The End of Leadership

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I am coming to a stage in my life where I discover that most if not all of the knowledge, models, methods, and principles I learned at school and the last 30 years of my career are completely outdated and irrelevant for the new reality we live in.

baby

That also applies to the concept of leadership. We’ve all learned about heroic and charismatic leaders.  That leaders are leaders when they have followers and when they can create the conditions to engage her followers in a new direction, a place where no one has ever been before, to make 1,000 flowers blossom, etc, etc

With some notable dropout exceptions (Jobs, Gates, Bezos, etc), “leaders” all have the “right” attitude and have MBAs or other impressive certificates. They have the right profile. They went to right schools and the top universities like Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, etc. Career progress and evolution is systematically reserved to this elite. Even upon today, I see companies that reserve certain professional or personal development programs to those who have the right certificates. How sad.

Most of these “leaders” fit a certain “style”, and most have been moulded in the same factories. Well-dressed, always smiling, ready to help, forthcoming, making it in every aspect of the professional and private lives, always reserved, never angry or upset, in control of their emotions, etc. They make impressive careers, mainly by pleasing their hierarchies, by staying in the blueprint and taking no risks.

But over time, I have become suspicious and bitter about these perfectly casted people. In many organisations I have seen how cheer-“leaders” joyfully smile in the face of their subordinates and at the same time put a knife in the back of the same human beings.

Some “leaders” have even “developed” an almost sadistic pleasure in ignoring and destroying well-crafted pieces of work. I would like to illustrate this with a story from during my studies as architect.

We got an assignment to build an exposition hall and the creation of the space had to be based on some repeating element of construction. As part of the coming-out we had to make artistic sketches, draw the precise floor plans and construction details, and work out the whole thing as a model on scale, including the repeating construction element. I think a worked 3 weeks day and night to make the deadline, and I was quite proud of the result. The model was made out of fine balsa wood. During the review session, my “leader” – the professor and coach, I still remember his name – found an immense pleasure in shooting apart with his fingers the fragile construction. I was not amused; in fact I felt deeply hurt and humiliated.

This is of course quite extreme and even psychopathic behaviour  but I am sure each of us can find one or more examples in their career where their project-of-a-lifetime was shot in pieces apart. If it would happen again, I would probably kick and scream, or no, be subtler and present a glass of purifying water, as in this great advertisement from Spa Reine.

Some of the perfectly trained leaders also never take the pain to reach out to those who are more introverts who hunger for depth and they only listen to the extroverts who are most vocal that reach out to them. Decisions about subordinates are made in secrecy.

But the secrecy-trick does no longer work out in this hyper-connected environment, and news that is supposed to be kept confidential in the catacombs of the power hierarchies is dripping through the more and more porous walls of our organisations.

This new self-emerging transparency leads of course to a huge credibility crisis for the leader, as she does not know that you already know, and her “in-control” pose becomes painfully revealing of the true nature of those so called leaders.

Of course, Pepsodent, Spa Reine and the external look-and-feel vestimentary attributes are only metaphors for something deeper going on.

The problem with this sort of leadership is that it is leadership based on what you are (your power position in a hierarchy) versus who you are, your true internal power as a human.

A monkey in a suit remains a monkey in a suit.

We need a more humanistic approach, inspired by meaning and purpose; an “eudaimonic” economy as so well described by Umair Hague in “Is a Well Lived Life Worth Anything?”

That’s an alternate vision, one I call eudaimonic prosperity, and it’s about living meaningfully well. Its purpose is not merely passive, slack-jawed “consuming” but living: doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing – all the stuff that matters the most. See the difference? Opulence is Donald Trump. Eudaimonia is the Declaration of Independence.

We have too many Donald Trumps in our organisations  We need a culture that is based on deep respect and dignity for the human being. In this context, I recently had a conversation with a very senior businessperson of a multi-billion-technology company, who told me the parable of the Indian King.

The king had hired a consultant to advice him on the performance of the kingdom. The expert told the king to fire ½ of his workforce, as they did not have the same performance and added value to the kingdom as the top performers. The king responded “And what will those people do, once they get fired?”. The consultant answered, “Is that our/your problem? Your kingdom will be more efficient, that’s what you hired me for, no?”. The king did not follow the advice of the consultant, as he deliberately chose for a societal role in giving his citizens an job, a meaning, and a future, even if that meant a little bit of overhead. His choice was driven by people’s dignity.

The leadership that we all learned about starts smelling like a myth: the myth of charismatic leadership. But don’t blame them. That’s how they have been trained and educated. And the “training” or “brainwash” already started at those business schools, provided that you were lucky enough to be born in a family with wealthy parents that could pay the bill, or you were prepared to put yourselves in life-long debts as slaves to the financial institutions of this world.

harvard

The first thing I notice about the Harvard Business School campus is the way people walk. No one ambles, strolls, or lingers. They stride, full of forward momentum. The students are even better turned out than their surroundings, if such a thing is possible.

No one is more than five pounds overweight or has bad skin or wears odd accessories. The women are a cross between Head Cheerleader and Most Likely to Succeed. They wear fitted jeans, filmy blouses, and high-heeled peekaboo-toed shoes that make a pleasing clickety–clack on Spangler’s polished wood floors.

Some parade like fashion models, except that they’re social and beaming instead of aloof and impassive. The men are clean-cut and athletic; they look like people who expect to be in charge, but in a friendly, Eagle Scout sort of way.

I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination—whether or not he knew the way.

“This school is predicated on extroversion,” and “Your grades and social status depend on it. It’s just the norm here. Everyone around you is speaking up and being social and going out.” “Isn’t there anyone on the quieter side?” I ask. They look at me curiously. “I couldn’t tell you,” says the first student dismissively.

quiet

These are extracts from “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” a fantastic book by Susan Chain. The book is an eye-opener in itself about the lost and untapped energy/potential of introverts in organisations.

The essence of the HBS education is that leaders have to act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information. HBS was once called the “Spiritual Capital of Extroversion” where Top of Form “Socializing here is an extreme sport” and where verbal fluency and sociability are the two most important predictors of success.” writes Susan Chain, and goes on: “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Exceptional CEOs are known not for their flash or charisma but for extreme humility coupled with intense professional will: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.”

Leadership as we know it does not work anymore. We need something else. We also need a language to articulate what this new “thing” is. Some are starting to look into that.

MIX

The MIX http://www.managementexchange.com/ was co-founded by Gary Hamel and Michael Zannini (ex-McKinsey). They have set up a platform to share best practices on innovation, management and leadership. “It’s time to re-invent management” is their tag line, and Gary Hamel has written several books and rants on the subject. And as part of the M-Prize competition series, they just launched a new challenge on “Innovating Innovation”. I will write more about this and the related M-Prize where both Innotribe and Corporate Rebels United will make a submission before the end of the year.

But if you look carefully, many of the contributors are from mainly male-driven organisations with very extrovert people. They fit the HBS mould. We seem to keep on tapping into the same high-testosterone pool of resources.

That becomes very challenging for those who do not fit that mould: the ones who are introvert, and who are rarely listened too (if they ever get the chance to be heard); the ones who don’t have the right MBA or certificate; the ones who have a more feminine rather than masculine energy (some man have lots of feminine energy, like some women hive high doses of testosterone); the ones of the other gender, race, religion, age, education, etc

nilofer2

Nilofer Merchant, author of  “11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra” (Amazon Associates link) rightly pointed out to me:

I hope our future economy is also about including the people who are unseen today. Those who are right in front of us, creating value but then ignored when it comes to be included as leaders, or thinkers to shape the future. No one does this out of bad intent, but out of blindness. Few people will realize that while Hagel and Kelly and Gray etc are mentioned, many well-respected best-selling women management thinkers were not. Our thriving systems HAVE to be open enough to include those that are currently blocked out. Blindness shifts when we start to be more conscious. Instead of perpetuating talking about the change, we have to embodying the change. 

Indeed, something deeper is going on….

Flowchain

Bob Marshall (aka @FlowchainSensei) is addressing a somewhat similar dimension of “leadership” in his post “Leadership of Fellowship” and especially the section about dysfunctions of leadership.

The concept of leadership introduces a number of dysfunctions. Rarely are these discussable or discussed in our romanticized conception of the mythological leader:

  • Leadership inevitably produces implicit (or even explicit) Parent-Child relationships. “Just one of many examples of this type of parent/child exchange is the unwritten pact that if employees do whatever their bosses ask of them (regardless of whether it makes good business sense) the boss will take care of their next promotion/career move.”

  • Leadership validates “followership” and thus increased risk of “social loafing“

  • Leadership cultivates “learned helplessness”

  • Leadership can increases alienation, tribalism and the formation of in-groups

  • Leadership often encourages favoritism, patriarchy, deference, sycophancy and obsequiousness, with a consequent reduction in both the quality and quantity of meaningful dialogue.

  • Leadership compounds and perpetuates the Analytic mindset

  • Leadership subtly undermines systems thinking, by breaking the social body into discrete parts (leaders, followers), and focusing attention on those parts rather than on e.g. the relationships between them, and the whole itself.

But the master of language and insight is for sure Rune Kvist Olsen from Norway. Checkout this excellent article “Leading-Ship: reshaping relationships at work”. Rune’s work is inspired by Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), a visionary in the field of human relations, democratic organization, and management. The tagline of the Mary Parker Follet Network is:

Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim

Rune’s s elaborated thinking blew me away: he is rethinking “leadership” into “leadingship”. It cuts deep in what motivates people. Rune challenges big time all our preconceptions about leaders and followers. I felt deeply inspired by it. So, I got into a conversation with Rune.

During this post-Sibos period of the year, I take off every Friday of the week to create some space for myself to reflect, to catch up on some reading, at times just being there and sitting in silence and trying to make contact with myself again, and then – in that moment of awareness – getting inspired by books and art. One could call it a personal retreat in silence and/or reflection and/or depth.

It was during one of those Fridays that I had scheduled a very long Skype call with Rune so that I could give him my full attention and listen in full presence to the rich language and set of concepts Rune had developed over the years. Since then Rune keeps on sending me wonderful essays and manifestos: describing what is really going on under the hood of human beings in leadership context. It’s very fascinating, and I all encourage you to dive in and discover Rune’s work.

The biggest outcome of Rune’s work is in my opinion that he has developed a language to express this new type of being as a leader in your organisations. It is so new and refreshing, that it needs its own language and vocabulary. Only then you can engage in a conversation trying to understand each other.

A good example of this language is in the following slide (a small extract of a very long presentation)

slide rune

That language is further elaborated in an essay called “Extracts from Humanistic Management Responsibility in the workplace”. It is about Imposed Responsibility (forced upon from outside) versus Chosen Responsibility:

The practice of “taking control” is a significant way in stimulating and inspiring self-esteem and self-confidence in the art of becoming a responsible and independent person.

Receiving and getting control from managers above implies that the person who is giving, still has control and can withdraw it at any suitable time.

Giving or delegating authority creates and sustain a superior/inferior relationship between the people involved.

This practice of giving as a form of domination is easily encumbered with the feeling of humiliation from the receiver’s point of view. The receiver could suffer the humiliation of not having personal control and not being able to take personal responsibility for the specific action at hand.

By granting power to people in gaining personal control and in becoming personally responsible for their actions, we are at the same time granting them real freedom to become true equals and fully human beings.

It is not difficult to understand that being an object of delegation and a recipient of giving (as a token of shared power), a person can naturally feel the humiliating bitterness engendered by being a powerless and subservient receiver and not having the authority in exercising personal freedom.

The result of this type of submissive role-behaviour, would possible entail the undermining of self- esteem, self-worth, and self-respect.

The most obvious flaw in the context of power concentration in the hands of persons in charge of others is the assumption that delegated responsibility is analogous to a commodity that can be shared among individuals or groups.

Giving or delegating responsibility can be conceived as a disguised way of pretending that people below will be empowered by the person above when this person is handling out some responsibility occasionally.

This is a deception in the sense that managers of other people are not actually entitled to give away any power because their power is connected to the managers’

Rune also signed up for Corporate Rebels United. We are btw now a worldwide group of about 200 people now and counting. And several pods being started up worldwide. More about that later.

rebels website

As his contribution to the rebels’ story, Rune produced the following essay “The Story of a Corporate Heresy”.

rune heresy

The full version in PDF is here The Story of a Corporate Heresy, but to whet your appetite here are already some salient extracts:

These types of corporate activist movements emerges as a result of profound crisis in the way corporate communities are organizing, managing and leading their organizations. Corporate Rebel United is pointing out the problem:

“Our companies no longer serve our needs. They cannot keep pace with a high- velocity, hyper-connected world. They no longer can do what we need them to do. Change is required.” Corporate Rebel Manifesto 2012.

Why, what and how can offensive, progressive and constructive actions be a part of the solution and not the problem?

“You never change things

by fighting the existing reality.

To change something,

build a new model

that makes the existing model obsolete.”

stamp fuller

Buckminster Fuller.

The next and last question of the solution in reinforcing engagement and passion amongst everyone in the corporation is: “How can we unblock and reopen the free flow of creativity and innovation for everyone, and create engagement, enthusiasm and passion amongst one and all?”

The resolving answer could be lying in removing the factors that institutionalize the system of vertical power, and in replacing this system with a model that are granting everyone personal authority in exercising power through individual competence, ability and capacity.

All the above are useful reflections about our future leadingship models. But how do we get to that ideal model of leadingship?

As Einstein once said:

“A problem can not be solved

with the same methods

that created the problem”.

Rune – and Bucky, and Einstein – indeed indicated, that part of the solution is to get rid of the leadership that has brought us where we are today. But this is dangerous territory, as those are the leaders who still are in the hierarchical power position to eradicate the subordinates that do not fit the HBS blueprint, and try to challenge the existing system. It makes me think of recursive loops, or the drawings of M.C. Esher. At what point does the transition between night and day really happen?

esher

“Day and Night” by M.C. Escher

Rune started sticking out his neck many years ago, in a period where he could not yet amplify his message through social media. Because he attacked the powers and hierarchies without defence, the system expelled him, and he ended up somewhat isolated, albeit in a beautiful self-built house on the borders of a beautiful Nordic lake (the story is correct, the picture below not)

house by lake

It is not my ambition to get expelled, and I am trying to walk on thin ice every blog again to get your attention for being your true self.

It is in that context that my questions to you are:

  • How can we get these new practices out of the reflection room and into the daily value creation practice?
  • Who has already implemented these principles?
  • What worked and what did not work when rolling it out or letting it emerge?

Let’s share and learn from each other. Let’s document this practice for value creation. This practice of Leadership. Jump in.

Seven Ways Organizations Can Survive Until 2100

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Last week, I was attending my third Techonomy conference.

Techonomy explores “the role of technology in business and social progress.”

I love the word “progress.”

It has that gentle flavor of positivism; in the direction of better. I am more and more convinced that we don’t need innovation; we need progress.

How is progress reflected in a modern company? What does a 21st century company look like? Or maybe we should start thinking about what a 22nd century company would look like. (22nd century indeed: somebody born in 2012 will only be 88 years old in 2100. If Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are realized, it will be a piece of cake by then.)

People might grow older, but companies will die younger.

John Hagel proves with the Shift Index that the firm performance (based on Return on Assets) has declined systemically over the last 50 years.

Most companies don’t last longer than 40 years. Most of today’s companies will not exist in 2100.

The question is: What are the characteristics of sustainable companies?

Here is a list of some memes I’ve come across in recent months: the Adaptable Company, the Decentralized Company, the Sharing Company, the Participating Company, the Collaborative Company, the Connected Company, the Connecting Company, the Coherent Enterprise, the Elastic Company, the Human Company, the Learning Company, the Living Company. I could go on.

I propose that there are at least seven characteristics that will be typical in the 22ndcentury company:

1. Peer-to-Peer Networks

Decentralized organizations with peer-to-peer networks of highly skilled knowledge workers will best create and sustain knowledge flows and enable employees to self-organize. The jury is still out on whether knowledge workers will most often be hyper-specialists or hyper-generalists, but the successful company of the future will behave as a living organism where peers organize themselves in “cells.”

In The Connected Company (Amazon Associates Link) Dave Gray calls such organizations “pods”: Hyper-connected cells building relations with other cells based on a common principles, a common set of values, a common pattern language.

2. Architects of Serendipity

Being an architect of serendipity is about creating connections and providing opportunities for collisions between nodes in a network that learn from the collisions and continually adapt. The collisions are not random. Instead, this is designed serendipity, which might sound like an oxymoron.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, the shoe company acquired by Amazon last year, is setting the scene for architected serendipity with his Downtownproject.

Instead of venturing in yet another luxury corporate campus with everything on-site from shops, restaurants, doctors, and central idea-incubation, Hsieh sees the value in integrating the Las Vegas fabric to catalyze collisions. He is investing about $350 million in local startups, small businesses, education, arts, culture, and residential and commercial real estate.

 

This campus of the future

starts to look more and more

like a complex living organism

 

Forget the old alliteration, the 4 P’s and 5 C’s of Kottler and Drucker. The C’s of this new era are those of hyper-connected learning organizations: Curated content, Community, Culture of openness, Collaboration, Creativity and optimism, Co-Learning, Co-Working, Co-Creation, Collisions, Connections. 

3. Empowered Radicals Instigating a Corporate Spring

Some call them Corporate Catalysts, Catalyst Peers, or Corporate Rebels. Steve Johnson described these instigators in his excellent new book Future Perfect: The Case For Progress in the Networked Age (Amazon Associates Link):

 

 

“the most striking thing about these new activists and entrepreneurs was the personal chord that reverberated in me when I listened to them talk about their projects and collaborations—and their vision of the progress that would come from all that work.”

In September, I wrote a blog post called Companies Are Movements of Greatness. Catalyst peers in our organizations instigate these movements, whether these organizations are hierarchies or peer-to-peer networks.

The point is we have to unleash the energy of these “positive deviants.” I joined with a group of enthusiasts around the globe to put together a Corporate Rebels Manifesto. It’s all about a common set of principles, a pattern language for helping our companies succeed in the Hyper-Connected economy. It’s about creating a new global practice for value creation. It’s about progress.

4. Empowered Platforms

Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook are celebrated for their platform approach, exposing their core functionality through application program interfaces (APIs) so that other players in their networks–customers, partners, developers–can create new value on top of their platform.

We are only at the beginning of this trend, which will encompass all trade and commerce supply chains. In the end, I believe a wide variety of entities, including people, businesses, devices, and programs will have their own clouds and APIs.

What should come next in this evolution is an interoperability among clouds, a layer of services, protocols, and standards that let a Cambrian Explosion of Everything share data in real time, securely and with the appropriate governance and trust.

 

 

Every company may have to carve out

a role as a platform player

 

5. Empowered and participative customers

Doc Searls has written extensively about The Intention Economy (Amazon Associated Link) and customers taking back control of their data. Many organizations have implemented Open Innovation techniques, calling upon the intelligence in their networks to discover and develop new ideas.

The motto “We know more than me” applies the principles of Crowdsourcing. Barclays Bank recently launched BarclayCardRing, a crowdsourced credit card that empowers customers with highly transparent services and shares the program’s profits and losses and monthly financial statistics. In simple language, the data explain how the program is performing. Customers become producers, in partnership with the companies that serve them. 

6. Deeply Digital and Human

It’s been almost 20 years since Techonomist Nicholas Negroponte wrote Being Digital.

We now swim in a sea of data and the sea level, so to speak, is rising rapidly. Billions of connected people, far more billions of sensors, and trillions of transactions now add up to create unimaginable amounts of information. This new environment will require extraordinary adaptability: It is as if we are a species from dry land that has to learn to live in the ocean.

The digital age environment requires a new design for companies, which presents both threats and opportunities. Companies will be disintermediated, will see the erosion of their market share as new entrants muscle in, and technology companies will threaten the position of incumbents in more and more industries, threatening profitability.

But there are also opportunities: sources of rich information are multiplying, and more information is being digitized all the time. Every business is becoming a digital business.

However, the potential benefits of the explosion in number of nodes and the volume of data is being squandered due to low levels of trust, concerns about security, and barriers to monetization. That’s why my employer, SWIFT, has launched a project called the “Digital Asset Grid.” The Grid is a research initiated by Innotribe, SWIFT’s Innovation initiative for collaborative innovation.

With the Grid, Innotribe proposesa new infrastructure for banks to provide a platform for secure peer-to-peer data sharing between trusted people, business, and devices.

7. Diverse Contribution and Leadingship in the Social Era

My initial post on Techonomy only included six ways organizations can survive. Nilofer Merchant kindly drew my attention to the diversity aspect. What follows is an edited version of an e-mail she sent me:

We are all talking about thriving, being more deeply connected in community and thus allowing our organizations to be more adaptive. And my question is… is this system of change more about the same or about something fundamentally shifted in who is allowed to contribute.

I hope our future economy is also about including the people who are unseen today. Those who are right in front of us, creating value but then ignored when it comes to be included as leaders, or thinkers to shape the future. No one does this out of bad intent, but out of blindness. Few people will realize that while Hagel and Kelly and Gray etc are mentioned, many well-respected best-selling women management thinkers were not. Our thriving systems HAVE to be open enough to include those that are currently blocked out.

And we will be surprised by what we create. I remember the story of Fold It. The original inventors of that “game” imagined Phd students more like them than not would be the ones creating value. But in the end, it was a woman who was an admin during the day and the best protein folder at night. If the system had first vetted, she would have been screened out, but when all the rules are evened out… she contributed valuable stuff because she could. (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/just_how_powerful_are_you.html).

Blindness shifts when we start to be more conscious. In stead of perpetuating talking about the change, we have to embodying the change. 

Nilofer stroke a cord.

Her new book “11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra” (Amazon Associates link) indeed offers new rules for creating value, leading, and innovating in our rapidly changing world. These social era rules are both provocative and grounded in reality—they cover thorny challenges like forsaking hierarchy and control for collaboration; getting the most out of all talent; allowing your customers to become co-creators in your organization; inspiring employees through purpose in a world where money alone no longer wields power; and soliciting community investment in an idea so that it can take hold and grow.

 

 

The Industrial Era and the Information Age are over

and their governing rule are passé

 

Leading in the Social Era requires a rethink and re-imagination of what can be.

During the same period, I discovered Rune Kvist Olsen in the following YouTube video (1 hour video, you need to be present to fully appreciate the message from Rune)

There is also the excellent article “Leading-Ship: reshaping relationships at work” His thinking blew me away in rethinking leadership into “leadingship”. It cuts deep in what motivates people. There is also an associated slide deck here http://goo.gl/Ds1Qd . Rune   challenges big time all our preconceptions about leaders and followers. I feel deeply inspired by it.

I really enjoyed the 2012 edition of Techonomy. The conference convenes discussions among leaders focusing on the implications of technology change. Kevin Kelly put technology “in charge” in his seminal work What Technology Wants (Amazon Associates Link) challenging the notion that humans control the direction of technology. I look at it more and more as a form of symbiosis.

It happens that I met Kevin Kelly face-to-face later that week at Defrag 2012, where he delivered an awesome talk on “The Emerging Technological Superorganism” but that is the subject for a future blog.

The Internet – with it’s built-in peer-to-peer network architecture – made new forms of peer-to-peer collaboration possible. The creative energy unleashed by the edges of our network represent a transformative change and challenge in how we organize our intelligences in a mix of peer-to-peer intensities, supplemented with some structured “companies” that orchestrate some of the overarching memes in our society.

The rules have changed. To quote Robert Safian (Editor-in-Chief, Fast Company) in his Oct 15 blog post “The Secrets of Generation Flux”:

“Business today is nothing if not as paradoxical. We require efficiency and openness, thrift and mind-blowing ambition, nimbleness and a workplace that fosters creativity. Organizational systems based on the Newtonian model are not equipped for these dualities.”

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Innotribe Health Index

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This blog post shares some more details about the Innotribe Health Index. This session will take place on Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

Whereas we are sure that the main conference will cover main topic areas and trends such as Global Shifts in Economic Power, Regulation, and the financial crisis, Innotribe would like to propose some alternative lenses based on New Economies and New Values thinking, aimed at accelerating a positive re-balancing.

The Innotribe Health Index is a brand new Innotribe initiative. Through six different lenses (Reputation and Sentiment, Social Data Capital, Big Shift Readiness, Technology Readiness, Urbanization and Inequality, and Agility), we will try to give an alternative ‘health check’ of the financial system.

The intention is that the Innotribe Index is an annual checkpoint, where this year we establish the baseline, and in subsequent years we look at the progress we make versus this baseline.

The effect we want to create is a bit like the famous “state of the union” update on Internet trends by Mary Meeker (who moved last year from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers).

Here is the data-avalanche presentation by Mary Meeker of last year at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco:

That went fast? Yes, indeed. Like a jet-airliner flying through your living room!

We will at least go as fast, if not faster. Indeed, this session is designed as a “high-speed” session.

Each igniter (that’s how we call our speakers) will give a power talk on their specific lens, and where possible come-up with a readiness index score from 1 – 10, giving a sense of the readiness of our community for that particular challenge. That’s six lenses in one hour!

Some background on our igniters for this session, and why we invited them to be part of this session:

Julius O. Akinyemi

Julius is the initiator of Unleashing the Wealth of Nations project and the Resident Entrepreneur at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The objective of this initiative is to effect a sea-change, a quantum leap for ordinary citizens of developing economies to move from day-to-day survival mode to a personal wealth creation and growth via asset ownership, registry, and mobilization.

To unlock the wealth of nations, we aim to provide practical solutions tailored to the local environment that leverages the convergence of existing technologies. By registering people, their assets, and life events in an eRegistry, and through economic modeling, we will work to mobilize the currently dormant trillions of dollars in local assets in developing nations in order to generate local capital that fuels the economy via asset securitization.

Julius will come with a “Social Data Readiness Index”, as we see the availability of people’s social and identity data as one way to create financial inclusion. This topic will also be covered during one of the breakouts of the Digital Asset Grid session to showcase that unlocking data assets has an important role for the bottom of the pyramid.

Wouter De Ploey

Wouter is Director in Business Technology Office, McKinsey & Company.

He will present results of research done by the McKinsey Global Institute on global economic trends, including urbanization, resource markets, capital markets, and productivity and growth, with a focus on Asia.

  • The landscape for supply/demand of labor is changing dramatically: where are the jobs for skilled/unskilled workers? Is the inequality in wages going up/down?
  • More and more people live in cities. Urbanization is driving a lot of growth. McKinsey identified 450 emerging market cities. Capital follows activity. Access to capital gets tighter and more localized. Do banks have the right local footprint?

“What’s the readiness of banks to confront these meta-challenges?” is the subject of this lens.

John Hagel

John is Co-chairman, Deloitte Centre of the Edge. He very much supports out-of-the-box and catalyst new ways of thinking. That is for sure one of the many reasons why John is one of the enablers for the Innotribe incubation activities.

John writes regular for HBR, on his own blog, and has published several book. His latest “The Power of Pull” (Amazon Affiliates link) has become a business classic, where John highlights how we move from Knowledge Stocks to Knowledge Flows.

This shift is also at the basis of the Big Shift Index that Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has developed to provide a clear, comprehensive, and sustained view of the deep dynamics changing our world, and what companies can do to address them.

The Big Shift Index consists of 3 indices and 25 metrics designed to make longer-term performance trends more visible and actionable. You can download the Big Shift Index here (PDF file)

We are very proud of having such a thought leader as John Hagel with us at Innotribe Sibos to present the Big Shift Index. You don’t want to miss John’s authentic take on this fascinating subject.

Michael Jones

Michael is VP of Technology, Dachis Group. We have invited Michael to present the Social Business Index.

This index is built on top of Dachis Group’s Social Business Intelligence Insight Platform, analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels.

The Social Business Index analyzes signals from over one hundred million social sources globally and analyzes the performance of the largest global companies and thousands of those companies’ brands. The Index is generated through the use of natural language processing, semantic analysis, and machine learning algorithms.

Think about it as a machine learning engine.

Michael will do a drill down on the data they have available on financial institutions.

William Saito

William is Founder & CEO, InTecur, K.K.

He is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, public policy consultant and educator who has founded start-ups, managed corporations and worked on global information security policy over the past two decades.

To build entrepreneurial spirit in Japan, Saito also acts as CEO for the Innovation Platform Technology Fund (IPTF), a venture capital fund established by ex-Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei and Kazuhiko Toyama, the former COO of the Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan (IRCJ). The IPTF seeks to produce more successful global ventures in Japan by creating a genuine venture environment.

Saito is active in several roles with the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2011, he was named a Young Global Leader.

He is also Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, the first such commission ever appointed by Japan’s national legislature.

With his strong entrepreneur role and his extra-ordinary international perspective, we have asked William – who now lives in Japan – to come up with “The William Saito Index”, an index reflecting agility readiness in financial services.

It will be a very personal take reflecting on entre- and intra-preneurship, in Japan and globally.

Michell Zappa

Michell Zappa is a Berlin-based technology futurist who has spent part of his life between London, São Paulo, Stockholm & Amsterdam.

His work, called Envisioning Technology, focuses on explaining where society is heading in the near future by extrapolating on current technological developments.

His research facilitates understanding the field for those who work in technology by painting a bigger picture of where the landscape is heading. In this, he tries to guide both corporations and public institutions in making better decisions about their (and society’s) future.

I met Michell through a tweet that was forwarded by one of my followers. Once we connected, we immediately spotted a fantastic opportunity to describe the readiness of financial institutions through an amazing interactive infographic. As we get closer to Sibos, we’ll release some pre-views of these amazing insights.

Coming soon: previews of Michell Zappa’s infographic on technology readiness of banks: short, medium and long term.

Michell has really surprised me with his fresh take on technology readiness, and I am very excited by the work-in-progress that I have seen from him in preparation for this session. Next year, I would love to give him a full hour.

So, in summary, fasten your seatbelts for this “faster-than-light” session, were you will be immersed in the readiness of financial institutions based on six different alternative lenses.

See you all in Osaka! Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka – Future of Big and Small Data

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This blog post shares some more details about the Future of Big and Small Data session. This session will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 15:30 in the Innotribe Space. This Future of Data session is leading into the next session on Digital Asset Grid. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

Picking up where we left off last year with Big Data, this session will de-mystify what we think we know about data. We will hear opinions of different experts and judge together what are the hard facts, half-truths and complete unknowns about data today: big, small, broad, real time. We will dive into artificial intelligence, augmented reality and algorithms and how they impact our analysis and use of data.

This will be one of those Innotribe sessions, where we go “all the way” with super igniters (that’s how we call our speakers) and the amazing group techniques from Innotribster Mariella Atanassova and her team of designers and facilitators.

We will indeed design this session

as architects of serendipity,

creating collisions of ideas,

leading into

immersive learning experiences

The high-level design of the session is organized around debunking the myths that exist about data. We will look at this from different angles:

  • Who is consuming the data: people, business, devices, applications, API’s (Application Program Interfaces)
  • Technical and human aspects of data creation, data usage and data management
  • The different lenses offered by our igniters

I would like to share a bit more about our igniters for this session and why we have invited them:

For the more “technical” angle on the subject:

Sean Gourley, CTO, from Quid.

Sean Gourley is originally from New Zealand and now based in San Francisco where he splits his time between Mathematical research and his venture backed startup Quid.

He has a PhD in physics from Oxford, and his academic research has taken him from Nanotechnology to Complex Systems and the Mathematics of War. Prior to Quid he worked at NASA Ames in Mountain View, Exclusive Analysis in London, and a (very) brief stint as a consultant at BCG in Chicago.

Sean started Quid back in Dec 2009, and they are doing some pretty amazing things with data, mathematics and visualization. They are building a global intelligence platform, a place where open source intelligence is collected, structured and visualized to help people understand and make better decisions about the complex world we live in.

Sean is currently CTO of Quid. Their corporate slogan of Quid is “Augmenting Our Ability to Perceive this Complex World™ ”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V43a-KxLFcg&feature=youtu.be

Sean will talk about the war of algorithms, a world of machines where black-swans almost become the norm. I have already mentioned this fantastic talk in my blog post about “The Cambrian Explosion of Everything”

Amir Halfon, CTO for Financial Services , MarkLogic

It is Amir’s fourth Innotribe at Sibos.

Before Amir recently joined MarkLogic, he was with Sun/Oracle for more than 12 years, where his last position was Chief Technologist specialized in Financial Services. MarkLogic offers next-generation database technology capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure. So, Amir brings the enterprise perspective.

This will not be a product pitch. We specifically invited Amir for his rich background in financial services and his familiarity with the Innotribe-way of doing things, so we can tap into his broad experience to map the generic big data concepts to our specific market.

Anant Jhingran, VP, Data, Apigee

I met Anant for the first time last year during Defrag 2011, where we had breakfast with Sam Ramji, Head of Strategy at Apigee.

Anant is VP of Data at Apigee. Before he 21 years with IBM where he was VP and CTO for IBM’s Information Management Division, Co-Chair of IBM wide Cloud Computing Architecture Board and one of the “IBM Fellows”.

He is our ideal igniter to talk about data as seen by API’s. However, in the session preparation talk I had with Anant, he already highlighted that discussions about APIs are very people centric in the enterprise:

“What is the governance for publishing the APIs? Some enterprises insist on a central gatekeeper for APIs, others believe in a decentralised Darwinian model.”

Anant blogs regularly. Check-out here how his new start-up life changed his thinking. I love his quote:

“Coding is liberating”

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross, Institute Fellow, Harvard University Institute

Alex is an award-winning scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He serves as an Institute Fellow at the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science and as a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Laboratory.

He has received 107 major distinctions, authored 13 publications, been granted 16 issued, pending, and provisional patents, and founded, managed, and advised 4 technology companies, 1 of which has been acquired. In 1998 and 1999, respectively, he won the U.S.A. Computer Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search.

In 2003, he became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Science and Engineering, and Mathematics, while graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. In 2007, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, where his research on smart matter, pervasive computing, and machine learning was awarded the Hertz Doctoral Thesis Prize.

His work has been featured in over 100 news outlets worldwide including The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.

Alex will share how HFT is driving a latency arms race. He has a fascinating story about “Sea-Steading”, where financial institutions start building operating centers in the middle of the ocean, just to win a couple of mille-seconds in latency.

He has developed an algorithm that calculates the best geographical spot for an operating center, based on a number of criteria given by the customer.

For the more “human” angle on the subject:

Andrew Keen, Author, Andrew Keen Productions, Author Digital Vertigo

I am very proud to have Andrew Keen on board. Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet culture and the trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier and Nicholas G. Carr among others.

Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.

He is sometimes called “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award.

Andrew just published his new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo” (Amazon Affiliates Link), a book I highly recommend, and the thinking developed in this book is the main reason why I invited Andrew to Innotribe at Sibos.

Following extract is typical Keen-speak:

“I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: This idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed.”

He is a real “contrarian” and therefore our ideal igniter to challenge all your assumptions on data and social media. The myth he would like to challenge is:

“the myth that social media

brings us closer together

and unites the human race”

Daniel Erasmus, Owner, The Digital Thinking Network

I was introduced to Daniel Erasmus by Brewster Kahle (who was critical for the Google’s book digitization) during Jerry Michalski’s retreat when he heard about the Digital Asset Grid. Because Daniel was doing some really advance scenario thinking for some clients in the financial industry, Brewster thought i should meet him.

Since then, I enjoyed numerous calls with Daniel on the importance of scenario thinking, and it was almost by accident we stumbled upon his start-up NewsConsole™, which is all about big data and the co-existence of man and machine and the world of augmented reality, in the sense of augmented information reality.

“Every day, an exabyte of information is created – an amount equivalent to half of all information created up to 2001. You will not read it, nor will any other individual, but some of it will be critical to your business.”

NewsConsole™ reads more than a million news articles per day to give its clients strategic overview of today and tomorrow’s news.  The Console is in use in the Financial Services, Governmental, the Energy and other sectors.

I love the way he talks about big data:

“Big data sells the story of “the eyes of god”: sometimes it is there, sometimes is  not. It’s about sort of half-truths, I would call them contingent-truths, as half-truths” has something negative”

and

“We see a computation a-symmetry. Google (for example) can do calculations on my data, but I cannot. This a-symmetry will have stunning implications on the power balances in the world. 20th century is all about “mass”. The 21st century is about the interface of one”

Daniel is a very erudite and versatile international businessman. In his scenario thinking work, he uses similar facilitation techniques as the Innotribe team, so Daniel will move between the spaces of advocacy and facilitation.

As for the other Innotribe session, you see that we put quite some effort in architecting, content curating, designing and facilitating our sessions.

We want to do more than just “events”

and listing some speakers.

We’d like to offer you

a memorable experience

In summary, this session is about debunking myths about data. What is the myth YOU would like to debunk? Let me know via the comments option of this blog post.

See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 12:30 in the Innotribe Space.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Digital Asset Grid

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This blog post shares some more details about the Digital Asset Grid session. The session Digital Asset Grid will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 16:00 till 17:30 in the Conference Room-3. It is part of the Main Conference sessions of Sibos. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

I have written extensively about the Digital Asset Grid in previous blog posts. Most recently in Banks-as-a-Platform and the Cambrian Explosion of Everything, all reflections on what it means to live in a hyper-connected world, to be immersed in the digital age.

We swim in a sea of data and the sea level is rising rapidly. Tens of millions of connected people, billions of sensors, trillions of transactions now work to create unimaginable amounts of information. A new environment requiring a lot of adaptability. We are species from the land that have to learn to live in the ocean. Like camels that used to live in the desert, that now have to survive in the ocean.

A new environment requires a new design.

The digital age and making the new design presents both threats and opportunities for Banks:

  • Dis-intermediation and erosion of market share by new entrants, telco’s and dominant technology companies threaten the position of Banks – and are increasing in velocity – reducing margins and profitability.
  • But there are also opportunities: new sources of rich information are multiplying, and the information that is available is being digitised.

Every business is becoming a digital business,

also banks and financial institutions

However, the potential benefits of the explosion in number of nodes and the data volume explosion are being squandered due to low levels of trust, concerns about security, and barriers to monetisation. The Digital Asset Grid has the ambition to tackle these challenges.

The Digital Asset Grid is a research project by Innotribe, SWIFT’s Innovation initiative for enabling collaborative innovation.

The Digital Asset Grid is probably one of the most forward-looking incubation projects of Innotribe.

The project proposes a new infrastructure

for banks to provide a platform

for secure peer-to-peer data sharing

between trusted people, businesses, and devices

The Digital Asset Grid does for data what SWIFT has already done for payments: providing a new scalable global network that supports “digital data banking”, a trusted peer to peer sharing of any digital asset between two or more nodes on the network. Banks existing qualities in management of de-materialized assets (today this is money but tomorrow this will be data), trust, regulatory compliance, market coverage and risk management puts them in a unique position to assume this role.

Indeed, with the Digital Asset Grid, we believe we are setting the direction for creating an internet-scale digital platform for information logistics.

The Digital Asset Grid acts as a digital map which describes:

  • The location of the data,
  • The trust framework governing access,
  • The digital identities who have access to that data, and
  • The usage rights these identities have under trust frameworks.

It overcomes the “data frictions” such as lack of security and trust and enables data to flow, leading to the creation of a low cost eco-system of revenue generating apps & services.

In addition, the Digital Asset Grid leverages SWIFT’s core skills and competences regarding governance, identity, security and operational excellence, establishing thus a global data-sharing platform as ubiquitous and reliable as today’s global banking network.

As part of the research, we wanted to go beyond mere PowerPoint presentation of a concept. What we have done is building an end-to-end prototype, with working applications and a working back-end infrastructure, together with a solid business story that is the result of a consultation with several banks of our community. In addition we produced a “foresight”-video of possible use cases.

Innotribe and its collaboration partners will present this prototype at Sibos on Wednesday 31 October 2012 from 4pm – 5:30pm in Conference Room 3. The session is part of the Main Conference Sessions of Sibos.

What we will show-case is:

  • A very strong opening with a strategy story by Antonio Benjamin – Global Chief Technology Officer & MD Citi GTS/ICG
  • A exciting intro into the changes in the digital data landscape
  • A brand new HD video – in the style of “Flowers for Grandma” and “Fly me to the Moon”, taking you into a not so far future 2013-2014, and showing in life environment of what is possible with current technology and the apps that we have built as part of the prototype.
  • A working prototype of the Digital Asset Grid server, server code and APIs
  • 4 applications illustrating the power of the Digital Asset Grid; some apps are relevant for the retail space, others are more relevant in a B2B context.
  • A compelling Business Story, where the opportunities are categories in three groups:
    • Creating new revenue streams through monetization of existing and new data assets
    • Doing the same better
    • Delivering New Services

But it would not be Innotribe if we added some elements of performance and interactivity. I can’t reveal everything in this blog post, but the staging of this session will include a motorcycle and smoking server.

Also, we will have facilitated breakout sessions to create an immersive learning experience for the audience. In these breakouts you will have the opportunity to get into person-to-person conversation with the developers of the applications and the back-end infrastructure, and the partners who have built the Business Story.

And at the end, Yobie and senior representatives from two other major banks will wrap-up the sessions with some suggestions on the way forward. And we’ll have some other surprises and some very cool announcements, which of course I cannot share now, if not you would not come to the session 😉

The Digital Asset Grid offers Banks the opportunity to transform their industry, making them and their customers more efficient, generating new value and enabling Banks to launch a range of new services – it is a game changer.

The financial industry has a unique chance to seize this opportunity and position themselves in a very compelling competitive position in a future of real-time information logistics.

I cannot enough emphasise the importance of the Banks-as-a-Platform meme: it means that the value creation moves from the centre to the nodes. The market used to think in monopolistic, silo-ed service providers, that put themselves in the middle of the nodes-universe, leading to non-interoperable silos of data and value creation. By moving from a central to distributed architecture at internet-scale, banks suddenly have the opportunity to be themselves the platform, with SWIFT as a shared beacon of governance and trust.

I believe this is a “good” project. Good for our industry. It comes at the right time and at a tipping point where we see an evolution towards a peer-to-peer economy between trusted nodes in the grid.

It is fantastic that SWIFT – through the Innotribe Incubation Fund – makes this sort of research and experimentation projects possible.

Incubation is in my opinion indeed about “catalysing ideas”: it is about setting waves of thinking into motion, planting seeds in the brain, and getting the chance to develop those ideas in full so that they become foresight scenarios that become in their turn reference points for decision making.

Only when you have some strong foresight scenario/reference in your brain, you can spot and recognise the disruptive change signals from the market and make relevant and inspired decisions on “what would I do if this scenario happens?”

The Digital Asset Grid is one of those foresight scenarios of a catalysed idea, a strong testimony that innovation beyond adjacencies can happen in more traditional environments.

The team has done a great job in depicting the “foresight reference model” of a not-so-far-out possible future. The test for our community will be to validate whether we can rally ourselves to take the foresight model out of its incubation sandbox and move it to the next phase of acceleration and do it for real.

I am very excited to be able to share soon with a wider audience the results of the last couple of months of hard work, and I am very curious to see how and when our industry will seize this opportunity. I feel privileged to witness this turning point, and I am deeply grateful to the team, the customers, and SWIFT who made all this happen.

See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 16:00 in Conference Room-3.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Companies are Movements for Greatness

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A couple of weeks ago, I was attending #BIF8 conference, organized by Saul Kaplan and his team. I was there 2 years ago, when Keith Yamashita from SY Partners did his fabulous talk on “Should I Dare to be Great?”

With hindsight, I found that that 2010 edition of BIF was better curated and had a more consistent level of high quality of speakers or “story tellers” as they are called at BIF.

Whereas 2010 was great, 2012 was good. This year, I was missing that consistency in quality. But there was clearly a theme emerging from the different talks. Initially it was a bit blurry for me what the theme was: companies are communities, creators of serendipity, human community movements, platforms for movements,… ?

In any case, it was clear that something deep is changing about what a company is all about. It made me think about the 1997 (yes, 1997!) book “The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business” by Arie De Geus (Amazon Affiliate Link).

The foreword by Peter Senge highlighted the big shift that is described in this wonderful book:

“The contrast between these two views – thinking about a company as a machine for making money versus a living being – illuminates a host of core assumptions about management and our organizations”

and

“Seeing a company as a living being leads to seeing its members as human work communities”

Most decision makers in our organizations have and still are trained in the model of the organization as a money making machine. Because this model almost completely ignores the fact that organizations are made out of people, human beings of flesh and blood and emotions and not “human resources” that you can just move around on the check board like physical resources, this has created in many companies an almost toxic environment with little room for happiness.

“Corporate health is experienced as work stress, endless struggles for power and control, and the cynicism and resignation that results from a work environment that stifles rather than releases human imagination, energy and commitment. The day-to-day climate of most organizations is probably more toxic than we care to admit, whether or not these companies are in the midst of obvious decline”

In addition, most of our marketing and strategy managers have been trained in fundamentals like the 4 P’s, the 5 C’s, etc by management gurus like Drucker and Kottler.

Andrew Stein recently posted a blog in defense of Kottler and Drucker, in essence claiming that the marketing fundamentals have not changed.

I tend to disagree, and here is why.

An important piece of the why argumentation came my way during the #BIF8 conference, by two storytellers:

  • The first was Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, the shoe company acquired my Amazon last year (one of my other heroes companies)
  • The second was Susan Shuman, CEO of SY Partners, yes the same company that Keith Yamashita from “should I dare to be great?” is working for

I was really blown away by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos (Shoes) acquired last year by Amazon.

Tony was talking about Zappos’ Downtownproject and the slide deck he used was more or less the same as what is on the slideshare here

The story kicks off when Zappos was considering building a new HQ Campus like Google, Apple, Nike, Microsoft etc,

Instead of venturing in yet another megalomaniac luxury campus with everything on-site from shops, restaurants, doctors, and central central incubator garages, he decided to become deep integral part of the city fabric and to create collisions and serendipities. He is investing about 350 million USD in local start-ups, local small businesses,  education, arts, culture, and residential & real estate.

It is an amazing story circling and hovering over what are probably the five or ten or whatever number of C’s of the hyper-connected and learning organizations of this new era:

  • Curated content
  • Community (Culture of openness, Collaboration, Creativity, and optimism)
  • Co-Learning, Co-Working, Co-Creation
  • Collisions (Colliding communities, serendipity, etc)
  • Connections

As in a real roller-coaster, Tony Hsieh took us from one sensation to another:

  • “We are creating a space where innovators, dreamers, doers, and though leaders from around the world can come to share ideas to enrich the community, to inspire us all. Call it a residency program”
  • “We want to make you/us smarter”
  • “Culture is to a company what Community is to a City See”
  • “Vibrant, interesting and community focused”
  • “Short term ROI vs long term ROC Return on Community”
  • “A learning community” aka “A learning organization” aka “An agile community”

And then it suddenly crystalized for me:

“Companies are Movements”

The sort of movements to change the world.

I reached out to one of the books in my library; very recent one about change management.

Or should I say transformation management?

The book is by Jurgen Appelo and is titled How to Change the World: Change Management 3.0 where he proposed four dimensions for change:

  • Dance with the system: Plan, do, check, act
  • Mind the people: Ability, Knowledge, Desire, Awareness, Reinforcement
  • Stimulate the network (instigators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards)
  • Change/Transform the environment: Information, Identity, incentives, infrastructure, institutions

It’s all about being part of the system you are trying to change. But change or incremental innovation is not good enough anymore in this fast moving world. The keyword is “transformation”: bringing into a new state where there is no option back, a risk to fall back into the old toxic habits. It is about a humanization of our organizations; a transformation at deep people level.

This is where my other #BIF8 hero comes in: Susan Shuman @susansyp, CEO of SY Partners.

She did not talk about the executives and the middle managers.

She talked about

“the forgotten middle”

the people who actually do the work in companies.

Some participants to the conference found she was too much in pitching mode, pitching her company. That may be true, but the story of what her company does is a very strong one.

I love the tagline “we help companies design their future”. This is a transformation story of Seeing, Believing, Thinking and Acting in meaningful and impactful new ways:

  • See = Fore-sighting, seeing the options vs constraining the options
  • Believe = deep sense of what is possible
  • Think = new solutions, prototyping, fail fast and wisely
  • Act = liberated in pursuing value driven opportunities

It’s about transformation management (not “change” management). It’s about a new way for creating strategy, grounded in complexity thinking and opening the options versus closing them, seeing through the lens of possibility not the lens of constraints, making visible and enabling options for collaboration.

The sort of collaboration and learning experiences that enable greatness, viral change from the top and from deep in the company fabric. It enables a modern way to look at strategy, an emergent strategy, where we not only look at short term revenue streams, but also for new capabilities and strengths. A different way of content curation, facilitation and design, leading to new collisions of expertise, and long lasting transformations.

The sort of collaboration that exists in great team where “duo’s” or “triads” of highly complementary people create greatness. Teams don’t just happen.

Teams are designed

You have to design for team magic

That’s also why moving around “human resources” from one team to another does not move around the greatness with it.

It’s about a new set of tools to let teams perform at their very best, a network of individuals dedicated to each other’s success, a tribe of humans that envision, believe in, and fight for greatness. It’s about a new practice for value creation.

It is not a coincidence that Innotribe’s updated mission statement includes a couple of these key components for the modern organization: “To enable collaborative innovation for the financial industry and create new value for the people it serves”

Companies are movements

Movements for greatness

Innotribe enables those movements and transformations.

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Hyper-Economies

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I blogged about the overall Innotribe Program at Sibos here. That post is kept up-to-date with the latest announcements and program changes. The Innotribe program is also available here on the Sibos website.

This blog post shares some more details about the Hyper-Economies session. The session Hyper-Economies will take place on Tuesday 30 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 14:30 in the Innotribe Space (the special tent in the middle of the conference centre).

We live in a hyper-connected world. The speed of change is increasing exponentially. Information has become abundant, versus scarce in the past, and change is happening in real-time.

This session will focus on the major cultural tectonic shifts that are underpinning and driving the hyper-connected economy and are the under-stream of deep organizational changes. We are witnessing the birth of
new economies based on hyper-connected organizations, exposure of core competence through APIs, horizontal sourcing versus vertical integration, Peer-To-Peer (P2P) sharing of data and Open Source developments, that lead to a new practice for value creation.

We have brought together an eclectic set of igniters (our name for “speakers”) to have a healthy interactive debate on the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for our financial industry.

Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce is Founder of Future Street Consulting, based in Sydney. He is currently publishing a book on the topic, titled “The Next Billion Seconds”. Mark was already with during the Innotribe Bangkok event in April of this year.

Every company should assess whether it is reducing frictions, or whether it is introducing frictions. This friction (less)-rule not only applies to organizations and functions but also to people and events.

But be aware, there are some “irreducible” frictions. Mark Pesce identifies 6 of them, all starting with a “T”. Here is how Mark Pesce describes the 6 “Ts”:

No matter how ‘smooth’ and frictionless hyper-connected commerce becomes, certain frictions in the business world will persist.  These represent both speed humps and opportunities.  The businesses of the 21st century will find leverage and differentiation by identifying and exploiting them.

 

  1. Time – If it were done when it were done, they’re well done quickly;
  2. Territory – you can’t be everywhere at once;
  3. Talent – some people are naturally better at it than others;
  4. Trust – is rarely immediately conferred, instead growing from a continuing relationship, and must exist for commerce to succeed;
  5. Tongue – language barriers persist until we all speak Globish.
  6. Tension – frictions in teams between humans

The topics that Mark addresses are very relevant to the evolution towards Banks-as-a-Platform and the Cambrian Explosion of Everything.

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is in my opinion the absolute “guru” for the P2P Economy, the thinking behind the Commons and the role of Open Source in software and other collaborative approaches.

He is the founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Michel currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, has taught at Payap University and Dhurakij Pandit University’s International College. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group.

The Hyper-Connected economy leads to new models of co-operation, and value production in highly connected P2P networks. Michel describes this as “Commons-Oriented Peer Production”

To get a deeper understanding of Michel’s work, check-out this fantastic report “The Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy” (link to PDF file)

Allevo

Allevo’s presence at Sibos will be under the signs of Innovation and Open Source.

Their project FinTP gravitates around the bold idea of developing an open source application for financial transactions processing and a creative community around it.

FinTP is an open distributed application for processing financial transactions and it is based on the 7 years practice proven solution Allevo has successfully deployed at its customers.

Covering the entire life cycle of financial transactions, FinTP intends to create a widespread financial transactions processing platform, an alternative for an industry common solution. The hope is this will evolve into a new standardization layer – a single financial dialect comprehensible for any party involved from individuals, SMSs, to corporates and financial institutions.

We believe this represents in fact the acceptance of the commoditization of the payments processing arena.

The format from this session will be a facilitated conversation. Like in Bangkok, we will help the audience identifying friction points in their value chains, and assess how the concepts of the Hyper-Economies, P2P and Collaborative Economy, and Open Source can give rise to a rich eco-system of parties building added value on top of Open Source platforms in financial services.

The session Hyper-Economies will take place on Tuesday 30 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 14:30 in the Innotribe Space (the special tent in the middle of the conference centre)

This session is a meta-story for the session “Future of Organizations”, that follows right after this Hyper-Economies session.

By @petervan of the Innotribe Team.

Bank(s) As A Platform

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I am just coming out of 3 fantastic and super-intense days with the team that is working on the prototype for the Digital Asset Grid (DAG). The DAG is a SWIFT Innotribe’s incubation project; we are really in research mode. Acting as a catalyzer, putting a big bold vision on the radar-screen of our community. Our plan is to show the results of our work during the upcoming Sibos in Osaka. Our session is planned on 31 October 2012 at 4pm in Conference Room 3.

Just last week, there were a couple of really interesting articles in press about the Digital Asset Grid project:

Click on image to launch video

At the end of the video, Marc says:

“If you can give the consumer more control over day-to-day commerce and greater privacy, that would be a reason to actually like your bank, rather than being resigned to deal with your bank”

So it looks like the huge opportunity is in the apps. True, but there is more.

And that only became apparent last week when we were together with the FULL team:

  • We took stock of the draft presentations, demo-scripts and video material that we will be showcasing in Osaka
  • We had some great and very intense interactions with customers, management and staff
  • We completed the last bits of the video, and we taped the last video interviews that will lead to a mini documentary on the topic
  • We articulated the key messages to be used on our communications plan leading up to Sibos

But last but not least, we created a platform of intensity where ideas could flow freely, leading to the most formidable insights.

One of those insights came during the playful key-messages-exercise, where we nailed down our key concepts by imagining what would be printed on the imaginary “product box” of the Digital Asset Grid (thanks to Martine Deweirdt of the Innotribe team to facilitate this exercise).

It was the moment where the word “platform” was deeply debated.

Is “platform” like Windows (or for the sake of the argument any PC-era operating system), or did we mean something else?

The owner of the platform really owns 90% of the market. Not only the OS market but also the ecosystem of applications and application developers that create a business on top of the platform.

The platform that is most loved by developers and that gives most value for the business decision makers/owners of the application companies ultimately wins. But we have evolved quite a bit since the early PC days.

  • In the PC-era, we had really one dominant Operating System. But it was a siloed OS.
  • In the SmartPhone Era, Steve Jobs and Apple reinvented the space and created the Application Store, a disruptive channel for apps. But still built on top of a highly closed and proprietary OS and ecosystem
  • More or less same happens with clouds. They become more and more proprietary. iCloud, DropBox, G-Drive, Skydrive, etc All living in their own silo. All these examples are very consumer oriented, but usually B2B follows the slipstream of retail customer, and it can be expected the same happens with B2B cloud offerings.
  • Add to this mess the blurring lines and confusions between all sorts of clouds: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, community clouds, personal clouds, device clouds, etc, etc

In the end, every entity (people, business, device, program, etc) will have its own cloud and its own APIs

  • What has to come next in this evolution is an interoperability of clouds, a layer of almost Kernel level services, protocols and standards that let the Cambrian Explosion of Everything share data in real time, securely and with the appropriate governance and trust per interest-domain.
  • This is the bottom-layer in the diagram above
  • This is what the infrastructure-layer of the DAG is trying to address. We base ourselves on open standards XDI/XRI which are going through their approval process at OASIS.

Phil Windley described the vision of the Personal Cloud Operating system in his blog “The Layers and Components in a Cloud OS”

Image courtesy Phil Windley

So far, we are thinking about companies (banks) hosting apps that run on top of this Customer Cloud Operating System. I use the more generic term “customer” in stead of “personal” Cloud Operation System, as the “customer” can be both the person, a corporate, or even a device or program.

In all our discussions, we have been so tempted to say that the value is in the apps (upper layer of this diagram). Whether that is in providing those apps as service providers (the bank as a data service provider), or as a consumer of data-services (in that case the bank acts as a “vendor” of financial services, trying to leverage the information from the direct channel with the customer (whether that customer is a retail or wholesale customer)

But that’s “only” the temptation.

The Holy Grail

is to be able to position your company

as the “platform”

on which others can build apps and create value.

Like Amazon (not the bookshop but Amazon Web Services). To make yourself so indispensable as a platform, that even your competitors start building on top of your company platform.

And suddenly the “gem” was there:

Bank(s)-as-a-platform

It is apparently a new meme (I Googled it, and did not get any hits ;-), and so I trademarked it 😉

Update: the meme “Bank as a Platform” is not new. Nicolas Debock (@ndebock) kindly pointed out to me that:

Anyway, “Bank(s) as a Platform” is what the DAG really enables. A new interoperability layer for people-, business- and device-clouds, creating a value and reputation system leveraging the existing KYC and digital slipstream information of customers with full respect of privacy and empowerment.

The real question is whether banks will see and grab this enormous opportunity, or whether they will satisfy themselves with copycats of outworn 20th century business models, and narrow down a great vision into adjacent banality.

Maybe we all can get inspired by two of my heroes:

Jeff Bezos (Founder and CEO of Amazon) said last week in an interview with @triciad in All Things Digital

“we don’t ask why do this, we ask why NOT do this?”

Click on image to launch video

And Buckminster Fuller said:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

and

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you its going to be a butterfly”.

The opportunity for banks is indeed to position themselves as data-platforms for value creation by a formidable ecosystem of third parties, so that every customer – from the Bottom of the Pyramid to the Top of the Pyramid and every customer in between – appreciates their bank as their own private wealth manager.

“Wealth” not necessarily exclusively expressed as “Money”, but as a richer an broader concept including social data capital for financial inclusion, reputation, trust, ethics, and integrity. Roger Hamilton nailed it when he said “Wealth is what you have left when you have lost all your money” 

This sort of wealth is enabling empowered customers with agency. The origin of the word “bank” was “bench”, a place where two people meet and create a relationship.

The deep meaning behind the DAG beyond its technical innovation is that it creates Relationship-as-a-Service (a term coined and trademarked by Respect Network). The realisation of this Relationship Economy will change the love/hate relationship with banks:  instead of being criticised for their past behavior, they can be loved like the Googles, Amazons, and other great platform companies of this era.

Corporate Rebels Manifesto

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Since my initial post “Corporate Rebels United – the start of a corporate spring?” of 17 March 2012, and the subsequent “A New Global Practice for Value Creation”, the core team has been working on fine-tuning  our mission.

UPDATE: we are now also present on other social media channels:

I am very grateful to the whole team for getting us where we are today, and especially for initial instigators Laura Merling and Mike Maney, and our advisors/mentors Nilofer Merchant, John Hagel, Mark Bonchek, and Dave Gray.

A special word of thanks to Dave Gray (author of the just released “The Connected Company”), who inspired us with his concept of “Pods”:  independent self-organizing cells who act autonomously but in context of shared platform of common, core, connected principles. Dave was also the person who landed the first version of this manifesto, based on previous culture-hacking work by the core group.

Mathias Vestergaard is the first Corporate Rebel from the core group starting the a Corporate Rebels Pod in New-York City. Who’s next?

Some of us will be present at the CultureCon2012 (co-organized by fellow rebel Dan Mezick and author of “The Culture Game”) and at BIF-8, the fantastic story tellers event by Saul Kaplan and team. Let’s continue the conversation there or online.

The release of this Corporate Rebels Manifesto coincides magically by the release of “The Labor Day Manifesto Of the Passionate Creative Worker” by John Hagel, mentor and my source of inspiration for many years, who writes:

We celebrate the passionate and dedicated individuals in all fields who have both led us to where we are now, and are creating and shaping the future. They are explorers, pushing back the limits of our current understanding. They pioneer new ideas, discover new truths, and tirelessly innovate. They actively seek out new challenges and connect broadly with others to solve them. Though they come from every occupation and background, they are unified by the sincere belief that they can leave the world a better place than they found it

So, without further due, here is our/your Corporate Rebels Manifesto:

+++ start manifesto

What is the problem?

Our companies no longer serve our needs. They cannot keep pace with a high-velocity, hyper-connected world. They no longer can do what we need them to do. Change is required.

What is the vision?

We love our companies and want them to succeed. We want to reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version, to accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations, and to reclaim our passion for work.

What is Corporate Rebels United?

We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm. Our actions will lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity. We are architects and scouts into the future, and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then.

Relentlessly

Challenging the status quo

Breaking the rules

Saying the unsaid

Spreading the innovation virus

Seeding tribal energy

With no fear

With a cause to do good

Leading by being from our true selves

Going after the un-named quality

Relentlessly

We are holding a space.

We are making and holding a space where everybody can have a voice in service of value creation. The DNA of our movement is a platform of core principles that are the basis for us to connect, to practice, to embrace, and to inspire other to dream and make our dreams come true.

How do we define success?

When we have a community of 10,000 pods worldwide, with a good distribution across industries and regions. When we feel whole at work. When the DNA is established, when the pods start to divide, enabled by the lightweight space we are holding. Holding a space is a about context; the job is done when the space is holding itself, when people start saying: “I suddenly feel free to be awesome.” When our practice gets the same attention in annual reports as efficiency practices such as Lean and SixSigma.

Help us articulate the principles.

We are now defining the DNA: A platform of common principles that define who we are and what we stand for. We could use your help.

  • Principle-1: We love our companies and want them to succeed in this high-velocity, hyper-connected world.
  • Principle-2: We dare to be great.
  • Principle-3: We have the mandate to be brave and to challenge the status quo.
  • Principle-4: We will reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version.
  • Principle-5: We accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations.
  • Principle-6: We enable and empower the rest of our organizations to move at rapid pace, but with room for patience and reflection.
  • Principle-7: We unleash the enormous potential that lies within every human being within our organizations.
  • Principle-8: We re-ignite the passion in our organizations.
  • Principle-9: We are not just talkers, but doers.
  • Principle-10: We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from their true selves.
  • Principle-11: Our actions lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity.
  • Principle-12: Our community acts from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm opening up old rusty structured.
  • Principle-13: We are architects and scouts into the future,
  • Principle-14: and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then.
  • Principle-15: We are very well intentioned individuals.
  • Principle-16: We are united people with shared purpose, starting with our own being.
  • Principle-17: We maintain integrity and relevance..
  • Principle-18: We keep our community a safe environment, where you can become who you want to become. Where you are not alone in being a catalyst.
  • Principle-19: Our core values are integrity, clarity of reason, brightness and great positive energy.
  • Principle-20: Reflection, reporting back and adding-on to each others input and opinions is our natural way of collecting and discussing opinions.

Join us.

Start a pod. Organize yourself. Decide on your own activities, your own resources, and your own relationships. And link them back to the mothership, the DNA platform of common, core, connected principles.

+++ end manifesto

If this Manifesto speaks to you, we ask that you become a “signatory” by indicating your support in the comment section below.  We’ll add you to the growing list of Corporate Rebels. And we’re in the process of creating an online holding space for our common principles and convictions. Stay tuned.

Cambrian Explosion of Everything

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“The Cambrian explosion was the relatively rapid appearance of most major animal life forms, accompanied by major diversification of organisms. Before, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organised into colonies. Over the following 70 or 80 million years the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude and the diversity of life began to resemble that of today.” (Adapted from Wikipedia )

I believe we are witnessing a similar “Cambrian Explosion of everything” in the information technology evolution of the recent years, and we see a relatively rapid appearance of new “life” forms, new building blocks for the way we do business in this hyper-connected economy.

This thought came into my mind when attending recently the Cloud Identity Summit in Vail, Colorado 16-19 July 2012.

Explosion of API’s

During the pre-conference workshops, I had already seen the explosion of a whole set of new authentication methods and digital identity concepts like SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, OIX, Facebook Connect, Google’s Accountholder.com initiative, etc, etc

And then came Craig Burton with a presentation announced as “The future of Authentication” but in essence a variation of his epic talk on “Identity and the API economy”. His full prezi presentation is here. (Disclosure: Craig has been advising us on our Digital Asset Grid research project)

  • If this evolution goes on, we’ll have 30K “open” APIs by 2016
  • But most enterprise API’s are not open, they are kept private, and their growth rate is 5 times that of open API’s. They are also referred to as “Dark API’s”, because you don’t see these species in the open.

Craig then showed some staggering stats of open API’s, the so-called “API Billionaires”

If you do the calculation, this means 150,000 API calls per second for Twitter!

Update: apparently most of these stats come from John Musser @johnmusser from The Programmable Web. Credits are made in Craig’s prezi, but not apparent in my post here. Sorry, John !

Craig believes – and I subscribe – that we will see a very fast evolution where

“everyone and everything will have its API”

And every API needs its identity. Leading to the staggering conclusion that we will need to provision more than 1,000 new identities per second.

In enterprise, one of the more accepted federated identity authentication and authorization standards is SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Craig created some consternation by stating, “SAML is dead”, because it is not made for the provisioning of this Cambrian explosion of identities. In essence the SAML model does not scale. For this type of scale, manual provisioning does not work anymore, we need high levels of automation, also at the provisioning level.

Explosion of Nodes

In his Cloud Identity Summit presentation, Craig was focusing on the explosion of number of API’s and the identities they will require.

Let me give another dimension, triggered by the research work we are doing on the Digital Asset Grid: when Craig talks about “everyone and everything will get an API”, I’d like to offer the dimension of “entities” aka “nodes in a grid” that need share data with each other. Those entities can be:

  • Humans
  • Group of humans – a good example is a Google “circle”, it’s a group of people without legal entity and therefore no liabilities associated
  • Companies – another type of groups of people – with legal entity and liability. Note that the liability of a non-profit is different from a commercial organization, from a educational institution, etc
  • But now we also add devices to the mix
  • And programs – pieces of software code – that act on our behalf or independently
  • Services and 3rd parties representing the seller, and 4th parties representing the buyer.
  • And personal and corporate clouds, where persons and corporations will keep the data they want to share in context with all the other entities in this grid of nodes.

And all these entities will get an API and will need to get an identity. It is leading to a “Catastrophic Complexity” unless we find a way to govern our communities differently, less manual, and highly automated.

It was very interesting to see that in the closing plenary of the Summit, Bob Blakley – now Global Head of Information Security at Citigroup – introduced the concept of the “Limited Liability Persona” that you could select as your identity to participate in certain data sharing use-cases. I’d like to emphasise he talks “personas” (plural of persona) and not “persons”. For example using your Limited Liability Persona “1” for getting a bank-account, and Persona “2” for your health transactions, etc.

This multiplication in personas will just add to the number of identities to deal with.

Explosion of Data

Big Data, Small Data, Real-Time Data, Fast Data, etc… I guess you are familiar with the buzzwords. I would like to share some insights that go beyond the generalities heard at most conferences.

Have a look at Avinash Kaushik – Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google – in his fascinating talk at Strata 2012 earlier this year. And especially pay attention as from minute 4:00 where he introduces Donald Rumsfeld as one of the “greatest philosophers when it comes to analytics”:

“Reports say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are the known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know”

And then there is this recent Future of Internet PEW report that opens with:

Big Data: Experts say new forms of information analysis are helping us be more nimble and adaptive, but they worry over humans’ capacity to understand and use new tools well

And in the opening para:

We swim in a sea of data … and the sea level is rising rapidly. Tens of millions of connected people, billions of sensors, trillions of transactions now work to create unimaginable amounts of information. An equivalent amount of data is generated by people simply going about their lives, creating what the McKinsey Global Institute calls “digital exhaust”—data given off as a byproduct of other activities such as their Internet browsing and searching or moving around with their smartphone in their pocket.

“The realisation of dynamic and emergent systems as a natural order will cause people to realize the foolishness of trying to game systems to the Nth degree. We will see the rise of more algorithmic thinking among average people, and the application of increasingly sophisticated algorithms to make sense of large-scale financial, environmental, epidemiological, and other forms of data. Innovations will be lauded as long as they register a blip in the range of large-scale emergent phenomena.”

Explosion of Time

This leads me into one of the coolest presentations I have seen on big data, high frequency trading and the new algorithmic ecosystem by Sean Gourley from Quid.com at TEDxNewWallStreet

Especially watch the section as from minute 9:00 or so, where he lets us discover how machines are doing business in matter of nanoseconds: a world of machines where black-swans almost become the norm!

It is not so much that more time is created, but more some form or time “implosion”, where things happen in milli- and nano-seconds timeframes, an outer-space alien to human beings.

Btw: Sean Gourley will be with us at Innotribe@Sibos Osaka 2012 in the session about The Future of Big and Small Data

Explosion of Mobile

Also repeated over and over again at Cloud Identity Summit by different speakers. Whereas many of the suggested solutions consisted of some form of “identity bridges” or translators if you want, I start to believe we come at a point where also here the existing metaphors and techniques are not adapted to the new paradigm of super-scale.

I have seen so many statistics and data that mobile is big, I prefer to refer to the mother of all internet trends, Mary Meeker who moved last year from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers with her May 2012 update on Internet trends.

As from slide #29, she introduces  the “Re-Imagination of nearly everything”

And closes her presentation with

“This cycle of tech disruption

is materially faster & broader

then prior cycles…”

Explosion of Decentralization

With some delay, I found some time this week to watch Don Tapscott’s talk at  TEDGlobal 2012 where he gets into “the interest of the collective”

Tapscott points out that this is “Not an Information Age, but an Age of Networked Intelligence”

And Don Tapscott nails it when he summarised the 4 principles for the open world:

  • Collaboration
  • Transparency
  • Sharing
  • Empowerment

The meta-story underpinning all this, is probably well reflected in the recent essay “The Democratization of Globalization” by Parag Khanna: We are not only moving into the age of Networked Intelligence, but we are also moving into Globalization 5.0 that is characterized by a high level of fragmentation and decentralization.

“Call it Globalization 5.0, the most decentralized form of the phenomenon in history. If succeeding in Globalization 5.0 comes down to exhibiting a single trait, it would be resilience—a decentralized, node-to-node way of doing business, where hundreds or thousands of points of interconnection form a giant web of commerce, information and social good. Those who can demonstrate resilience will adapt and thrive. Those who cling to the old, centralised paradigm do so at their own risk”

I am deeply convinced that the “Cambrian Explosion of Everything” is leading us very fast in a highly fragmented world of heterogeneous entities that are sharing and analysing data at warp speed.

It’s a new world

that will soon require new levels of

governance, security, identity

and community or commons management

Who could be the neutral trusted organisation for the financial industry to deliver us that resilience and trust for the next superfast and hyper-connected data-age?