Earlier this week, Kosta Peric and Mariela Atanassova kick-started our blogging campaign for the last 2 remaining weeks before we all head for Innotribe in Toronto.

I also just posted two blogs on Digital Identity and Big Data. These are technology subjects.

But we have taken a risk this year by programming three non-technology subjects:

• New economies
• Corporate Culture, and
• Banks for a Better World

That is because we believe there is deep disruptive impact on our companies’ organizational fabric caused by fast ramping up technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social, Location, Big Data, and Digital Identity.

They all transform our companies in what John Hagel calls “Knowledge Flows”.

 

The new art is

to share, manage and create

these new knowledge flows

 

So when I proposed these non-technology themes to the Innotribe team, I initially thought that the “fil rouge” in all of this was that of The Connected Company, broken down into Connected Teams, Connected People, Connected “Value” like alternative currencies or reputation or influence.

“Value” was always simmering under hood when curating the program for this year, it now just hit me what is really is that links all our themes together, and suddenly I can “name” it.

I believe the encompassing theme is:

 

“the redefinition of value”

 

And the “New Economies” is a good illustration of the signals of this emerging new value paradigm.

Our general blurb on sibos.com for “New Economies” says:

“Is money the only form of transaction value and wealth? What about social currencies? We will expose you to new thinking on new economies such as the trust economy, the intention economy, the relationship economy, the social economy and the ethical economy.”

> but what does that mean ? 🙂

I believe we are witnessing the end of the double accounting system that had its embryonic start long time ago in the Middle Ages.

 

However

I believe we account

for the wrong things

I believe we “only” account

for what comes in/out

of the corporate walls

 

But our companies

have become

“porous” companies

 

What would happen with the balance sheet of our companies, if we also started accounting for the waste passed-on to next generations? If we would really account for waste, the balance sheets would look quite different and few companies would be in a position to present real growth and real profit. Because we don’t want – at least that is what I believe – fake growth like in a Ponzi scheme. We want growth and profit based on a correct value accounting system.

The balance sheet of course also has an asset side. Here we could start accounting for corporate values and skills like autonomy, transparency, fairness in trade, open, agility through hyper-connectedness, relationships, reputation, social attention, captive versus free customers, openness and accessibility, etc

All these asset topics are also inspirations for several new economy models. SO I truly believe this is a positive story about alternatives for doomsday thinking.

Hence this session on New Economies.

The session will run from 9am – 10:30am on Wednesday 21 Sep 2011 in the Innotribe Space of the conference.

This session is – taken into account the crazy interactive stuff we’ll have done in the previous days – a fairly traditional one, but with the speakers/igniters we have invited, it is impossible that this will be a traditional conference session.

As in all other Innotribe Sessions this year, we have “planted” three groups of people in the audience to provoke and challenge the speakers and the audience:

• We have six students from the Social Data Lab of Stanford University, injecting the Gen-Y energy
• We have five really cool folks from Laura Merling’s team. Laura is heading “a start-up within an enterprise”, and her team will sprinkle our sessions with start-up agility, energy and coolness
• And we have Chris Skinner for Financial Services Club, famous blogger and provocateur.

Inspirational keynotes/igniters

 

From a content point of view, the session will be conducted by Jerry Michalski from The REXpedition, and probably one of the most connected people I even met in Silicon Valley and beyond. He is a pattern finder, lateral thinker, Gladwellian connector, facilitator and explorer of the interactions between technology, society and business. And he also fun !

• Gregory J. Rader, Blogger – InTheSpiral (www.onthespiral.com) will open the session. I met Gregory through his blog and we met face to face during one of my trips to the US. He is a really smart young guy, who stepped out of his regular job at a trader’s company to take responsibility for what he loves. He will start with a framework for New Economies for kick-starting our conversation. I want to emphasize it is “a” framework and not “the” framework. As we move through the lenses of the different igniters, we hope that at the end of the session we’ll have a tentative group-sourced model/framework for these new economies. Jerry Michalski, Founder of The REXpedition – this is about the relationship economy – will probably immediately start to challenge the framework.
• Art Brock, Co-Founder from the Metacurrency Project will put all this in a broader historical and holistic evolutionary perspective; Dan Robles, Founder – Director – The Ingenesist Project will focus on the Sharing Economy. Dan has also been very helpful in promoting this session through his blog. Thank you, Dan !
• I am particularly proud that we’ll have Umair Haque, Director Havas Media Lab and Author New Capitalist Manifesto. Unfortunately he won’t be able to make it face to face at Sibos, but he will join us via Skype. I strongly recommend that you start exploring his blog on Harvard Business Review , and get an idea of his energizing thinking on new capitalism.
• Doc Searls, VRM initiative and Alumnus Fellow – Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Cluetrain was written in April 1999 (!): in here, Doc launched the thesis “Markets are Conversations”. The Cluetrain Manifesto is still as relevant today as in 1999. During this session, Doc will talk about his new and inspiring thinking about the “Intention Economy” also the title for his new upcoming book begin 2012.
• And last but not least we’ll have Craig Burton, Founder of Novell, and Founder of The Burton Group, and strategic thinker on big infrastructure plays. He deeply believes that SWIFT should open up to the internet in a controlled way – navigating the “Burtonian Innovation Matrix” – and add “accessibility” to its core set of attributes, enabling this way what he calls the “API Economy”.

These value-conversations of course spill-over into our other non-technology themes “Corporate Culture” and “Banks for a better World”. Martine Deweirdt from the Innotribe team well soon update you on these via a subsequent blog/vlog.

I am sure you will very much enjoy “New Economies” and the rest of that values-day. Looking forward to meeting you all at Innotribe Sibos 2011 in Toronto !

 

 

Peter @petervan from The Innotribe Team

This post is also cross-posted at http://innotribe.wordpress.com

 

Earlier this week, Kosta Peric and Mariela Atanassova kick-started our blogging campaign for the last 2 remaining weeks before we all head for Innotribe in Toronto.

Today, I also posted a blog on our Innotribe theme “Digital Identity”.

Here is a deep dive on our Innotribe theme “Discovering the new Physics of Big Data”.

 

 

Our general blurb on sibos.com says

“The quantity of data available to our businesses is sky-rocketing. Data volumes continue to explode, doubling every 14 months. So what tools are out there to enable us to use the patterns that can be identified in huge data sets such as Twitter, blogs, and other forms of social media to make correlations and even predict trends? Also get the lowdown on the SWIFT Index – a research project into how SWIFT traffic data can correlate with economic indicators such as GDP. And find out the latest on SWIFT’s Business Intelligence tools and how they can help you turn data into decisions.”

> but what does that mean ? 🙂

Compared to Digital Identity – where we had 2 separate slots, here we will have one big session on Tuesday from 2pm – 5:30pm in the Innotribe Space.

As in all other Innotribe Sessions this year, we have “planted” three groups of people in the audience to provoke and challenge the speakers and the audience:

• We have six students from the Social Data Lab of Stanford University, injecting the Gen-Y energy
• We have five really cool folks from Laura Merling’s team. Laura is heading “a start-up within an enterprise”, and her team will sprinkle our sessions with start-up agility, energy and coolness
• And we have Chris Skinner for Financial Services Club, famous blogger and provocateur.

For Big Data our “conductor” will be Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist IBM Analytics Group – IBM Research Labs, Los Angeles.

 

 

I am very proud of having Jeff Jonas with us. He is considered as one of if not THE biggest thinker about Big Data worldwide. Besides being our conductor, he has prepared a mind-blowing pitch towards the end of this session (nobody really wants to come after Jeff ;-).

Sean Park from Anthemis Group will be his partner in crime for this session. Almost a yin/yang couple, they will keep each other honest and on-track so that everything remains very relevant to financial services.

 

The fil rouge in this session is

that deep analysis of big data

leads to

predictive pattern recognition

 

Those patterns on their term can be predictors of all sorts of indicators. In the case of the SWIFT Index, the SWIFT traffic data analysis can give predictive indicators of GDP of countries. Francis Martin from SWIFT will be our man during this session at Innotribe. (Please also note there is a dedicated SWIFT Index presentation on Tuesday morning 10:00am – 10:45am in the SWIFT auditorium).

We will start from the following assumptions:

• Banks are vast repositories of Big data.
• This data is underused, unconnected, un-contextualized.
• Applying the new physics of big data can solve many data intensive decision problems in the financial industry

Let’s have a look at our other igniters:

• Michael Chui, Senior Fellow – McKinsey&Company, was one of the co-authors of the May 2011 McKinsey report on big data. Michael will bring a high level overview of what big data is and zoom into specifics for financial services
• Sean Park, Founder – Anthemis Group, will do a short talk on “Big Data, imagine that…”, primarily but not exclusively on relevance in financial services, and emphasize that all this is “do-able” today

After Sean, we’ll have several top representatives of some of the bigger vendors in this space.

• Larry Ryan, Chief Technologist Financial Service Industry – HP, will share his deep experience on this topic based on his numerous engagements with clients in the financial industry. Amir Halfon, Senior Director of Technology – Oracle will do same from Oracles point of view with a igniting talk on how to manage large amounts of structured and unstructured data. This is Amir’s third Innotribe at Sibos, so I am sure he will go the extra mile. And we are also very pleased to have David Campbell, Technical Fellow – Microsoft. For those who don’t know, “technical fellow” is a big thing at Microsoft, a sort of reputation and top-expertise title reserved for only 25 out of the 80,000+ employees of Microsoft world-wide.

We have two more igniters, with quite novel and exciting lenses:

• Michael Ouliel, CEO – Ripple Homeland Security Group, will show some mind-blowing demos on what happens when you release big data power and analytics on video and audio. And Michael Driscoll, CTO – Metamarketsgroup, will focus on the velocity of date, the “movement” of data, the flow. I particularly like his lens of FAST data, BIG analytics and FOCUSED search.

From a format point of view we’ll experiment with “Sequential Conversations”, something we tried out successfully during SOFA in March 2011 in NYC.

Here is how it works: We’ll have invited some of the finest thought leaders in this big data space to give an inspirational igniter talk. The first speaker gives a specific lens on the topic. Right after our facilitation team under the leadership of Mariela will break up the audience in sub-teams and will give them an assignment to help them reflect and condense what they just heard. After that, we have the second speaker with a different lens on the topic. Again, back to the break-outs with a new assignment to digest and complement what was found in the first round. Iterate till all speakers/igniters have passed the revue.

 

This will be

an immersive learning experience

 

• We have created an explorative learning environment, mixing stimulating talks about different aspects of big data and its application in the financial industry, with exercises enabling people to discover the main concepts around what Big data is and how it can be used for better decision making. Since the subject is highly technical, the goal is to create a step by step process by which people can discover themselves the concepts that make Big Data interesting and valuable.
• We will stimulate thinking and reflection on where the participants could apply what they learned during the session in their job/company/industry.

And the deliverable will be some kind of puzzle.

Curious? Come and join us for this fantastic, engaging and fun Innotribe Session on Big Data.

 

 

Looking forward to meeting you all at Innotribe Sibos 2011 in Toronto !

Peter @petervan from The Innotribe Team

Also cross-posted on http://innotribe.wordpress.com

 

Earlier this week, Kosta Peric and Mariela Atanassova kick-started our Vlogging/Blogging campaign for the last 2 remaining weeks before we all head for Innotribe in Toronto. And yesterday, Matteo posted his vlog on the start-up competition.

Here is a deep dive on our Innotribe theme “Digital Identity”.

Our general blurb on sibos.com says:

This interactive session will explore the edges of the digital identity eco-system, looking into personal data stores, trust frameworks, and multi-channel authentication techniques. We will also present the findings of the research phase of SWIFT’s Digital Identity Incubation project.

> but what does that mean ? 😉

We’ll have 2 sessions, both on Tuesday morning. The first session starting at 9am in the Innotribe Space is a set of “keynotes”, or inspirational igniter pitches. The second session is a deep dive into our Incubation Project about Digital Identity, starting at 12:30pm also in the Innotribe Space.

As in all other Innotribe Sessions this year, we have “planted” three groups of people in the audience to provoke and challenge the speakers and the audience:

• We have six students from the Social Data Lab of Stanford University, injecting the Gen-Y energy
• We have five really cool folks from Laura Merling’s team. Laura is heading “a start-up within an enterprise”, and her team will sprinkle our sessions with start-up agility, energy and coolness
• And we have Chris Skinner for Financial Services Club, famous blogger and provocateur.

Inspirational keynotes/igniters

I recently was reading “Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity” by Peggy Holman (Amazon Associates link).

 

One of the sentences that deeply resonated with me was:

 

"Take responsibility

for what you love

as an act of service”

 

“Is an act of service” is one of the key design principles of this year’s Innotribe at Sibos. The Innotribe team is “at your service”. It is not about any of the Innotribe team shining;

 

it is about you

our audience

being part of the tribe

 

And being able to keep your own authentic identity as part of the tribe.

That’s also why most sessions are “conducted” by an outside expert, not a Swiftie.

For Digital Identity our “conductor” will be Tony Fish of AMF Ventures. I won’t go through his impressive bio, but one of the reasons that I invited Tony is because he is the author of “My Digital Footprint” – one of the first books that explained so well the difference between “identity” and “footprint”

 

 

That difference, that nuance is what we will bring to this session of Innotribe. Because the subject of “digital identity” is so vast, we made a selection, in essence centered around possible facets of (digital) identity, and how can we develop a deep understanding of user centric identity.

• Michael Ouliel, CEO – Ripple Homeland Security Group and Kevin Sharp, SVP Sales EMEA – DAON Identity X will show how mobile identity has evolved. Highlights are Risk Context identity and “fusion” of multiple authentication methods from simple PIN code up to facial recognition. They will also show a KYC process completely online, without the customer ever having to present herself at the branch of her bank.
• Then we switch gears with Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and godfather of the VRM initiative (Vendor Relationship Management) with a fantastic talk about Abstraction, Token strategy and Infrastructure. Must see! Must hear!
• Azeem Azhar, CEO – Peerindex, will go through the identity aspects of his famous reputation and influence engine. I suggest that before this session, you go and check your personal reputation and influence score at www.peerindex.net
• And Drummond Reed from Connect.me will for sure get into a lively debate with Azeem, as Azeem’s solution is based on algorithms and Drummond is a big believer of social vouching by human beings in a trusted framework. He will bring with him David Scott, Partner – K&L Gates LLP law firm – who is a world authority on Respect Trust Frameworks. These Silicon Valley guys have won the KuppingerCole 2011 European Identity Privacy Award, so fireworks guaranteed.
• We will close this session with a presentation of our own SWIFT Digital Identity Incubation Project. This is about so much more than identity, it’s about digital assets. That’s why we have re-named the project into the “SWIFT Digital Asset Grid”. Two experts from that project team will present: Gary Thompson, Co-Founder and CEO – CLOUD.Inc and Mary Hodder, Chair – Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. The full Identity “gang” that was part of this project will be present. You can consider them as the who’s who of modern digital identity thinking.

Deep-Dive

This session will be a super-duper deeply interactive session doing a deep dive in the “SWIFT Digital Asset Grid” project above.

 

 

For this and all the other Innotribe sessions, we are so indebted to Mariela Atanassova from the SWIFT Innotribe team who has designed the interactive facilitation for these sessions. For Digital Identity, she teamed up with Scott Smith from Changeist.com.

 

What they have come-up with

is really incredible and is pushing the limits

of what you can imagine

in terms of session format

 

This will be a truly immersive learning experience session. Together with the audience we will in fact build some sort of 3-dimensional physical installation, so that you get a good “feel” of the deep concepts built into the Digital Identity Grid:

– The client/user tools: Selector and Weaver

– The infrastructure play

– The unique opportunity for banks and other 3^rd parties to build services on top of this infrastructure

Somebody described the “Digital Asset Grid” project as

 

“This innovation

will bring bank-grade

identity, privacy, and security

to the global exchange

of any digital asset

between any parties”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, we truly believe we have a game-changer at our hands.

 

There is one more thing…

In case you have not noticed, there is a strong synergy between ALL our themes at Innotribe this year.

Although it was always simmering under hood when curating the program for this year, it now just hit me what is really is that links all our themes together, and suddenly I can “name” it.

I believe the encompassing theme is

 

“the redefinition of value”.

 

That’s why we will launch throughout the Innotribe event a virtual conference currency called the “Reputone”. I am sure that Mariela – as chief facilitation designer of this Innotribe event – will follow-up on this in a subsequent blog or vlog.

 

Looking forward to meeting you all at Innotribe Sibos 2011 in Toronto !

 

 

Peter @petervan from The Innotribe Team

Also cross-posted on http://innotribe.wordpress.com

This is probably the most important blog post I wrote since the start of my blog in April 2009.

It’s about a “big bad idea” that started simmering during Le Web 2010, when listening to Shai Aghassi of Betterplace.com

 

 

Shai Agassi was the number two of SAP in 2009, responsible for a budget of more than 1 Billion dollar, but in the CEO succession battle (a finite game, see later) he got bored, resigned, and set his minds on a much bigger thing, now called Betterplace.com

At LeWeb 2010, he told a story on how he took the Japanese challenge to run a 24/7 taxi service in downtown Tokyo for 128 days, without any other power that electric power from batteries, reloaded or switched when needed in “battery stations” in less than 59 seconds each time.

Agassi is very inspiring. Reflecting on his words after his talk during the coffee break, I bumped into one of his strategy guys. I am a strong believer of unplanned encounters and the serendipity that can result from such encounters. I understood Betterplace had a healthy funding of more than 750 Million USD, and I learned that some of the main funders were some of the biggest financial institutions.

The idea started simmering…

 

What if we with OUR community

could get a fund of 1 Billion dollar together

for a better world?

 

At first people looked at me with unbelief and wondered “1 Billion Dollar?”

But it is really not that crazy: if you now that our daily traffic is about 18 million messages, it would mean +/- 50 dollar for each message of ONE day. This calculation on a napkin is in no way intended as a “tax” on each message, it is just meant to say that in the end 1 Billion is indeed a lot of money but not unreachable for a community like ours.

I first mentioned the idea in my blog post on “Pump up the (Innovation) Volume”. And I started talking about it at almost every encounter.

People love it.Everybody I talked about it gets sparkles in their eyes and gets excited. Nobody thinks it’s a bad idea.

 

You know you have a good idea

when suddenly everybody

wants to own and run with it

 

This is a big bold idea. This one is in the category of:

• "Change depends on unreasonable people" (Mega investor Vinod Khosla)
• "If you don’t share your ideas, you’ll remain anonymous and powerless" (Google Evangelist Vint Cerf)
• Number one, great ideas matter. Number two, find passion. And number three, be tenacious, be irrepressible (Steve Ballmer)

So what is it ?

It’s about a 1 billion non-profit fund and framework for supporting sustainable and responsible businesses for a new type of wealth creation.

It would also lead and propel the community forward into a modern thinking about capitalism, rethinking value, and waste that we produce for the next one in the value chain (for ex bail outs) or even pushing debt towards future generations. It would also help us better understand and articulate what a “better bank” would look like.

 

It will stimulate a conversation

about a new wealth paradigm

centered on

new type of value services,

instead of

money and cash services only

What sort of sustainable and responsible businesses do we have in mind ?

• Business that create and/or enable a new type of wealth, based on the full value chain
• Social entrepreneurs that create financial inclusion solutions
• Experiments in social and sharing economies
• Ethical businesses
• “Better” Banks.

However, the idea is about “Banks for a Better World” and not or not only about “Better Banks for the World”. It does include “better banks”.

 

But I don’t like “better banks”

 

Because “better” also means somebody else is “worse”. It’s related to the old game, the finite game where there are winners and losers. I believe we have to shoot for infinite games, where we all together go for the big bold goal, where we have set a direction, where the game does not end when there are winners or losers.

In this context, I really want to recommend a little booklet, written by James Carse in 1986, titled “Finite and Infinite Games – A vision of Life as Play and Possibility” (Amazon Affiliate Link)

 

 

“There are at least two kinds of game. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

“If finite players acquire titles from winning their games, we must say of infinite players that they have nothing but their names.”

My strength

does not come from my title

but because I am me

 

So, because “better bank” is like a title, I don’t like the concept.

But I do want to share some of the ideas and characteristics that popped-up when discussing the concept of better bank. In no particular order, better bank characteristics would include:

• Experiments for better corporate culture in banking, based on open mind, open heart and open will
• Playing an active role in enabling new value transactions – exchanging social reputation for cash, money for social currency?
• Moving from a money bank to a digital bank
• Transparent
• A bank that lets other build “on-top” through API’s
• Scam advisors, sensors
• Leveraging personal knowledge of the person in the context of his/her community/ies
• Digital Asset Stores, info-banks, Social graph bank, community risk Assessment, Values based organized, helps you do your job, exchange social currencies in real dollars and the other way around, offer better picture of my wealth and analytics, an organization that helps me guide my wealth decisions into the future, behavioral economics,

Mind the gap:

this could be new type of organizations,

other than the traditional financial institution,

once known as “bank”

 

Somebody even suggested to weave in here a new fabric, a new concept of the Digital Bank, where the bank not only is our trusted repository and exchange-enabler for money, but also offers similar services for digital assets, such as social graphs, personas, and even payment intentions in a Vendor Relation Management (VRM) scenario.

Doc Searls (who will be with us at Innotribe Sibos as part of our Digital Identity Incubation project) says about customers using VRM:

 

“A free customer is better

than a captive customer”

 

We also can get inspired by folks like  Kevin Doyle Jones? (on twitter @Kevindoylejones). He is the founder of Good Capital, an investment firm that increases the flow of capital to innovative ventures creating market-based solutions to inequality and poverty. He is also involved with Hub Ventures, an innovative funding and support program for early-stage for-profit social ventures – officially launched on January 18th. And cofounder of Social Capital Markets, a multi-platform organization dedicated to the flow of capital towards social good.

It just seems that this guy and his community "get it."

I also asked my friends of the REXpedition (a think-tank on relationship economies, under the leadership of Jerry Michalski) to give me some feedback.

Another example where sharing your idea makes it better.

 

 

Here are some of the messages I got back.

• The "better banks" memetic is a known issue globally – something people really want / reform of finance.

 

“What is being discussed here

is a larger idea

It is a transcend-and-include-idea”

 

• Some REXers suggested me to drop the resistance to the “better bank” twist and maybe to ask “why” we are all so tempted to fall back on this. Maybe we should let go, and let the discussion happen this way, and through putting banks in contact with this sort of new thinking to create a transformation of the banks.
• Some said that existing banks act as incumbents. As incumbents they probably easier embrace “better banks” as they don’t have to re-invent themselves

One of the deepest and profound thoughts came from Jerry Michalski himself, who planted the seed to go back to the primitive level of our understanding of a bank.

The word “Bank” comes from “Banca” which means “Bench”.

People used to sit on a bench, and had a conversation. It was relationship building avant-la-letter, it as about wealth creation for everybody, it was a community play. The metaphor also applies to “stocks” which originally was a “stick” with carves indicating what values where loaned between parties.

Jerry Michalski will be with us at Innotribe Sibos 2011 in Toronto on the topic of New Economies.

 

Maybe this whole idea is a discussion

about new forms of wealth,

about a world

where we are not so dependent

on fiat currencies,

where wealth is separated from money.

 

Check out this Money & Life video:

 

This video has some very strong messages for our community:

Money has “evolved” from a means to transfer wealth to uplift the poor but overtime money took over not as a means but as a measure of wealth and became a human obsession.

And

The system is systemically unstable

We need new and different types of governance.

 

Where the sum of the commons

equals

our collective wealth,

and is not the sum of

individual wealth.

 

Where we talk in terms of community-asset-mapping. With baked-in resilience in the system, like you can have baked-in resilience against floods by allowing mangroves, swamps, etc to overflow.

 

This is a story about

scarcity versus abundance

 

Our money was created with a scarcity model in mind. Sharing was not part of the thinking. In fact, it was about anything but sharing. It was a way to protect the already rich and powerful.

 

This is probably the deeper thought

that led to

“Banks for a Better World”

 

I still carry some of the naivety that Bankers not want to be greedy, that there are powerful and influential individuals in those organizations that still want to change the world for the better.

Sometimes I think that the ideas we’re discussing here might be too much for the targeted audience, like last year at Sibos, where Venessa Miemis introduced GEN-Y thinking into the Future of Money debate. She was not understood by the financial community.

She was infuriated by our deputy chairman’s reaction: “I wonder, are those convictions strong enough to overcome the realities of what makes the financial industry or system tick today………. My own take on this is that the prevailing values may be stronger than the new values.”

Me too, I feel today like preaching in the desert, like an alien naïve idealist in this world of power games and testosterone. I feel like Venessa after Sibos 2010. Her words still resonate like a furious storm in my head, that makes we wake up angry every morning. In Venessa’s words 2010:

 

But if “the financial industry” at large, (whoever that is), doesn’t understand that there is a new mindset that is spreading around the planet, how can they expect to tap into it?

It wasn’t lost on me that I got looks of skepticism and cynicism by some of the bankers that week. I also got plenty of looks that made me feel like someone was going to pat me on the head and say “Awwww, well that’s a cute idea! But you obviously have no idea about how the world works.”

Infuriating.

I do get it. Everyone gets it. The wheels are barely being held onto the cart to keep the grand illusion of this dog and pony show going.

The word “vision” means seeing beyond what is. It means a fundamental shift in the way we choose to interpret the world and our place within it. Everything about “the way things work” is, and always has been, an evolution of socially constructed realities. What happens when we change the meaning of reality?

This isn’t a recession. It’s the growing pains of a transformational evolution in how humanity functions.

People are waking up, consciousness is evolving, and the infrastructures are being built to make it easy for people to communicate, connect, collaborate, and build a world that is mutually beneficial FOR ALL. Beyond a zero-sum game. It’s possible. It’s a choice. We can all be a part of it, and everybody wins.

Join the party.

 

Marti Spiegelman is helping leaders in our culture come awake via the principles of consciousness and restore their businesses to powerful centers of creation, exchange, and distribution of value for the greater good.

She was spot-on in the recent REX call when she said about “Banks for a Better World”:

 

But maybe the new ideas we talked about are just new expressions of principles that are common to the system we already have, that are common to life and thriving and value creation.

The thought here is that we have to remember that principles are core to what we create, consciousness works through a network of principles .

What if we presented those common principles as a resource – as knowledge people already have about value and abundance and exchanges core to commerce?

And then restate the challenges everyone is familiar with, explaining they are expressions of those principles.

This would shift the atmosphere so when we invite creative discussion to bring forward new expressions of those principles we don’t get the fragmentation that occurs when new ideas are just tossed into a highly structured arena.

Summary

This is about trust and reputation, how do you manage such an organization, about organizations with modern governance.

If you want, it’s like an Ashoka for sustainable and social innovation in financial services and wealth creation.

 

 

We partnered with Ashoka for this week’s Innotribe Mumbai on 1-2 June 2011, where they bring a couple of Ashoka Fellows to The Mixer on day-2 of our conference. If it makes sense in the flow of the discussions, we will float the “Banks for a Better World” idea, and see where it goes.

We also partnered with Askoka for their Changemakers’ week in Paris on 21-22 June 2011, where our facilitation crew will lead some Innotribe Labs introducing the subject of Banks for a Better World to see if the idea has any wings to fly and to collect feedback on how you want to shape it.

 

 

Here are some draft descriptions of the Innotribe labs we are going to run there:

Banks for a Better World, Part I

Imagine that we had a way to value wealth not just in return on investment, not just in money, cash flow and balance sheets, but in the worth we bring to society. Imagine if our financial systems were able to provide a platform to transact with, transform, deal in different kinds of value: social benefits, reputation, ecological footprint, etc. Together with several inspiring speakers we would engage you, the audience to create a vision of what Banks for Better World may mean. Be part of this change by joining us for a highly interactive dialogue on scoping this vision and thinking of how we could make it a reality.

Banks for a Better World, Part II

As follow-up to the morning’s banking session, this workshop will provide an interactive platform for diving deeper into some of issues involved in reimagining our banking sector, such as R&D, infrastructure, reaching unbanked populations, and more. Break-out groups will enable participants to design the beginning blueprints for banks for a better world.

The birth of Banks for a Better World is probably very similar to the birth of Ashoka itself. Check-out the video below, by clicking on “Everyone is a Changemaker”

We’ll keep on seeding the idea in our build-up towards Innotribe at Sibos, and are closely in synch with our colleagues of CSR at SWIFT.

 

I can’t help it,

but to me there seems to be

some sweet spot where

innovation,

talent,

and sustainable business

come together 

 

It’s probably the corporate structures and silos that withhold us of tapping this full potential of passionate people coming together and doing really bold things. But by now, you know this guy, and corporate structures is the last thing that is going to stop us 😉

Maybe it is time for me to move on beyond Innotribe event content curator, or technology watcher. Maybe this is my thing. Maybe this is how I can leave a legacy. Maybe this is my purpose in life. Maybe this is what will me lead by being. Raising the question is answering it.

So, what do you think ? Do you get excited by the idea of “Banks for a Better World” ? Do you want to join our Infinite Game ?

Let me know your thoughts, observations, criticisms, suggestions. I am hungry and curious to read your reactions.

Recently had a good discussion with Tony Fish, author of My Digital Footprint, and entrepreneur/investor with AMFventures. The discussion was in the context of our digital identity incubation project (more about that project in an upcoming blog post).

Not sure who invented it, but he came up with a really good metaphor based on the railway systems, that we could use very well in a lot of our discussions on innovation and how we have to position new services on top of or adjacent to our core messaging infrastructure.

 

“Infrastructure”

There we have it

 

With credits to Tony, a classic railway system is made up from:

• Infrastructure (rails, connection);
• Enablers (signaling and control);
• Ticketing (collection of money, the market place/ exchange);
• Platforms (access – something to get customers in and out the service), and;
• Trains (the service – what I am actually paying for in the mind of the customer).

SWIFT in this model already delivers critical parts of the international payments infrastructure.

• From an innovation point of view, I believe the core of our innovation focus should be to extent our current remit to offer industry wide services that will enable Banks and Corporates to offer new services to its customers (signaling and control)
• The Banks will provide the services (ticketing, platforms and trains)

In that sense, the SWIFT 2015 strategy is spot on by stating there is still enough juice and room for innovation in the core.

But I believe a lot of thinking in the industry about innovation at SWIFT is “limited” to the messaging paradigm, and anything that goes beyond messaging seems to make some of our shareholders nervous, as it may be the space where they compete for business with each other.

The railway system metaphor is in my opinion a great help to get rid of the pure emotions in this debate, and to well articulate the roles of the different players in a “system”.

In other words

to do some system-thinking

 

And metaphors always help in system thinking.

Another metaphor is the operator of a horse-track: you offer the infrastructure, and the horses (or rather the horse owners) compete on the horse-track.

 

 

The worst thing the horse-track operator can do is to have horses of his own and put them in the race in competition with the other horses.

Better is to think of the horse-track as something exciting with lots of new enabling services giving horses a better experience, and enabling new merchants to offer new services to the horse-owners. And the ticketing: you can run it yourself, or outsource it.

Just one more thought. Railways make me think of old, messy, noisy, rusty environments and coaches.

 

 

Unless you take the Thalys/Eurostars in First class, or Shanghai Maglev train that propels you forward at 431 Km/hour.

I’d prefer something that “smells” like the infrastructure and ecosystem described in the book “Aerotropolis” by John D. Kasandra. (Amazon Affiliate link)

 

 

Most of my readers are probably familiar with my addiction to cities. Because they never die. They create “intencities”. Platforms of intensities where ideas can flow freely.

Now

we add the city transportation

to the mix,

and how that can be

a real catalyst

for systemic growth

 

Some quotes from the Aerotropolis book:

 

“Look for yesterday’s busiest train terminals and you will find today’s great urban centers. Look for today’s busiest airports and you will find the great urban centers of tomorrow.”

“Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time.”

“The shapes and fates of cities have always been defined by transportation. Today, this means air travel”.

 

 

Aerotropolis. It’s just sounds so much better than railway station or infrastructure:

 

Modern

Fresh

Fast

Convenient

Transparent

 

So, is SWIFT a Railway Station ? You should be able to cook up the answer yourself now.