You don’t have to suffer

Posted on December 4, 2010 by petervan

Have you also noticed ? How many people you see dragging themselves through the office, through their lives ? They seem to have lost sense of engagement.

It makes me so sad. Such a shame not to enjoy life.

Sad in the sense of empathy, and the feeling there is little I can do about it. Maybe just write a blog and hope that some of my readers will get inspired and re-find that spark that makes yourself worthy.

We all know what caused this feeling of uncompleted, not being worthy, being imperfect.

It’s caused by the disconnect between the soft/hardware of your company and the world outside there.

The software is what is between your ears. But even more so about the fine sensors you have in your whole body. This is not about “mind”, this is about “heart” and “feeling”. Deep feeling.
The hardware is about how your company is structured. The hierarchies. The power games. The team dynamics. The motivational models. The focus on the optimization engine with efficiency programs like Lean and SixSigma that such the soul out of great companies. At the end there is only efficiency and no soul.

That’s why people are “dragging” their feet. They just FEEL its not right. And they have lost the energy to fight. The hope to regain their souls.

But of course there is something you, we, all of us can do about it.

We can start a movement

From within. Find the peers who care about people, about life, about soul.

And of course we can ask help. Outside help if needed.

Check out the site of TeamPelgrims:

The NEW ECONOMY demands speed, creativity, dynamism, perseverance, courage, knowledge and the ability to work with others on a multicultural basis.

The NEW SOCIETY, prompted by the Human Interest movement, demands respect for individuality, freedom, mobility and quality of life

The last thing a fish can see is the water he is in… It’s very difficult to understand the “cultural mechanisms” in which we live and breath. Leaders should be made aware that they are “trapped” in cultural viruses. We see in too many occasions that cultural viruses are multiplying and contaminating substantial parts of the organization or company. Be accountable to manage and master this non-transparent but very present dimension in the engine of the organization.

It brings me to the topic of team dynamics.

I am very lucky to be part of a great team.

But due to the stress of the last months, we seem to regress a bit as a team. Just a little bit. In the sense that we start to grow more individualistic.

Luckily some of us have good “consciousness” antennas, and the team is strong enough to 1) bring this to the table and 2) openly discuss them.

My alarm-bell went off when a new team member joined, and I witnessed myself not 100% caring for the newcomer. I said something like “Throw him in the water, and he will learn to swim”. That’s not fair. Because there are so many new things to learn, so many unwritten conventions, rules, habits, cultures.

The problem was

that I did not have any time left

to give quality time to each other

Luckily our team is great, and we are working on great inspirational topics.
Luckily the newcomer is outspoken and has the courage to send invitations for feedback.

But I can imagine if you are not in such a team, if your have not this courage, if you have lost some of your closest colleagues is the latest restructuring, and you can’t work with your new boss and the new efficiency rules, that you get dragged.

We should not let this happen. We have to redefine, revive the company culture from within. Push it to the next level. Be viral. Infect he company, as it will not work by a top down approach or rolling out a big program.

Live the spark, the energy, the enthusiasm. And hope – be sure – that it will have a rippling effect – no, an unstoppable wave – within your team, spreading out to other teams, to other departments, to other regions, to other companies, to everybody you meet everyday.

Enthusiasm is contagious.

And don’t be afraid to ask for help. And to offer help. Probably one of the best ways I can offer help is by transferring authority to others. To hold the bike saddle and then let go. But WITH transfer of authority.

Be not afraid to show vulnerability. Create safe harbors for vulnerability. These harbors become like the womb for the fetus.

Your team could be a womb.

And especially:

be nice to yourself

It’s ok to be imperfect.

I am excelling in being imperfect by NOT being nice to myself. It has to do with the word “mildness”. Be “mild” for yourself. For yourself first. I used to say to others: “apply mildness to the 3rd degree”. But it did not come across as authentic. As I was not able to be nice for myself. People, human beings just “feel” when you’re not authentic.

Brené Brown has written a whole book about this.

Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. Brené spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness.

Have a look at the “look” of her website. The illustrations have something “round”. The site creates some feeling of safety. Of roundness. Of “womb”-ness. It has a feminine softness/roundness that we seem to have lost in our company hard- and software.

I was very touched and moved by her TEDxHouston talk of June 2010.

The video is a 20 min summary of her book: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

The video has subtitles, so the words have more impact. Without trying to make a transcript of her talk, here are some lines that resonated very strong with me:

Shame as the fear of disconnection
Don’t try to outsmart vulnerability
Do you believe YOU are worthy of love and belonging ?
Courage, compassion, connection.. who you are with all your heart
The courage to be imperfect
Be kind to yourself first
Connection as the result of authenticity
Let go who you think you should be
What makes me vulnerable makes me beautiful
Do something where there are no guarantees
Research is about control and predict
You know who you are when you think you need help
See a therapist who sees therapists: no family, no childhood shit, I just need some strategies
Vulnerability is the care of shame and fear and your struggle for worthiness
But also source and birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging, love
Vulnerability and tenderness are important
We “numb” the vulnerability. We “numb” everything
Blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort
But then there is no conversation, discourse
We try to perfect our children, but babies are hardwired for struggle
We pretend that what we do does not have an effect on people
Let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen
“I am enough”

Suddenly it became clear to me:

The difference is in

the (lack of) indifference

It’s about the capability

to be able

to relate to this

I am playing with the idea of building into Innotribe at Sibos 2011 in Toronto a topic on “New Corporate Culture” or “Towards a new corporate culture of difference”. Where we would invite people like Brené Brown, Vineet Nayar, Andre Pelgrims, Keith Yamashita, Marc Dowds and others ?

Something else than technology. Something else than payments. Something that touches our lives everyday. Probably more hours at work than at home. To feel happy, fulfilled, and worthy should resonate with all of us, no ? Or are you not afraid of becoming one of these “dragging” people ?

Let’s put back the “juice” in our companies.

What do you think ? Sibos ? About new corporate culture ? You really don’t have to suffer alone !

Is it really worth daring to be great?

Posted on November 5, 2010 by petervan

In September this year, I was attending the BIF-6 Summit, in Providence, RI.

Why only report about it now ? Because they finally released the videos of the stories that were told at this year’s edition of BIF.

Next year’s edition BIF-7 dates will be 21-22 Sep 2011, unfortunately the same week as Sibos 2011 in Toronto. Wonder if we can not do something together with BIF that week at Sibos, if only sharing some of the 2011 speakers? I will give a call to Saul Kaplan. Look at the confirmed dream-list of already confirmed speakers: Danah Boyd, Lisa Gansky, John Hagel, Dan Pink, etc. Wow ! What a start, and still almost a year to go!

From this year’s edition, I suggest you take some time to go through my personal top-5:

Absolute topper, world-class, inspiring, moving, energizing, whatever talk came from Keith Yamashita.

Is it really worth daring to be great?

SY Partners chairman Keith Yamashita dares us all in this moving video story crafted as a metaphor from the Charles and Ray Eames video “Powers of Ten.” It’s a remarkable tale that reminds us that the future is here for us to create and it starts one collaborative duo at a time.

It’s worth every of it’s 25 minutes, and it’s a fantastic story about how “twins” in teams are the fuel of great teams.

It’s about doing great things like landing the Eagle in the moon, and “turning a bunch of folks blue” back home
It’s about having the house full of diagrams
It’s about when you start to believe that anything is possible
It’s about kids being born with greatness
It’s about being fully aware and fully alive
Trusting so deeply you can create together remarkable things
Duo-ships are about great invitations
Going actively after the status quo
About systems thinking + creativity
Building different type of organizations
That there is a better optimum than just the first choice
About having deep conversations on how to get smarter
To tackle things at a societal level
About finite/infinite resource and infinite/no possibility
About “then” (pre-crash), and “tomorrow”: finite resource + infinite possibility

About saying

“I trust you implicitly

to do a brilliant job,

and come back

with what you learned”

About

Ending the tyranny

of false trade-offs

Who is Keith Yamashita ? All the quoted text below comes straight from the BIF site, but I have added my usual color and typographic emphasis:

When Keith Yamashita looks at the world, he sees complexity—a beautiful and rich one, if we can visualize our place within it.

As chairman of SYPartners , a consultancy that has worked with leaders at IBM, Apple, Facebook, Target, Blackstone, Target Financial Services, Bloomberg, Starbucks and The Coca-Cola Company, Yamashita is a master at helping people define themselves against the backdrop of a profoundly shifting business landscape. The task requires tremendous empathy, he says, a singular understanding of what clients need and want.

“The biggest fallacy of business is that it’s only rational,” he says. “All business is personal and all business is human.” Yamashita is intensely curious about what makes people tick. Who are they? What are their deep aspirations? What do they need to be successful? What’s holding them back?

Ambition

Love

Fear

The human component of consulting goes deep. “We hope for people what they wish for themselves,” Yamashita says. “I’d like to think that when we show up in a room, we authentically care about the people in that room and that they sense that.”

Still, it is not enough to simply identify a dream, Yamashita tells his clients. The only way to stand out is to be fully aware of how you fit into a wider spectrum, to figure out what unique part you play, given the circumstances around you.

“Because we live in a world that is more interconnected than it’s ever been, we are particularly susceptible to the dynamics at play,” Yamashita says. “People feel overwhelmed—it’s a natural outcome of the world we live in. There are more systems problems that require creativity than there are creative people in the world.”

To minimize the potential fallout from system shifts and to maximize the positive impact we can have on the world, Yamashita urges a return to authenticity. He says it’s a question of unlearning bad habits and relearning what comes naturally:

“I do believe

that people enter this world

with a certain amount of

greatness

So many people,

through the pressures

of society

or the way we’re educated,

unlearn that greatness.

They fritter it away.

They start limiting themselves.

It’s really about

reclaiming that greatness

people learning about

how to be just themselves,

fully alive and aware.”

The positive exponential effect of all this self-awareness arises when individuals begin working together. Yamashita encourages his clients to build “powerful duo relationships” that require one of the trickiest human emotions: trust. “The duo is the smallest atomic unit where trust is built,” he points out. “If there’s only two people, you can’t shovel blame.”

With competent, self-aware individuals who relate to others on the basis of that trust, an organization has the potential to expand by the power of ten, just as in the Eames film. Zooming out, Yamashita sees a universe where companies design their own destinies by connecting purposefully to a wider array of players in order to work on a tougher set of problems.

How to make babies ?

Posted on November 4, 2010 by petervan

UPDATE: the Prezi version of the SOFA presentation mentioned at the end of this post is now available here.

Sibos 2010 is over! It was one of the best ever. After that week I felt completely exhausted. Empty. Because I gave my full self. Went deep. Gave and received loads of energy.

This week, it’s time for reflection. For chilling-out. Took some days off: late breakfast, some power naps. A walk here and there. Still lots of reading. Lots of tinkering. Some up-moments, some down-moments. Flowing.

And the future starts to emerge again.

Soon we have to go back to the salt-mine. Soon the treadmill starts all over again. But it does not have to be a copy-cat.

Soon we have SOFE (SWIFT’s Operations Forum Europe), running from 13-15 December 2010 in Conference Center “Dolce” in our home town La Hulpe (close to Brussels).

I have been asked to organize the Innovation Plenary on 14 December. So, here we go again!

Sean Park from the Anthemis Group will be there as well.

He was one of our VC-coaches and Innotribe Leaders for Cloud at Sibos. He will do a keynote during the plenary (a great Prezi presentation on “Platforms, Markets, and Bytes”) and a viewing of his trailer video on “Financial Reformation”. And he will help us run an Innotribe Lab on Cloud computing. Yammy !

Also for me it’s a great opportunity to refresh/reboot. I will do the second part of the innovation plenary armed with

a brand new presentation titled

“How to make babies”

It will be one of those presentations that have been breeding in my head from some while, and suddenly materialize. Like a painting on a canvas. Like poetry on a sheet of paper. Like joy and harmony in music. Suddenly, it’s there!

“How to make babies” will bring together numerous thoughts collected during many conferences visited this year and ideas distilled from the books I have been reading recently. If you are interested in the books I am reading, I am inviting you to subscribe to my GoodReads.

In essence my story will start with the collision of two ideas.

The first idea was seeded in my brain by Geoffrey West (Distinguished Professor at the The Santa Fe Institute) in a presentation titled “The Secrets of Scale” delivered during the Techonomy conference in June of this year.

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests include elementary particles and their cosmological implications; the theory of companies, cities and global sustainability; and biology, including metabolism, aging and sleep. He served as the Santa Fe Institute’s (SFI) President from 2005 to 2009.

It happens that the folks at Techonomy just put up all the videos, including Geoffrey West’s presentation:

It also happens to be the story that opens chapter one of one of the latest books that made a great impression on me: “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnston.

At Sibos, we reflected on the Long Now. In the first chapter of “where ideas come from”, Steven Johnson talks about that vantage point the long zoom.

It can be imagined as a kind of hourglass:

Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether Kleiber’s law applied to one of life’s largest creations: the superorganisms of human-built cities

And

the quarter-power law governing innovation was positive, not negative. A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.

The essence of Geoffrey West’s story is that cities are intensities. That cities never die. That cities are the ideal womb for idea generation, incubation and execution. That innovation scales differently than the size of the city.

Because

the information and the ideas

flow freely and in high intensity.

But how does one create a culture of intensity, of innovation? How does one create the vibrancies of cities within the walls of a castle?

Here is some additional video material featuring Steven Johnson’s ‘”Where do ideas come from”.

And a TED talk on the same subject:

It brings me to the second idea in the collision: the one of incubators.

Incubators at the Maternity Hospital, Port Royal, Paris (Maternité de Paris, Port-Royal). An engraving by Eugene Froment (1844-1900) from the Illustrated London News, 1884.

Incubators were invented by Stéphane Tarnier in 1880, and documented by Auvard in the historic 1883 article De La Couveuse Pour Enfants. Incubators help us grow babies. Physical babies. What I am talking about are ideas. Baby ideas that need to be prototyped. And then incubated. Many incubator models for ideas and start-ups exist.

Probably one of the more famous ones is MIT Building 20. Building 20 was designed differently. With flexibility in mind. A bit like the Value Web walls that allow you to create spaces of intensities. And when the job is done, you disperse and build new spaces, new teams. Disperse and re-group. A different composition for each new project. Get rid of the one size fits all.

Old Building 20, Vassar Street facade, 1997.

New Building 20 at MIT

The point I am trying to make here is that physical environment is equally important to have a free flow ideas. Ideas will not flow in a castle with long corridors and closed offices.

Once incubated, you need to scale. Which brings us back to Geoffrey West and “The Secrets of Scale”. You need to create intensities. As I already mentioned in a previous post:

Intensities and intentions. City intensities. Platforms of intensities. Physical or virtual. Almost requires an architectural purism and surroundings to make it work. Has to be physical.

I want to create these environments. Where small groups of intense people can meet. Can radiate. Can nurture and inspire each other. Where one hunch leads to another, and ideas cross-fertilize. Where we play the Medici-Effect for 100%.

We need to build some sort of city, some platform of intensities, some sort of campus. Not a “chalet” next to the castle.

Think big

Think scale

Think city

Embedded in the social and economic fabric of our industry. Where experts can meet and weave the next generation solutions.

Where we not only have a fertile environment for funding “only”, but where we also thought about physical housing, novel resourcing models like dedicated teams combined with shared staff from the castle. Or in-residence programs as another way to resource and bring fresh blood.

Where we have a shared infrastructure for support, project management and IT. And where we nurture a culture of experimentation. Where we have reverse-mentorship of our bankers BY the Gen-Y generation.

Venessa Miemis hit us all hard in the face at Sibos:

There is a class of young, intelligent, creative people who are disillusioned with the debt-based monetary system, and are busy building the infrastructures for a commons-based economy, which is emerging, right now, in parallel to what currently exists. The foundation of this economy is built on trust… and transparency…. and the ability of distributed networks to self organize. And using the Web as a grounds for experimentation, we’re learning more effective ways to link unmet needs with unused resources, innovate, generate wealth, and build resilient communities.

This is the prototype of the future. This is where the opportunities are.

I hope that during the Innotribe sessions the remainder of the week, we can explore ways to create bridges between these two worlds and ways of thinking, and co-evolve the next global economy.”

Venessa & friends already followed up post-Sibos with the idea of an in-residence program for bankers. To understand and connect with the new class of young, intelligent, creative people. To learn their language and adapt their values. Yes, you got it right: the bankers get mentored by Gen-Y.

I think it’s a fantastic idea. To think wealth instead of money.

With trust as the currency

of the 21^st century

Where we create bridges in a strengths-based society instead of a problem mindset.

We are in a different Zeitgeist,

and most of our bankers

haven’t noticed yet.

The realization that most senior executives in finance (or elsewhere for that matter) would be completely at a loss – “sans moyens” – faced with an articulate and intelligent Gen-Y as personified by Venessa.

Things like this residence program idea: that’s the sort of babies we need to create. That’s the sort of family harbor we want for our children. And when babies become adolescents and adults, when those ideas have matured into successful companies in their own strength, keep thinking about our off-spring. As it never stops.

And despite big hopes from the singularity movement, there is a fair chance that all who read this in 2010 will die sometime. But as Geoffrey West pointed out and proved mathematically:

Biological beings die

Cities never die

The big “contours” of my SOFE presentation are drawn. This post-Sibos holiday & chilling season is ideal to let it mature. To perfect the visuals. To come to the essence. To get to its full purity. To be different by less not more. So that you can feel the full intensity. So that each of you can realize his full potential.

Let’s practice making babies !

Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 : Meet the Jury of Pitch Your Lab !

Posted on October 21, 2010 by petervan

As you know by now, Thursday 28 October 2010 is our Innotribe Grand Finale day where everything comes together!

Make sure to be in the Interactive Workspace from 9-10:30am on Thursday 28 Oct 2010 when we run the “Pitch your Lab” session .

This session is the culminating point of the all the work that will have happened in the Innotribe Labs throughout the Sibos week.

We will open with a 20 min update and reflections on the Long Now Lab by Paul Saffo, who will also be the keynote speaker in the Sibos closing plenary later that day.
After that, we’ll have a “Pitch your Lab” competition. The best ideas from the cloud, mobile, and smart data labs will be pitched to a jury who will select the winner of this year’s SWIFT Innovation Awards.

Listen to Kosta Peric who explains what this "Pitch your Lab" session is all about. It is your chance to win the SWIFT 2010 Innovation Award !

Here are the members of our extraordinary jury, also referred as our Buyer’s Panel:

Paul Saffo, Professor, Stanford University
Jo Van de Velde, Managing Director, Head of Product Management, Euroclear SA/NV
Wilco Dado, Head of Global Payments, Royal Bank of Scotland
Gary Greenwald, Chief Innovation Officer, Global Transaction Services, Citi
Lázaro Campos, CEO, SWIFT
Ian Johnston, Chief Executive, Asia Pacific, SWIFT
Gottfried Leibbrandt, Head of Marketing, SWIFT
Alain Raes, Chief Executive EMEA, SWIFT
Kosta Peric, Head of Innovation, SWIFT

The jury will be assisted and advised by a VC (Venture Capitalist) Advisor’s Panel. These VC’s were part of the Innotribe Labs during the week. Here are the members of the VC Advisor’s Panel:

Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery (Cloud Lab)
Sean Park, Managing Director & Founder, Anthemis Group (Cloud Lab)
Eghosa D. Omoigui, Founder & Managing Partner, EchoVC (Smart Data Lab)
Nova Spivack, CEO, Lucid Ventures (Smart Data Lab)
Jennifer L. Schenker, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Informilo (Mobile Lab)
Matthaus Krzykowski, Mobile Expert, VentureBeat (Mobile Lab)

Each team will have 5 minutes to pitch their Lab-idea to the jury. After each pitch, we will ask the advice of the VC’s.

Then there will be a short Q&A with the judges, and a voice-of-the-public using our latest “high-tech” applause meter.

The winner of this “Pitch your Lab” competition will be announced during the Sibos Closing Plenary at 16:00 later that day.

We run this competition for the second time this year. Last year this session was referred to as “the best session of Sibos 2009”. We have done everything to match last year’s success. We have invested heavily in a solid design of the labs, and have armed the teams with fantastic facilitators from The Value Web, Innotribe Leaders from the business and the technology eco-systems, and matter expert VC’s.

In the true spirit of less push and more pull, we encourage you to engage in a true dialogue with the Innotribe team and the Pitch your Lab finalists. We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam.

The Innotribe team

www.sibos2010.com
www.innotribe.com
www.swiftcommunity.net/innotribe
innotribe@swift.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/innotribe
Hash tags: #innotribe and #sibos

Breaking: Lazaro Campos opens Innotribe @ Sibos 2010

Posted on October 19, 2010 by petervan

Drop everything ! Get up early ! THE session not to be missed at Sibos this year is the Opening Innotribe Keynotes. Be there at 9am on Monday 25 Oct 2010 in Conference Room #1.

Lazaro Campos (CEO SWIFT) will open this session and participate to the following interactive Q&A with the speaker panel.

Matteo Rizzi (Innovation Leader at SWIFT and your master of ceremony) and Kosta Peric (Head of Innovation SWIFT) will guide you through the Innotribe program of the week. Knowing Matteo, he for sure will have some humoristic gimmicks in his sleeve to keep you energized that morning: it will start already when you come in, as you will be “bugged”. More details on-site 😉

Five speakers, thought leaders in their respective domains will thrill you with their latest perspectives on the tectonic shifts that underpin the topics of the rest of the week at Innotribe @ Sibos. Each of them will give a 15 min presentation:

Peter Hinssen, CEO, Across Technology, will open with “The New Normal” a fascinating back and forward looking on the digital revolution. The New Normal is also the title of his latest book, just released on 30 Sep 2010. http://www.peterhinssen.com/books/the-new-normal/synopsis

John Hagel, Director, Deloitte Centre of the Edge, will follow with “The Power of Pull”, or how business models fundamentally change in our hyper-connected world, and how passionate he is about passion. “The Power of Pull” is also John’s latest best-selling business book.

Nova Spivack, CEO, Lucid Ventures is the world-renowned “guru” on Semantic Web. He will entertain you with a talk on “The Present is the Future”, how real-time and “Nowism” is permeating everything.

Stephen Ellis, EVP, Wholesale Banking Group, Wells Fargo, will fire you up with his views on tectonic shifts in Banking.

Venessa Miemis, Graduating Student NYC, Emergent by Design will speak on “The Future of Money”. Her talk will be spiced-up with a video she produced exclusively for this event in Berlin. We already blogged and twittered a lot about Venessa here

For early birds, there will be a couple of copies of the books of Peter Hinssen and John Hagel.

After these keynotes, Matteo will pick another trick from his sleeves to make sure the audience participates interactively in a short interactive Q&A with the speakers. He will wrap-up the session with the highlights of the Innotribe day and week, and will give you a call for action to keep you engaged with us throughout the week.

Both in content, quality of the speakers, and format of this session, this will be THE not-to-be-missed session on Sibos Monday. We are convinced it will set the bar for any session for the upcoming week.

Innotribe is organized by SWIFT Innovation with the support of financial institutions, vendors and innovation leaders. In the true spirit of less push and more pull, we encourage you to engage in a true dialogue with the Innotribe team.

We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam.

The Innotribe team

www.sibos2010.com

www.innotribe.com

www.swiftcommunity.net/innotribe

innotribe@swift.com

innovate@swift.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/innotribe

Innotribe @ Sibos 2010: Here are the finalists of the Innotribe Start-up Competition !

Posted on October 7, 2010 by petervan

Cross-Posted on swiftcommunity.net

As you know by now, Thursday 28 October 2010 is our Innotribe Grand Finale day where everything comes together!

After the “Pitch your Lab” session (9-10:30 am) and the “Open Innovation Best Practices” session (11:00 – 12:30), we launch for the first time a true “Start-Up competition”.

Make sure you book this high-energy session in your agendas!

The competition will start on Thursday 28 Oct 2010 at 12:30 in the Interactive Workspace : a rollercoaster of 11 five-minute pitches by start-ups in front of the full audience and a judge panel of real Venture Capitalists (VCs).

After the pitches, there will be a short Q&A with the judges, and a voice-of-the-public using our latest “high-tech” applause meter.

The winner of the Start-Up competition will be announced in the final Sibos Closing Plenary at 16:00 later that day.

Finalists have been selected based on their professionalism and fit with the one or more of the four themes of Innotribe 2010: Cloud, Mobile, Smart Data, and Long Now.

Here is the list of 11 finalists (in alphabetical order):

• AcceptEmail (www.acceptemail.com ): E-Billing and Payment via e-mail (**)
• BehavioSec (www.behaviosec.com ) : Behavioural analysis of keyboard/ mouse usage (***)
• Canatu (www.canatu.com ) : Printable devices based on nano-technology (***)
• Collibra (www.collibra.com ) : Business Semantics Glossary for Data Management (S)
• Cumulate: Mobile payments based on Cloud and Semantic Web (*)
• Hypios (www.hypios.com ) : Semantic web for finding experts (***)
• Kinamik (www.kinamik.com ) : Data Integrity and in-stream archiving (***)
• MiiCard (www.miicard.com ): Identity and dematerialization of bank account creation (S)
• MyWOT (www.mywot.com ) : My Web of Trust (***)
• FX Capital Group (www.fxcapitalgroup.co.uk ): The Currency and Payments Platform (S)
• Smartlogic (www.smartlogic.com ) : Semantic analysis of contracts/legal documents (***)

(S) Spotted by our own SWIFT innovation scouts during the year
(*) Winner of the Innotribe Lab at CPA Conference June 2010, Vancouver
(**) Winner of the Florin Award competition at EPCA Conference March 2010, Paris
(***) Selected from Innovate 100 Pitchslams (www.innovate100.com ) sponsored by SWIFT.

All finalists will have the opportunity to get a G/SCORE assessment : a standardized, scalable methodology for the incisive analysis and transparent assessment of startups’ commercial viability, execution, team and business model.

This methodology has been developed by Chris Shipley and the Guidewire Group, the organizers of www.innovate100.com

And here are the VC Judges:

• Jennifer Schenker, Founder and Editor-in-chief – Informilo (www.informilo.com ) with focus on Mobile
• Oren Michels, CEO – The Mashery (www.mashery.com ) with focus on Cloud Computing
• Nova Spivack, CEO – Lucid Ventures (www.lucidventures.com ) with focus on Smart Data
• Guido Jouret, VP CTO Emerging Technologies Group – Cisco (www.cisco.com ). Best Practice Incubation.
• Mike Sigal, Co-Founder, President and Chief Development Officer – Guidewire Group (organiser of Innovate 100 –www.guidewiregroup.com ) and G/SCORE methodology to score start-ups.

The prize:

There is no other prize attached to this competition other than visibility towards the financial community and a group of experienced VC’s who have their own networks with Business Angels, VCs, and Investment Funds.

We run this competition for the first time this year. As such this is an experiment, where our main ambition is to expose the Sibos audience to the typical high-energy dynamics of such a competition and the start-up mindset in general.

Let’s start the conversation:

In the true spirit of less push and more pull, we encourage you to engage in a true dialogue with the Innotribe team and the Start-Up finalists. We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam.

The Innotribe team

www.sibos2010.com
www.innotribe.com
www.swiftcommunity.net/innotribe
innotribe@swift.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/innotribe
Hash tags: #innotribe and #sibos

Digital Identity Tour Part-2: Digital Identity Tuner 7.0

Posted on September 25, 2010 by petervan

This blog post is Part-2 of a series that started as the ongoing thinking after our Digital Identity Tour in June 2010. In Part-1, I developed the idea of the Unpolished Diamond.

Today, I will entertain you on the concept of a Digital Identity Tuner, which in its own is also a further evolution of the Identity Rights System 3.0 post of March 2010.

It all started coming together when – during the tour – we visited PayPal.

This visit was at the end of the tour. We were welcomed by Eve Maler, Distinguished Engineer, Identity Services at PayPal, and Andrew Nash, Senior Director Identity Services at PayPal

These folks of PayPal basically told us to forget what we had seen earlier in the week. These are probably some of the smartest identity folks around, so you pay attention.

Indeed, I was amazed how much further ahead they were, not only in their conceptual thinking, but also in the pace at which they define and rapidly test new protocol standards.

The eye-opener for me was that there is no business in identity, but there is some significant potential when flipping the discussion to sharing and managing of user data.

It is not that much about identity,

but more about digital footprint.

Happens that a couple of weeks later I read Tony Fish’s book My Digital Footprint, where the author explains razor sharp that there is a difference between digital identity and digital footprint.

At about the same time, I saw appearing on the internet all sorts of semantically tagged enabled viewers, like this one from Recorded Future.

Recorded Future lets you search and find for events, based on the WHAT, the WHO/WHERE and the WHEN.

What if we could do this

for a person’s digital footprint ?

Here is where my Digital Identity Tuner comes into the picture:

Remember those old radios ? You could “tune” into a radio channel, and there was a big button, and if you turned that button an arrow would move over a “map” of pre-defined radio stations.

What if we could do the same on your digital footprint ?

The spectrum above is my “Digital Persona” as generated recently by MIT’s Digital Personas project. Personas shows you how the internet sees you.

Every color in the spectrum is about a certain dimension of your digital footprint: books you read, education, political preferences, musical preferences, professional attributes, etc, etc…

What if you could make that spectrum “clickable” ? Not only via a browser, but also via API’s. What if you could zoom in/out that spectrum or certain aspects of it ?

So far, we have “tuned” in two dimensions:

On the horizontal axis, hovering over the different color dimensions
On the “depth” axis, zooming in/out to get more or less detail

Let me add the third dimension of Time.

I could tune into the past, but I could also tune into the future, as my digital footprint does not only contain past behavior, but also contains real-time data (such as devices that I may wear to beam my heartbeat-data to the Microsoft or Google or Wallgreens or whoevers Healthvault when running a couple of miles on my cloud enabled Nike shoes.

S625X

It also contains data about my future, as I keep my calendar in Google Calendar, for example. Or the event for which I bought tickets. Or even on-line streaming events for which I subscribed.

UPDATE-2: or check out this TED Video, on the Quantified Self, with Gary Wolf’s intriguing new pastime: using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending — just about everything in daily life you can measure — in gloriously geeky detail.

So, the third dimension is time.

What if I would have a sort of

“Remote Control”

that could let me navigate through my digital footprint on those three dimensions. It’s like steering a helicopter via remote control.

Or maybe more dimensions. You would end-up with something that navigates you through a fractal or so…

Of course, we don’t live alone on this planet.

We are part of tribes

of swarms

with leaders and followers

I love the metaphor of “SWARM”

Imagine that we have a similar digital tuner for navigating the swarm. For seeing links between the WHO’s in the swarm.

UPDATE: just a couple of hours after my initial posting of this blog entry, I came across this great post by Greg on Digital Tonto about “The Story of Networks”. At the end he refers to a great TED talk by Nicholas Christakis “How social networks predict epidemics”

In essence, it shows the “swarm” of communities, leaders and followers and their relationships. And how germs, ideas, memes, etc spread in a community based on the same S-curves as innovations happen. Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is an internist and social scientist at Harvard University who conducts research on social factors that affect health, health care, and longevity.

So far, we looked at “navigating”. But the system would also allow me to define and manage who gets access to what parts of my digital footprint in what specific contexts or constraints. Not only “access”, but also “usage”.

For all that to happen, we need to fundamentally rethink how we deal with digital footprint.

We have to navigate away from identity systems that mimic our brick-and-mortar world, that are still based on the metaphor of identity cards, or passports, or electronic equivalents based on PKI systems and certificates.

No, we almost need a new semantic tagging language. Not to “tag” pages or servers, but to tag my digital footprint.

And not only “tag” it but allocate and manage “usage” rights to it. And I should be the owner of those data, whether they sit on my computer, in Facebook, or distributed open source models like Diaspora.

So that I end up with a collection of different “where’s” where data about me is kept. It may lead to some new form of DNS, but then a DNS of people. Not pages or servers.

Maybe all this is a bit of futuristic/iconoclastic thinking. Maybe. But when reading the book “Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently” by Dr. George Berns, I came across the following two sentences and took them a little bit out of … context.

But they are so relevant to our identity context:

There are two paths in spectrum: one for identity/categorization and the other for digital footprint / Trail / history/future (time dimension, recording, in the future,…)

The high road is concerned with extracting where objects are located and throws away the elements related to their identity. The low road, on the other hand, is concerned with identification and categorization, and less so with objects’ spatial locations

As Tony Fish so well articulated in his book: we have to separate identity an footprint.

The discussion

about internet identity

has moved from identity to footprint

how we are going to manage that

with a privacy ethic

that is adapted

to our hyper-connected world

Privacy is not dead. It needs to be redefined.

Innotribe at Sibos 2010: Gen-Y and The Future of Money

Posted on September 19, 2010 by petervan

Cross-posted on Swiftcommunity.net

Matteo may have been a bit over-enthusiastic when he declared his session "probably the best session at Sibos 2010" . I guess he may have been unaware of something very special that is happening in the context of the Innovation Keynote Sessions of Monday 25 Oct 2010 at 9am .

What’s going on there is so unique , that i suggest you doublecheck your travel plans to ensure you can be there at 9am Monday morning !

What’s up ?

One of our keynote speakers is Venessa Miemis, a brilliant 28 year old Graduating pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC. Venessa has a fantastic blog called Emergent by Design and you can follow her tweets @venessamiemies where she is leading us in a fascinating way through a collaborative effort to explore the emerging Network Culture and ways in which we can collaboratively build human intelligence and raise consciousness.

Some months ago, i asked Venessa to do a 15 min keynote on The Future of Money as seen through the eyes of Gen-Y. We occasionally kept contact via mail, twitter and skype, and in the spirit of her blog tag-line "emergent by design", and did not give and further instructions and trusted the process and the smartness of young people.

Great was my pleasant surprise when Venessa published her outline some weeks ago under the title "The Future of Money Begins !" .

The keynote will be on "large scale shifts in cultural values and the impact they’re having on our relationship with money, our perceptions about ourselves as humanity, and how we are redefining what ‘true wealth’ means." For more details on the content, see the link/picture above.

What is really cool is not only the content of this keynote, but also they way how Gen-Y people like Venessa approach such task .

Without corporate structural constraints, Venessa told me very early in the process how she wanted to do something special: she wanted to produce a video as part of her keynote.

And in a true on-line collaboration Gen-Y way, she was going to produce this video with a company in… Berlin. For Gen-Y, they are truly no geographical boundaries anymore.

But to produce such video will require some money. No problem, how do Gen-Y approach this ? They ask their on-line communities for support.

So she launched the Future of Money Website – and Emergence Collective "creating innovative momentum" with a fundraising via PayPal .

You can determine for yourself what degree of support you can muster to help. It starts at 5$ and can go up to 1,000$ if you want to be Executive Producer of this video.

At the time of this writing, the counter stands at 470$ ! I made a small calculation:

if each of the 10,000 readers of this swiftcommunity.net blog contribute 1$, will be able to make come true their full blown dream.
if each only 1% of the 10,000 readers donate 100$, same !

I don’t think it should be so difficult for our banks, partners, employees to find between 1-5$ to help support this really cool project.

For $5,000: They will create a beautiful and useful visualization of all the companies, initiatives and organizations we’ve been tracking in their research. Right now this research is a tangled mind map but with the skills in their team they have the ability to transform it into an informative and elegant visualization. This would include an overview of peer-to-peer lending platforms, open money protocols, emerging virtual currencies, microfinance platforms, and social currencies.
For $10,000: They’re going to be conducting a bunch of interviews very soon. Typically interviews will run between 10-30 minutes. However the video they’re producing will be between 3-5 minutes when it’s finished. Obviously they’re going to have to leave some stuff out. With this level of support they’ll be willing to edit each interview on its own and release it as its own video.

So let’s see what happens. The offer is made. The deadline is Venessa’s presentation on October 25, 2010. It’s up to you to decide if these expanded aspects of the project are worth your money and our time.

The result of this work – the video and the presentation – will be given away under a creative commons license.

Even just a small amount will go a long way towards helping us cover our time and expenses on this volunteer effort. And of course it couldn’t hurt to tell your friends via your blogs and tweets.

To show the example, we just sent via PayPal some encouragement from the SWIFT Innovation budget to kick-start the process.

Very curious to see where this goes.

And Matteo, no offence, but i think this session will probably be the best attended session at Innotribe @ Sibos 2010

To put things in perspective: Planetary Boundaries

Posted on September 1, 2010 by petervan

Sine parole. Watch this TED video on the resilience of our planet.

The nine planetary boundaries are:

Let the environment guide our development

Innovation in/out the Castle ?

Posted on August 31, 2010 by petervan

As member of the Innovation Team of our company, I try to stay up-to-date on innovation thinking and therefore I try to read +/- one innovation book per month. I also read other stuff, and if you’re interested in my readings, please check-out my GoodReads Shelf. I found that sharing the books one reads is a good way for connecting with people. Interested to hearing what you read.

I just finished a fantastic new book on innovation. It’s called The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge (Harvard Business Review) by by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

As the title suggests, this book goes way beyond the idea-generation phase of your innovation efforts. It’s about making ideas happen, especially if you are an Innovation Leader responsible for innovation WITHIN an existing organization.

Many models have been tried, but most stay stuck in idea generation:

The innovation = ideas + motivation formula can generate thousands of small initiatives, but does not support projects requiring resources beyond a few people and their spare time.

The innovation = ideas + process model can efficiently crank out innovation after innovation, as long as each initiative is mostly a repeat of prior efforts

The books goes in great detail into the causes for tension between the “castle” (in the book referred to as the Performance Engine) and the Innovation Team.

Business organizations are not built for innovation; they are built for efficiency.

The authors also offer many solutions to solve this tension. The basic premise is that the Castle is organized for efficiency: to create as many as possible predictable processed and make them as efficient as possible. That’s where initiatives like Lean and Six Sigma found their origins.

An innovation initiative is any project that is new to you and has an uncertain outcome

Indeed, every innovation project is an experiment, always based on not-so-precise assumptions, and with continuous learning in order to change those assumptions in more precise decision foundations.

By definition, innovation is neither repeatable nor predictable. It is exactly the opposite—nonroutine and uncertain. An innovation initiative, even a major one, is just an experiment.

The castle loves planning (basically building upon the planning models of previous years), and comparing past actuals vs. plans. Innovation is fundamentally different, as it is about comparing current assumptions with future potential. The comparison also happens much more frequently in a rapid learning context. It’s exactly what the Castle hates.

This tension often leads to frustration with the innovation leaders. At first sight, the job of an innovation leader seems like a dream job. It is not. The aspiring leader has been set up to fail. He just doesn’t recognize it yet. In frustration, he goes a step further, fashioning himself a rebel and a subversive. He fearlessly, or maybe even recklessly, flaunts authority. One person against “the system” is an extraordinarily bad bet. Why is it that innovation leaders so often feel that their biggest enemy is not the competition but their own company? There is a simple answer. Organizations are not designed for innovation. Quite the contrary, they are designed for ongoing operations. Innovation and ongoing operations are always and inevitably in conflict.

But the break-all-of-the-rule

mantra

while understandable

and widely shared

is poison

First, innovation leaders need the Performance Engine. Most obviously, it is profits from the Performance Engine that pay for innovation. Innovation leaders, take note: antagonizing the Performance Engine is a really bad idea.

This is nothing more

than youthful fantasy

at work

Another eye-opener for me was that the innovation team must be distinct from the Performance Engine, but that the innovation team must be just as disciplined as the Performance Engine.

The authors also propose that the Innovation Leader is NOT part of the execution team. The execution of each innovation project is trusted to a “Dedicated Team” and “Shared Staff”. The shared staff comes from the Castle. And this is done for EACH individual innovation project !

The split of work between the two teams is based on the work relationships required for the innovation project: these work relationships have three essential dimensions—depth, power balance, and operating rhythm.

For the Dedicated Team, the authors have a very clear recommendation:

hire outsiders !

There is no more powerful antidote to organizational memory than outside hires. If you want to change the culture, change the people.

At least 1/4 of your Dedicated Team should be made of people from outside your organization. If not, you easily fall into the trap of the The Risk of Organizational Memory.

Experience is usually an asset for advancement within the Performance Engine, but it can be a liability for a Dedicated Team. Innovation initiatives are, by nature, deliberate departures from the past. The lessons of experience are therefore less relevant.

If everyone on the Dedicated Team has been shaped by the same lessons learned from the same victories and defeats inside the Performance Engine, then the collective instinct will be even harder to escape.

A couple of words as well on the role of the Executive Sponsor – correction – the Supervising Executive:

By the way, we have deliberately chosen the term supervising executive instead of the more commonly used term sponsor. We dislike sponsor because it makes the job sound easy or even trivial. A sponsor just provides occasional support. But the supervising executive has a critical job. Few innovation initiatives succeed without a deeply engaged one.

The supervising executive should not only be there when the yearly budget of the innovation team is approved. He should be deeply involved throughout the year to coach the team and help them overcome the tensions with the castle.

If not innovation initiatives are looked at as “second class”. In the overall picture the innovation budgets are a fraction of the budgets for technology renewal of the castle for example.

The importance of innovation

should not be based

on the size of the budget

but on the size of it’s potential

If not innovation will end up as 5 lines in your company strategy papers, CEO reports and Annual Reports. The innovation leader should NOT content himself with just a mention of the word innovation in these reports.

At the end of the book, the authors really make you re-check your assumptions by listing their

10 myths of innovation:

Myth 1: Innovation Is All About Ideas
Myth 2: The Great Leader Never Fails
Myth 3: Effective Innovation Leaders Are Subversives Fighting the System
Myth 4: Everyone Can Be an Innovator
Myth 5: Innovation Happens Organically
Myth 6: Innovation Can Be Embedded Inside an Established Organization
Myth 7: Catalyzing Innovation Requires Wholesale Organizational Change
Myth 8: Innovation Can Happen Only in Skunk Works
Myth 9: Innovation Is Unmanageable Chaos
Myth 10: Only Start-ups Can Innovate

The book also makes reference to some outdated books and consultants on innovation, that unfortunately are still used as the oracles in defining today’s modern innovation initiatives.

Chris Zook has recommended that companies take only small steps outside their existing business. Their conclusions, however, are based on studies of what organizations have accomplished in the past, not what organizations might deliver in the future. Their research is akin to someone studying all the aircraft built through the mid-1940s, collecting voluminous statistical data, and claiming, on the basis of all available evidence, that traveling faster than the speed of sound is impossible.

This is a great book on innovation. Doing away with a lot of the Bull Shiitake of Innovation.

Read it. Internalize it. Apply it.

Petervan Studios

Artistic Interventions – Interruptions – Provocations

You don’t have to suffer

Is it really worth daring to be great?

How to make babies ?

Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 : Meet the Jury of Pitch Your Lab !

Breaking: Lazaro Campos opens Innotribe @ Sibos 2010

Innotribe @ Sibos 2010: Here are the finalists of the Innotribe Start-up Competition !

Digital Identity Tour Part-2: Digital Identity Tuner 7.0

To put things in perspective: Planetary Boundaries

Innovation in/out the Castle ?

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