Identity Rights System 3.0

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Next week, SWIFT Innotribe will be hosting the European eID Interoperability Conference 2010.

It’s a great agenda with presentations by European experts on eID, and also some of the smartest SWIFT folks on identity. For example, we’ll have Jacques Hagelstein, our Chief Architect, and we’ll also run an Innotribe Lab on day-2. Check out and download the PDF agenda here.

Hosting this sort of events is an interesting win-win model, where we at SWIFT can share our great meeting and auditorium facilities and at the same time dove-tail with important topics that are relevant in our industry.

Acting like this beyond our traditional boundaries nicely fits The Medici Effect that i described in my previous post, although i am not sure we at SWIFT apply this principle always with full consciousness and intent. It does not matter, the key thing is that it just happens, and i feel confident that on this intersection of worlds some new ideas will emerge naturally.

Thinking through how we deal with company and personal identities in an on-line world, and being able to deliver this on a world-wide, predictable, resilient and secure way is one of the key value propositions of SWIFT in the financial services eco-system. SWIFT has the advantage – it’s a deliberate choice – that we are a community based venture, and a lot of services we offer adhere to standards and rulebooks that have been subscribed to by our membership. Even then, delivering this is not a sinecure.

But in this post, i’d like to take you on a journey beyond SWIFT’s ecosystem and edges, and look at what is happening in terms of identity and privacy outside our safe community walls.

My first contacts with privacy related matters date back to my Microsoft period, where I was quite involved in the Belgian eID project.

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Microsoft saw Belgium as a good test ground to see what happens when a country rolls-out in a mandatory way 8 million electronic identity cards to its citizens, what applications get developed, and what needed to be done at the level of Windows, Office, MSN Chat, etc to support an identity card issued by a third party, in this case a government. At that time, I experienced the Belgian Privacy Commission more as a pain in the neck, limiting us in doing ‘”real cool things” with on-line identity. But they surely planted in my head the first seeds of some “culture” of privacy. It’s only now that i start to fully appreciate the importance of privacy, and the role of Privacy commissions and alike.

Now the Belgian eID cards are rolled out, we even look at a second and third generation, but the number of applications that are really leveraging the eID on a day-to-day basis are disappointingly low.

Already when the first eID cards got rolled out, it appeared to me that the card was already a dated old-fashioned way of dealing with identities. It does not make a difference whether we talk here about a smart-card, a USB token, or whatever other hardware device.

The point i am trying to make is that

the model of an identity “card”

does not match anymore

the online realities of today

The “card” is an artifact of the physical world, and we try – in vain – to squeeze all sort of on-line concepts into an off-line model.

The next occasion where I felt something was wrong with our model, was when i saw the demo of Intelius Date Checker. See also my post on “privacy is dead” for more details on this application. I was shocked that nobody in the audience made any reflection on the huge privacy issues at stake here. It must have been American culture ?

Then a couple of months ago, there was the famous debate launched by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, where he basically suggested to change the paradigm with 180°: in stead of considering "private” as the default setting of personal data and letting the user decide what data he releases to whom, he suggested “public” as the default setting, forcing to “un-public” data the user did not want to make public and keep private. See also ReadWriteWeb coverage here. Unfortunately for Zuckerberg, there was around the same period an article about a Facebook employee revealing how much privacy data they have access to by for example super-admin passwords and alike.

And even ex-colleague Paul Shetler took the pain to scream out his frustration on why public as a default really does not make sense.

It all makes me feel very uncomfortable how much i have to believe from Mark Zucherberg or Eric Schmidt when they are behaving like the white-knights of privacy.

It looks to me that

privacy is out-of-control

 

and that they would like to officialise the dead of privacy by declaring “public” as the new norm. It looks to me as privacy has become

 

too complex to fix it

 

Via Facebook, Google Buzz, Twitter, etc, etc, there is already too much data out there. Fixing this taking into account regional and country laws and regulations must be a real nightmare for the Facebooks and alike.

It’s an interesting debate what should be the default: privacy or publicy. And Stowe Boyd rightly adds the dimension of “sociality”. Because you release some info about yourself consciously (when participating on social media, your really want people to know about yourself and your preferences) or passively (by accepting blindly the privacy notices on Facebook and alike. Some related info on sociality here.

This aspect of passive privacy is really well explained by David Birch. He recently wrote a whitepaper: “who do you want to be today ?” and “Kissing Phones”. Check-out here. And just a couple of weeks ago, David wrote this fantastic post about Moving to Privacy 3.0

And the big boys are feeling the pressure. A couple of years ago the audience at the Gartner IT Symposium in Cannes was still having fun with “The Great Google Hack” scenario. This session was part of an “Unconventional Thinking” set of sessions with following disclaimer from Gartner: “This research doesn’t have the full Gartner seal of approval (we call them Mavericks internally).” Today this is not just a scenario but getting very real. I am just picking one of the thousands of articles that have been written on the Google China hack described as the privacy breach of the year.

Let’s throw in some additional dimensions, so that you as novice reader on this subject really start feeling the pain.

  • What have you browsed ? Interesting reflections by Microsoft’s Chief Architect Identity on “browser fingerprints”. Btw, Kim is confirmed speaker at the eID Interoperability Conference next week.
  • Where have you been, and how your iPhone becomes a spy-phone here and here
  • What have you bought recently ? How you can let a service like Blippy stream your purchases online.
  • Who have you slept with ? Given some’s willingness to post all their data online, and the rising casual nature of some behavior, this isn’t so far out of reach to be completely ridiculous.
  • Add to this things like Facesence MIT, about mind-reading
  • Bodyscanners about being “sniffed-out” by chemical noses.
  • Did you take your pil and when. In essence about “body-surfing” and RFID like tracking inside your body.
  • Please rob me, in essence about real-time location tracking

Some suggested solutions for all this go into the direction of

 

“gatekeepers”

 

Trusted entities that are the safe-harbor for keeping these personal data. Or even distributed models of “gatekeepers” certification.

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The recent announcement at the March 2010 RSA Conference of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) goes in this direction. Please note that this initiative is backed by industry leaders Google, PayPal,Equifax, VeriSign, Verizon, CA, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

However, I don’t think it will work, and i am not alone, although from a different perspective (see below on PETs). I think it won’t work, because in the open online world, it will not be acceptable that somebody or some company sits in the middle of all this identity hocus-pocus, and controls our world. The internet has just become way too distributed to accept this sort of models. Maybe this works in a closed community (vertical or other) where users subscribe to a common set of standards and rules), but not on the open internet.

One possible route are PETs (privacy enhancing technologies).  For example, Stephan Engberg, one of the speakers at the European Commission’s December 2009 workshop talks about security (and privacy) “in context” and seems to be a big advocate of PETs. Check-out an interesting debate here.

The word “context” is very important here.

To come back to the beginning of this blog post, i believe we have to change the old eID model to a model where we acknowledge that the personal data are highly distributed on the net today and are dealt with “in context”.

Personal data sits everywhere, and you really can start imagining “data weavers” or “identity weavers” that combine these individual sets of personal data into new sets of relevant information, based on the context of usage.

The concept of data-weavers was already introduced in my guest blog “Digital Identity Weavers” by Gary Thompson from CLOUD, Inc.

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I repeat myself by saying that this CLOUD vision goes way beyond the web of pages, goes way beyond the early thinking on Semantic Web. It is in essence proposing an identity architecture for the Internet. Because the internet is broken. It was never designed with identity in mind.

Its about user control of personal data.

It’s about context awareness.

It’s about who i am, how i am, and

what i do and intend to do in an on-line world.

But we all have problems in imagining how such standard and supporting system might work.

How it would look like ?

 

And then suddenly last night the pieces seemed to fall together. What if we start thinking about this in a way similar to “Information Right Management” (probably called something else today), something that Microsoft built as a feature in Microsoft Office, and basically put the user in control of what somebody could do with his documents. Mind you, this is about “USAGE” rights, not access-rights.

In Microsoft Office this was visualized by the “do not pass” sign.

By clicking on that icon, you – as the user – can control whether somebody can cut-and-paste from your document, whether they can print it, forward it, etc.

We need a standard that makes it possible to control/manage the usage-rights of the different pieces of our personal data that are distributed over the internet. And then we need to let play the competition on how this standard gets implemented in our day-to-day tools. Maybe by a clickable icon, maybe something else. Would be great to let Heads of User Experiences have a go at this.

But maybe it is too late. Maybe there is already so much data out there, that there is no way to 1) find where they are and 2) give back the control to the user/owner of the data. The breach already happened.

To conclude, get inspired by this NYT article “Redrawing the Route to Online Privacy”

So if the current model is broken, how can it be fixed? There are two broad answers: rules and tools.

“Getting this balance right is critical to the future of the Web, to foster innovation and economic growth,” Mr. Weitzner said.

Whatever the future of regulation, better digital tools are needed. Enhancing online privacy is a daunting research challenge that involves not only computing, but also human behavior and perception. So researchers nationwide are tackling the issue in new ways.

At Carnegie Mellon University, a group is working on what it calls “privacy nudges.” This approach taps computer science techniques like machine learning, natural language processing and text analysis, as well as disciplines like behavioral economics.

How would all this be relevant for our financial services industry ? One example would be to apply semantic web technologies to Corporate Actions. For folks at SWIFT it’s pretty obvious that we can apply our semantic knowledge to the data in the “messages” that are exchanged between parties of Corporate Actions.

What seems less obvious is to apply the same semantic tagging techniques to the personal data and attributes of the persons who participate in a Corporate Action transaction.

In essence this is about applying the CLOUD concepts. It’s about setting new standards and rules in this space. And are standards not one of the cornerstones of SWIFT.

It would be great to build an innovation prototype to educate our community on the power of semantic web.

I call this the “Identity Rights System 3.0”

UPDATE: apparently the subject is red-hot at SXSW in Austin this week. Check out Danah Boyd at SXSW “Privacy is not dead”

The Medici Effect

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The Medicis were a banking family in Florence who funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures.

Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.

These introductory words come from a book “The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics” by Frans Johansson (Author).

The book is not that new (it dates from 2006), but it is very relevant to today’s innovation challenges. You can find the book on Amazon.com via the links above, but there is also a free PDF summary here and a Google Book edition here. And obviously, there is the website www.themedicieffect.com .

There was also a 2004 book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures

The core of these books is about two types of ideas:

  • Directional ideas
  • Intersectional ideas

Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. Examples of directional innovation are all around us because they represent the majority of all innovations. This is what we call incremental improvements (Innovation is in my opinion a bit on the optimistic, even window-dressing side).

The goal is to evolve an established idea by using refinements and adjustments. The rewards for doing so are reasonably predictable and attained relatively quickly. People and organizations do this all the time through increasing level of expertise and specialization. It is absolutely necessary if one does not wish to squander the value of an idea. Even an intersectional idea will, once it has become established, develop and evolve along a specific direction.

Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions. This is what Guy Kawasaki calls “jumping the curve”. These ideas are game changers. I am preparing a whitepaper on how NIBC (Nano, Info, Bio, Cogno)) technologies are major game changers.

Although intersectional innovations are radical, they can work in both large and small ways. They can involve the design of a large department store or the topic of a novella; they can include a special-effects technique or the product development for a multinational corporation.

In summary, intersectional innovations share the following characteristics:

  • They are surprising and fascinating.
  • They take leaps in new directions.
  • They open up entirely new fields.
  • They provide a space for a person, team, or company to call its own.
  • They generate followers, which means the creators can become leaders.
  • They provide a source of directional innovation for years or decades to come.
  • They can affect the world in unprecedented ways.

The Medici Effect is about bringing together people of different fields of expertise and

let the magic of

cross-fertilization of ideas

happen

 

What sort of people do we need to invite ? In essence, we are looking for people who succeeded at

breaking down

their associative barriers

 

because they did one or more of the following things:

  • Exposed themselves to a range of cultures
  • Learned differently
  • Reversed their assumptions
  • Took on multiple perspectives

The explosion of concept combinations at the Intersection can offer a myriad of uniquely combined, extraordinary ideas.

 

I have a dream

 

That we can turn Innotribe.com into a Medici Effect: the place where different disciplines find each other, and through that intersection come up with intersectional innovations.

 

I have a dream

 

That we can turn the SWIFT Campus into a hosting environment, where we facilitate those intersections to happen.

 

I have a dream

 

That i can blend my personal interest of creating a Think Tank on Long Term Future with my professional endeavors at SWIFT.

 

I have a dream

 

That together we can write The Readiness Manifesto. The strategies and focus areas to prepare the Net.Generation – the 20-25 years old of today – to stand up as our leaders in 20 years from now in 2030.

But NIBC technologies are not the holy grail. There was a fantastic quote in one of Fred Destin’s latest blogs on Venture Capital 2.1:

The fundamentals of the business have changed.  Technology is a quasi-commodity, the spread of ideas is instantaneous, competition is global, in other words the market is more efficient.

“Technology is a quasi-commodity”

 

Wow ! So what will be your differentiator ?

I believe it will be in the HOW of delivering products and services. And i can’t help re-quoting Umair Hague in his Good to Great Manifesto and my related post some days ago. Umair Hague proposes a number of new corporate principles:

  • First how, then who: “Do our people have the capacity to judge right and wrong, no matter how great they are?”
  • The Yoda/Hedgehog concept: “companies should only do what they can be great at, what makes tons of money, and what they’re passionate about.”
  • Ethical accelerators: “”transparency, openness, rules, and accountability. Most companies have not a single one of these”
  • A culture of meaning: “Production and consumption are meaningful when they actually yield durable, tangible benefits to people, communities, and society”
  • Confront reality:” Banks, for instance, confronted the “brutal fact” that selling toxic financial instruments was great for their bottom line. But they never confronted the simple reality that a classic asset bubble in housing was failing to do good.”

So, the question is not only “What will be the technical readiness kit that we will need to provide ?”.

The question really is:

What will be the value kit

that will have to underpin

this highly technological environment ?

 

As i mentioned in a previous post, I have accepted an opinion article/essay on technical readiness for The Fifth Conference. See also my posting “No more collateral damage”.

Below an extract of my initial input for this essay:

We must carefully analyze and think-through on how all this will influence the way we will and want to live and work in the future. What sort of life-quality we aim for? What the socio-economic impact of all this may be? How we want education to be organized? Where we still can and want to influence? How are we going to deal with the Technical and Value Readiness of our region to be competitive in this new era ? To lead the change, and not only be mediocre followers?

I believe it’s time for action. I believe The Fifth Conference and its natural network of inspiring leaders bears deep in itself the embryo for a sort of “think-tank/foundation” on long term future. A movement and an energy that prepares our Net-Generation for the next 20 years. To focus on our technical and value readiness. A place where “smart people” can meet. Where experts from different technological domains share their insights for 2030. Cross-fertilizing each other’s disciplines. With “savants” from different contexts & worldviews that can act as our “eyes” and offer a perspective on how we will live, work in 2030.

Or will we find ourselves in 2030 like this medieval knight trying to get his cup of coffee in the local deli ?

 

c03_22043139

No, in 2030 we want our children to be in a position to lead and not be the “behaving” followers in some old-European country that is by-passed by countries and regions that work at the speed of light, that have higher education standards, higher ethical standards, in other words who have found the “how-differentiator”.

My desire is to create

a movement

a tribe

a Medici Effect

 

where the dream can come true.

Who feels connected ? Who would like to join this tribe ?

Let me know via the comments of the blog, or contacting me directly. Please also let me know where the model flaws. What you would add to it ? Do you believe i am on to something or just living an illusion ? Let me know.

iPAD what’s next ? Oblong !

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Seen at many blogs and feeds during the last week. Of all, i like most the post of MG Siegler of Techcrunch.

MG Siegler writes:

The demo I saw a couple years ago was stunning, but it was still just a video. Apparently, at TED, the audience got to see it in action. NYT’s Bits blog detailed some of it in a post yesterday. For those not at TED, Oblong has also made a few demo videos in the past, which I’ll embed below. Again, this is Minority Report.

Oblong’s coming out party couldn’t come at a better time. Following the unveiling of Apple’s iPad, there has been a lot of talk about the future of computing at a fundamental level. That is to say, after decades of dominance by the keyboard and mouse, we’re finally talking about other, more natural, methods of input. The iPad is one step to a multi-touch gesture system (as is this 10/GUI awesome demo), but this Oblong system is the next step beyond that.

TED2010_18647_D31_5144_1280

So how does it look like ? I found 2 videos, and waiting for the video of Underkoffler when he unveils the interface, called the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment, at Friday’s annual TED conference.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

and

oblong’s tamper system 1801011309 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

More cool stuff from Oblong on their home page.

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Maslow for Stakeholder Relations

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If you have any role in Stakeholder Relations (in some companies this is called “PR” and/or “Investor Relations” and/or “HR”), i can recommend reading Chip Conley’s book “Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”

Conley, the CEO and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, turned to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s iconic Hierarchy of Needs. This book explores how Conley’s company "the second largest boutique hotelier in the world" overcame the storm that hit the travel industry by applying Maslow’s theory to what Conley identifies as the key Relationship Truths in business with Employees, Customers and Investors.

To be honest, the essence of the book is in the first chapter. The other chapters are endless variations and illustrations of the same with rather simplistic, naive, and even romantic examples.

For those not-familiar with the work of Abraham Maslow:

Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues. This enabled him to discover that people experience “peak experiences,”high points in life, when the individual is harmony with himself and his surroundings. A visual aid Maslow created to explain his theory, which he called the Hierarchy of Needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid he reaches self actualization.

Maslow for dummies is summarized in the table below (all tables below come from Chip Conley’s “Peak” book).

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In his book “Peak”, Chip Conley applies this hierarchy of needs to the three main groups of Stakeholders for any company:

  • Employees
  • Customers
  • Investors

Conley may be over-simplifying, as he reduces Maslow’s five layers to three.

But in the end, i found this an interesting way to assess and improves a company’s stakeholder relations.

1. Employee pyramid

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Chris Conley basically says that most companies offer a salary and perks in compensation for the employee’s time. Fewer companies succeed in giving true recognition to their staff, and only a very few know that their company should shape the conditions for the employee to find meaning in his work.

2. Customer pyramid

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The same principles apply to the customer pyramid.  At the top, the customer is truly delighted. Not because you got a “”license to operate” (btw the minimum level pursued in the Lean “Kano” model, but because you address unrecognized needs. You will NOT identify those unrecognized needs through customer surveys, consultations or market research. And the risk exists -  if your organization has been “leaned” to offer in a scalable way the “license to kill” satisfaction – that you won’t have any resources left to try to “create evangelism” by your customers.

3. Investor Pyramid

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When we look at the relation with the investors, most companies are transaction oriented in their Shareholder’s Relations: when they assess the relation, they ask whether the Board member gets regular and sufficient information or whether the dining and site-seeing arrangements are to everybody’s satisfaction. However, the ultimate nirvana in Investor relations is that your investors are PROUD of being your investor. This is much more than “being treated well”. It’s much more that just being a happy shareholder, or somebody who would recommend doing business with you.

Reaching the top-levels for each of the three categories of stakeholders is already an unreachable dream for many organizations.

However, shareholder relations should aim for an even higher goal.

Anybody who has been reading Maslow, should be familiar with Richard Barrett. Chip Conley missed that opportunity. One of the best books to get familiar with the thinking of Barrett, i can recommend “Building a Values-Driven Organization: A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation”.

In essence Barrett is saying that Maslow levels focus on our personal self-interest – meeting the needs of the ego.

Beyond Maslow’s level-5 (transformation/self-actualization), Barrettt sees 3 higher levels:

  • Level-6: Internal Cohesion: this is about finding personal meaning in existence
  • Level-7: Making a Difference: about making a positive difference in the world
  • Level-8: Service: leading a life of self-less service

Barrett’s levels beyond transformation are about being ego-less, at the service of others.

The fears of the ego lead us to believe that we do not have enough of what we need. Consequently, we are never fully happy because we do not have enough money, we do not have enough love, and we do not have enough respect.

In this situation, we lead a dependency-based existence.

What if we would apply these upper-levels from Barrett to our Stakeholders Relations ambitions ?

  • Do you have the courage to assess your stakeholder relations based on the Maslow of the Barrett models ?
  • What would you change in your shareholder relations if you would just aim for one higher level then where you are today ?

It’s becoming a trend/pattern: today’s business is not anymore about transactional and technical readiness.

The more important under stream is to develop and execute a solid stakeholders architecture. It’s about an openness and transparency. Often Social Media tools are used to support such strategy and ambition. But they are just tools. They are worthless and only become “tricks for the quick fix” in the absence of a genuine stakeholders architecture.

Execution on this is what you could call innovation in stakeholder relations

In the end, our new-game economy is about doing good, giving meaning, and realizing your relationships.

In the end, its all a matter of

ambition

 

The level of ambition will define how innovative your company wants to be.

No ambitions leads to no innovation or incremental improvements at best.

Ambition will force you to look into other corners, will let you discover how you truly can redefine your marketplace and change the game.

Ambition will lead to radical innovation: in your products, services, and in your stakeholder relations.

So, what’s your ambition ?

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Flyfire swarm for U2 ?

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Found via Singularity Hub.

Re-think big screens. Really big screens in the sky. Think swarms.

MIT’s Flyfire project uses a swarm of miniature helicopters with embedded LED lights to act as ’smart pixels’ as they fly through the air. Acting in concert they will be able to form complex three dimensional shapes – digital displays that will awe you more than exploding chemicals ever could. Not only will the pixels change color, the 3D dynamic movement will create an immersive experience that you can view from any angle.

Have a look at the video animation below:

I was just reading a Trends Magazine article about the new CEO of Barco, once – and to be honest still – of the pearls of the Flemish tech industry.

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Have a look at their history here. They started in 1934 as a company specializing in the assembly of radios with parts from the United States. Hence the name, "Belgian American Radio Corporation" or Barco.

Now, in 2010, they are a global leader designing and developing visualization solutions for a variety of selected professional markets. They are big in events and shows: The world’s major bands use Barco lighting, projection and LED technology, e.g. U2, Depeche Mode, Bloc Party, Coldplay or The Prodigy

Imagine Barco implementing this new MIT Flyswarm technology and scale it so that it can be used as a massive projection-in-the-sky for the next U2-tour !

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Miniature helicopters turning the U2-sky into a Digital Screen.

No more collateral damage

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There was this week a really interesting article in Trends Magazine about “The Blue Economy”, about a guy called Gunter Pauli, and his ZERI foundation.

I started googling this stuff, and was amazed about what i found.

Apparently, Gunter Pauli is busy doing what he does for quite some time, as can be seen in the Fastcompany article dating back 1993 !

Surprise, surprise: Gunter is from Flanders, Belgium. He was co-founder of Ecover. In 1991, Pauli launched the concept of zero waste and zero emissions for industry through the clustering of activities at his detergent factory in Belgium.

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Gunter Pauli is Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Creative Fellow of the Club of Budapest and a long term advisor to the Japanese Government and the United Nations. He is professor at the Politecnico di Torino in charge of “systems design” at the Faculty of Architecture and the School of Design.

“The Blue Economy” is introduced as:

a new business model to inspire entrepreneurs to shape a new economy based on competitive innovations, creating JOBS and SOCIAL CAPITAL”

“The Blue Economy: Cultivating a New Business Model for a Time of Crisis” is based on the new book “The Blue Economy: 10 years, 100 Innovations. 100 Million Jobs”, published by Paradigm Publications (New Mexico, USA) with the support of UNEP and IUCN.

I could not yet find the book on Amazon, but the paper that was input to the Club of Rome can be downloaded here.

From the intro:

The form of capitalism that has dominated world societies is entirely disconnected from peoples’ real needs. Some two billion people struggle to get by on less than two dollars a day, lacking access to food, water, health, and energy, the most basic requirements for survival. Over 25% of the world’s youth are unemployed. Yet one billion of us are over nourished and swim in 400 million tons of electronic waste with higher metal concentrations than the ores extracted from the earth. Conservatively, the top 70% of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the top 10% of the population.

Fortunately, times are changing. This book is about that change. As the second decade of the 21st century sets the stage for a new economy, the core question we answer is, “What is the business
framework we really need?”

And the Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives (ZERI) is introduced as:

a global network of creative minds seeking solutions to world challenges. The common vision shared by the members of the ZERI family is to view waste as resource and seek solutions using nature’s design principles as inspiration.

I continued clicking through the different ZERI sites, and was thrilled by the ZERI Education Initiative:

The opening song is

 

“I want to live in a better world”

 

This is about an innovative learning project for children, developed by Gunter Pauli and a team from ZERI Network of scientists, scholars, pedagogues and artists.

It’s about learning children to ask the right questions.

It’s about teaching children

the 5 intelligences

  • Academic Knowledge
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Artistic Expression
  • Eco-Literacy
  • Capacity to implement change

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Apparently Pauli and friends published a whole series of books “Gunter’s Fables”. And yes, you can buy them at Amazon 😉

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Also check-out this fantastic talk "How Can We Use Finite Resources To Propel Ourselves In The Future?" of TEDxTokyo 2009, held on May 22 at National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation.

It all makes me think very much about the book “Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough (Author), Michael Braungart (Author), a book that was a real eye-opener for me at the time, and a book that i already mentioned several times in this blog.

“Let the future emerge” is the tagline for this blog. And things seem to emerge with an astounding sense for synchronicity. Just last week, i discovered The Fifth Conference.

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The Fifth Conference is a forum for vision. Part publisher and part conference, The Fifth Conference tackles the ‘big issues’, the factors that drive our future. Think ten, twenty, even fifty years ahead and try to imagine how we will live and work. What will this world look like? How will we have solved the economic, social and environmental challenges that we confront today? To answer those questions we talk to entrepreneurs, policy makers and experts. We analyse the facts, the forecasts and the arguments. And most importantly, we collect vision.

It is so close to my idea of the Think Tank for Long Term Future !

So, last week, i had a chat with Frank Boermeester, co-founder of The Fifth Conference.

Lots of synergies!

 

Frank invited me to draft an essay on Technology, with a focus on Technology Readiness in our region, for the next publication. Will certainly do so, and cross-post on this blog.

However, as we were chatting, we suddenly became aware of

the “understream”

that is driving all the changes and evolutions in Growth, Mobility, Green, Technology, Health.

Its about the theme of Cradle-to-Cradle that “reducing waste” is not good enough anymore, we need to “add value”. Its about the notion that Google’s “Don’t do evil” is not good enough anymore, and we need to “Do Good”.

It’s about what keeps Gunter Pauli going, and what he refers to in his video as

 

“no more

collateral damage”

 

And not anymore

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and yes, create a sustainable society.

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See also some related blog posts on this site on:

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Thought experiment: who am i really ?

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About a year ago, I did my “coming-out” of the Leading by Being program. That program led to the start of this blog in April 2009.

Leading by Being is in essence a deep search for yourself and how you function in groups and in the world in general. It’s trying to answer the question “Who am I ?”.

Read that again:

“Who am i REALLY ?”

 

A couple of weeks, i “lost” my right foot – luckily only temporarily. Reflecting a bit during my extra free time sitting in my sofa with my right leg in the air, i started doing the following thought experiment:

 

What if i would loose not only my foot but everything ?

My job, my lovely wife and daughter, my family, my friends,…

Would that change who i am ?

 

And more related to this blog:

 

Would i write about the same things

in my blog as today ?

And if about the same things,

would i write about them

with the same intensity ?

 

The answer for me is yes.

  • Yes, i would write about different things
  • Yes, i would write about the same things but with a different intensity

What different things ?

  • Probably much much more about the realness of innovation.
  • Probably more on the themes like “Sex, Money, Happiness, and Death”
  • Probably more about ethics and ethical reboot
  • Probably more about meaning
  • Probably more about Love/Hate relationships
  • Probably more about digital identity. Not so much as a technology, but more as a philosophical aspiration
  • Probably more about soft things like poetry, romance, melancholy, more introspecting
  • Probably about my daughter and my wife. Without compromising them.
  • Probably about some nice sentences i read in novels.
  • Probably some writing of my own. As in my very first post:

I want to be playful like the birds,

showing little tricks,

challenge and pursue

but not limited

by any form of danger

In essence, it’s about a free mind.

What different intensity ?

  • I would be more radical on the innovation themes. Yes, even more radical 😉 I feel i still withhold, because of – real or imaginary ? – fear for reactions of my employer.

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  • I would set-up the Think Tank Long Term Future on my own. With less dependency on others. Going my own way. I would look at setting up a open innovation web-site with online fund raising.

All the above is basically struggling with the fear of

“how naked do i dare to go ?”

There seems to be an interesting book on this topic: “Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty” by by Patrick M. Lencioni (Author)

 

“Naked” is a term that refers to the idea of being vulnerable with clients, being completely open and honest with no sense of pretense or cover. The book looks at 3 basic and well-known fears:

1) Fear of Losing the Business – No service provider wants to lose clients or revenue. Interestingly, it is this very notion that prevents many service providers from having the difficult conversations that actually build greater loyalty and trust. Clients want to know that their service providers are more interested in helping succeed in business than protecting their revenue source.

2) Fear of Being Embarrassed – This fear is rooted in pride. No one likes to publicly make mistakes, endure scrutiny or be embarrassed. Naked service providers are willing to ask questions and make suggestions even if those questions and suggestions turn out to be laughably wrong. Clients trust naked service providers because they know that they will not hold back their ideas, hide their mistakes, or edit themselves to save face.

3) Fear of Being Inferior – Similar to the previous fear, this one is rooted in ego. Fear of being inferior is not about being intellectually wrong (as in Fear of being Embarrassed) it is about preserving social standing with the client. Naked service providers are able to overcome the need to feel important in the eyes of their client and basically do whatever a client needs to help the client improve – even if that calls for the service provider to be overlooked or temporarily looked down upon.

The last one is in my opinion also related to your relation with your employer and how prepared you are to stick out your neck, and to evangelize your ideas, because you have a genuine desire to make your employer succeed and improve.

The worst than could happen is when your employer gives you a negative appraisal for sticking out your neck, or pushing change too hard. Especially if you are part of the innovation team. Though everybody in the company has creative juices and is an innovator.

And what do you do when this happens ? What do you do when you discover that the innovation your company proclaims is not real ? What do you do when you find out or get confirmed it’s all a big illusion ?

How much do you once again want to compromise your own authenticity and just go on ? Or are you prepared to go through the resistance of big changes and boldly daring to pursue your own dreams as suggested in Seth Godin’s Linchpin ?

Or how long are you prepared to you hide in your own shadows and have your will broken ?

In Leading by Being, one of the exercises was to think about one of your “shadow”-sides, some negative something about yourself, something that you would not like others to identify you with, such as being arrogant or manipulative or … and then the do a play-role yourself “playing” / “acting” that shadow role for 3 hours. It’s pretty confrontational !

 

What if i would start blogging under an alias

to express those shadow thoughts ?

 

It’s an interesting thought experiment that helps you assess how Trapped or Free your are in your worldviews.

 

Yes, i am still trapped

But much less then a year ago

 

What would you like me to explore further ? What different things would you like most ? Where would you like to see a different intensity ?

Let me know. Give me clarifying, supportive and challenging feedback.

Innovation Traumas

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Interesting blog post from James Gardner in Bankersvision a couple of days ago.

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Formerly Head of Innovation and CIO of Investment at Lloyds Banking Group in London, James Gardner is now Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK Government.

James has also written “Innovation and the Future Proof Bank”, a book that is on top of the pile of to-read books next to my “broken-foot-sofa”.

Anyway, the title of his last post was “When failure is not an option” (FNAO), a theme that i addressed many times before on this blog before:

The blog entry is triggered by the following question:

What are your thoughts on organizations were failure maybe is not an option. For example nuclear physics, NASA or a government organization that pays benefits. In these situations failure could be disastrous. What strategy would you recommend in these types of organizations?

James adds an interesting perspective: failure early in your project is better then close to delivery.

…the further you get into delivery, the more money you’ve spent. If you have to stop then, its very bad indeed. As innovators, you don’t want that situation occurring if you can help it. It leads to what academics call “innovation trauma” – the scenario where everyone is so burned by a failed innovation that no-one will ever sign up for anything new again.

And – what is scary if you are in your early days of an innovation program in an organization that has FNAO as one of its core assets:

Even one bad failure, though, can close down an innovation program. And clearly, in the cases that Malcolm mentions, that kind of failure has very dire consequences indeed.

One last point on this: “failure is not an option” is a mentality that leads to – you guessed it – failure. Trying new things is a process that requires lots of stops and starts. There will, inevitably, be more stops than starts, actually.  In an organization that doesn’t celebrate good failure, what you get is a scenario where nothing new starts at all.

That, clearly, is a very bad situation to be in, and is one of the main reasons people complain they “don’t have enough innovation”

It’s also via this post i discovered James Gardner’s “The Little Innovation Book”.

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This little on-line experiment has absolutely great content for innovators. Every page adds a perspective to innovation that i was not familiar with. A recommendation. You can also comment on-line as James is writing this on-line innovation book.

Would you be interested to have James Gardner at Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam (25-29 October 2010) ?

Let me know. We can invite him 😉 But would he accept ?

Great to Good: new value kit

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Umair Hague did it again. He just published the Great to Good Manifesto.

He starts with “Pepsi‘s great at producing something that’s bad for you (sugar water)”. And goes on by stating that “Do no evil”  “Don’t do evil” is not the same as “Doing Good”.

Umair’s blog is in essence about an Ethical Re-Boot. We all feel that we cannot go on with the greed-economy. We cannot go on with killing our earth. We cannot go on with hurting other people.

It is about a new value kit for the 21st century. About old game vs. new game.

In the table below, you’ll find some other examples.

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I made this table about 2 years ago during my Leading by Being adventure. In fact it even started before that. The trigger was the book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things” by by William McDonough (Author), Michael Braungart (Author)

The book is from 2003 (almost 10 years old !), and i bought it after seeing a BBC documentary on the work of William McDonough. The key insight that opened my eyes was when McDonough explained that

reducing waste

was not good enough

There is a better alternative, and that is producing products that do not generate (less) waste, but that add value, that add goodness.

This is the essence of Great to Good. The difference between “Do no evil” “Don’t do evil” and “Doing good”.

In that sense, also the famous TED one-liner “Ideas Worth Spreading” is not good-enough anymore. Better is “Ideas Worth Executing”.

This must become a huge PR issue for Google, who have surfed the wave of “do no evil” “Don’t do evil” for 10 years now. They are also more and more seen as the “Beast of Mountain View”. If you read the wave of protest following the release of Buzz and the resulting privacy issues, you’ll get a good feel why

“don’t do evil”

does not work anymore

Umair Hague proposes a number of new corporate principles:

  • First how, then who: “Do our people have the capacity to judge right and wrong, no matter how great they are?”
  • The Yoda/Hedgehog concept: “companies should only do what they can be great at, what makes tons of money, and what they’re passionate about.”
  • Ethical accelerators: “”transparency, openness, rules, and accountability. Most companies have not a single one of these”
  • A culture of meaning: “Production and consumption are meaningful when they actually yield durable, tangible benefits to people, communities, and society”
  • Confront reality:” Banks, for instance, confronted the “brutal fact” that selling toxic financial instruments was great for their bottom line. But they never confronted the simple reality that a classic asset bubble in housing was failing to do good.”

Umair asks the right questions:

  • How many of the principles are at work in your company, industry, or sector?
  • What would your company, country, or life look like if each of the principles was applied to it?
  • How would applying each principle disrupt “business as usual”?

Defining, building, evangelizing, and nurturing this

new value kit

for the next 10-20 years

is all what our Think Tank on Long Term Future is about.

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Hotel Mama

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This blog post is a little tribute to my wife Mieke.

The picture above are home baked muffins. This is how i get treated during my 6 weeks stay home after my broken foot accident.

I am now 100% dependent on her. As walking on crutches usually requires using both hands, i can not help her in any way. Not even opening the fridge, or cleaning up some of the kid’s toys.

But it’s going to be better 😉 I had a check-up with the surgeon yesterday, and i am rid of the plaster. Hurray ! And i also will get a wheelchair, so that i can contribute a bit more to the daily small things to be done in our household.

But for the time being, the only thing i can do is laying in the sofa the whole day, with my right foot up in the air. I have my laptop and Kindle. So not completely contactless or inspiration-less.

The high (inter)-dependency makes me feel uncomfortable. But at the same time grateful for all the little and big things Mieke is managing.

A friendly colleague sent me a very nice mail on this saying: “it will confront you with yourself, and also will make you appreciate your wife’s dependency on you” (when you were 100% fit, and were so busy not noticing it).

It’s true. My broken foot accident helps me to re-calibrate. To see what really important.

In summary, my wife is everything in one: all CxO tasks combined, complemented by a absolute unbeatable care-factor. And my 4-year old daughter gives a lot of kisses to accelerate my healing. I am sure it works !

No place like home. It’s my personal personalized 5 stars Hotel Mama.

Thank you, mama !