[UPDATE May 2013] The original business model below has now been updated and separated into two visuals: New AHT Group Business Model and AHT Group Strategic Overview

For the last 15 years of my life post-employment I have struggled when people ask me what I do. More recently I have managed to crystallize a simple description of myself: Futurist and Entrepreneur. However that doesn’t explain the diversity of my companies’ activities, and how they fit together. In particular people are often confused by the relationship between our primary companies: Advanced Human Technologies, Future Exploration Network, and The Insight Exchange.

A few months ago I started designing a business model diagram to help me conceptualize the relationship between our brands and activities, our scalable and less scalable business models, and our current priorities. While it included a few personal aspirations, I ended up showing it a number of job applicants to help explain what we are doing. I soon realized I needed a public version of our business model. This is what we created.

AHT Group Business model (click on the image for full-size pdf)

Some comments on a few of the features of the business model:
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Personal branding is one of the big themes today, for a number of reasons.

As I wrote in five key trends in how influence is transforming society, one of the dominant forces is that reputation is shifting from the corporate to the individual. People build relationships and place trust in individuals more than organizations, changing how (the best) companies organize themselves and engage externally.

In addition, professionals are increasingly shifting to independent work in a global distributed economy. As such they must build their own brands and not rely on their affiliation with the brand of the company for which they work.
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There is an interesting Quora discussion going on What are the distinctions between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0? As in most Quora discussions some of the top people in the field have weighed in.

I had to chip in myself – here is my comment.

Business terms have a life of their own, just as the meaning of words evolve depending on social usage. Each of these terms has a different meaning to what they did just a year ago.

I find it interesting that many people seems to think that Enterprise 2.0 is more about technology than business. My standard definition of Enterprise 2.0 has two parts:

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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Future of Crowdsourcing Summit is just over, and I’m very pleased with how it went and the feedback so far.

The format of back-to-back cross-continental panels over two hours means that the content is very intense, and given the size of topics we take on – the impact of crowdsourcing on work, organizations, media, economies and more – we can only really touch on the key issues, so much goes unsaid. Still, an extraordinary amount of really rich material was covered during the event.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to keep notes while I moderated. Part of the audio of the event was captured, so we hope to get that up in some form. However the primary record of the Summit was from Twitter, with the #foc10 stream very active throughout the event. @LeslieCBarry generated a very nice visual overview of the Twitter stream at the event:

The full Twitter stream for #foc10 is here – it’s well worth a read. The event done, I now have to focus on my Future of Global Media keynote in New York later this week, but will reflect more on the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit when I get a chance, hopefully soon. This really is one of the defining issues of our times.