Launch of Left Coast Festival and Rose Vickers’ Flohawk show

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It’s great to see Sydney’s continued rise as a creative hub, with the wealth of talent on hand compounded by the immense energy going into great events and festivals such as Creative Sydney.

This Wednesday 6-8pm Sedition Gallery is launching the 50 day Left Coast Festival, including visual works, installations, video, hybrid music / dance performances and more with an event themed Red, with unconfirmed ‘whispers’ that Laurie Anderson might attend while she’s in Sydney.

The event is also a launch for the talented Rose Vickers’ show Flohawk, about transience, mortality, the brevity of life’s stages – an image from the show below.

rosevickers_flohawk.jpg

Maybe see you there!

Is Google a vampire sucking the blood out of media and the web?

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Here is a nice video of the highly-respected Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand speaking at Web 2.0 Expo SF about how Google plays fair and less fair, giving a balanced view of the accusations of vampirism from media tycoons such as Mark Cuban and Wall Street Journal publisher Les Hinton.

The video is well worth watching. Each of the many examples show how Google is using and potentially abusing its power in specific areas. Small choices, for example in showing related sites against a company website, could point to competitors and thus erode value for advertisers even as they may help consumers. It is also very easy to favor its own initiatives. Why wouldn’t you? But if you lose trust that you are providing the best search results, you lose everything.

Danny suggests that Google doesn’t want to do evil, but its initiatives have an enormous impact. Many caught in its enormous field of influence feel squeezed by its actions.

He ends up by proposing that all search engines should honor the “content compact”: Give as much or more than you take. Danny believes that Google is giving far more than it is taking, particularly in terms of giving traffic to websites.

What is most important is that the quality of search increases. I have to say I thought we would have far better search than we do today. The degree of competition in search is not quite what it should be to push Google. Hopefully the state of search can get better faster as the right sort of pressure is put on Google – not from media empires, but from people searching for the information and services they want.

What Enterprise 2.0 means for the CIO and IT department

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Our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is intended as a practical guide to how to create business value with web technologies inside the organization.

One of the key issues is the implications of these approaches for the organization and its key functional areas. Not surprisingly, there are a particular set of pressing issues for the IT department. These are covered in the report – we have excerpted Chapter 19 on the implications for IT below.

WHAT ENTERPRISE 2.0 MEANS FOR IT

Enterprise 2.0 has significant implications for the IT function of organizations. It is of course generally the responsibility of the IT function to facilitate the adoption of technologies that create value for the enterprise. However Enterprise 2.0 technologies both have significant cultural aspects to their use and uptake, and can have a significant impact on the underlying business processes and even value creation inside the organization.

Following are the primary issues that need to be understood and addressed, both by the CIO and his or her team, and the senior executive team and board of the organization.

1. Increased user expectations

One of the most important implications of Web 2.0 for organizations is that staff are increasingly exposed to very useful and well designed applications on the open web. The contrast with existing enterprise applications is usually stark.

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How IT analyst firms can learn from investment bank research pricing models

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Gideon Gartner has just posted a great article titled Advisory Industry, a future redesign: the “Payment” Model, in which he draws on investment banking research pricing as a model for IT analysts and their clients. Gideon writes:

So in the Wall Street model The buy-side “analysts” will work closely with their most helpful and favorite sell side analysts, and buy-side “portfolio managers” will work with sell-side salespeople who funnel ideas and information from their research departments to the buy-side clients. During the year, when investment issues arise (many dozens of times each day), the BofA money managers and staff analysts will call several(!) appropriate sell-side analysts, and may even effectively triangulate among them until a level of understanding an issue, or a decision to buy or sell stocks or other investing instruments with traders, can be reached.

Not until the end of the year do the buy side money managers and analysts “vote” for those individual sell-side analysts and salespeople who were most helpful and influential during the past twelve months; and when this process is completed and the numbers added up, the decision is made as to the percentage of trading volume (e.g. money) to be generated for each of the brokerage ?rms for the next year! Thus the compensation will vary somewhat each year based upon trading volumes and perceived relative performance. Most important perhaps, new sell-side firms and analysts are added to the list since innovative and effective research and interactions will be recognized! (the sell-side firm will have sent all its research, and its analysts will accept phone calls hoping or expecting that content and interactions will be recognized and therefore compensated for their value).

He wraps up:

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Will there be capital markets for equity in people?

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I recently read the entertaining science fiction novel The Unincorporated Man by brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin. The premise is that several hundred years in the future everyone is incorporated at birth, with the government owning 5% and parents 20%. People trade equity in themselves for their education and development, then spend their life trying to earn back majority ownership so they can control their lives. Into this world an entrepreneur of today who underwent cryogenic freezing is revived, and refuses to cede ownership of himself.

This is not a new idea. In 1995 aspiring British actress Caroline Ilana, trying to fund her attendance at acting school, established a corporation with herself as the sole asset, giving shareholders 10% of her earnings. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Ben Elton, Julie Christie and many other celebrities she approached bought shares.

In their 1998 book Blur, Stan Davis and Chris Meyer wrote about the blurring line between being a laborer and a capitalist, resulting in the securitization of individuals.

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Solsbury Hill live – the call to something beyond

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Peter Gabriel’s song Solsbury Hill has been a special song for me for more than two decades. It tells the story of being called to something beyond, something that others wouldn’t understand, that you can only take on faith and dive into. That is like the call I’ve experienced through my life and done my best to follow.

Browsing the web this afternoon I came across this excellent live rendition of Solsbury Hill.

And here are the lyrics, courtesy of Lyrics Freak.

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill

I could see the city light

Wind was blowing, time stood still

Eagle flew out of the night

He was something to observe

Came in close, I heard a voice

Standing stretching every nerve

Had to listen had no choice

I did not believe the information

I just had to trust imagination

My heart going boom boom boom

“Son,” he said “Grab your things,

I’ve come to take you home.”

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Discovering the most interesting and inspiring phrases

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I’ve long said that newspapers and books will become digital when they have all the qualities of the existing media – including readability, portability, and the ability to highlight and make notes – as well as all of the capabilities of digital media – such as searchability, compactness, and remote access.

The Amazon Kindle allows people to highlight passages and take notes – a basic functionality required for a e-book. What this also allows is to discover what others are highlighting, providing a form of collaborative filtering. Amazon has just released a list of the most highlighted books and phrases on the Kindle.

The most highlighted books are:

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

The Holy Bible

The Shack by William P. Young

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

A selection of the most highlighted phrases:

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There are TWO possible attitudes companies can have to social media

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Last week I gave a presentation on the future of business to the top executive team of a large fast-moving consumer goods company at their quarterly offsite meeting.

One of the issues they were keen to hear about is the rise of social media and how they should respond.

I told them that there are essentially two possible attitudes a company can have to engaging with its customers in an open world.

One attitude is to EMBRACE the fact that customers now have a voice that the company – and others – can hear, and to do whatever possible to help its advocates to form communities and talk about its products. That doesn’t mean its executives aren’t concerned that things can go wrong in social media. But the belief is that fundamentally it is a GOOD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.

The other attitude is to HATE the fact that customers have a voice that can be widely heard. While the executives realize that their fans can communicate their love for their products, they are far more afraid that bad things will be said about them, merited or not, and they think they will have no recourse. The belief is that it is fundamentally a BAD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.

I used one example for each of these attitudes.

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California Management Review: Network perspectives on improving team performance in sales, innovation, and execution

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The summer issue of California Management Review a couple of years ago contains an article co-authored by myself together with Rob Cross of the University of Virginia, Kate Ehrlich of IBM, and John Helferich of Northeastern University, titled Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective. The article can be purchased from the California Management Review website (the journal is published by the Haas School of Business at University of California – Berkeley).

I’ve provided the synopsis of the paper and a more detailed description below. Writing the paper was an interesting process, bringing together specific domain expertise and insights from projects that each of the four of us have run over the last few years. The result is a framework and detailed prescriptions on how a network perspective can take the lessons on teams learned over the last decades to the next level, applied in a number of specific areas. Here is the article title and abstract.

Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective

Rob Cross, Kate Ehrlich, Ross Dawson, and John Helferich

50/4 (Summer 2008): 74-98

Whether selling products or services, making strategic decisions, delivering solutions, or driving innovation, most work of any substance today is accomplished by teams. However, since the early 1990s, teams have evolved from more stable groups-where members were co-located, dedicated to a common mission, and directed by a single leader-to more matrixed entities with colleagues located around the world, juggling time between several projects, and accountable to multiple leaders. As teams have become more fluid, substantial challenges have been posed to traditional advice on team formation, leadership, roles, and process. This article describes how leaders at all levels within an organization can obtain innovation and performance benefits by shifting focus from forming teams to developing networks at key points of execution.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) (social network analysis applied to organizations) provides deep and specific insights into how to enhance the performance of organizations.

In the article we ask six questions to determine team effectiveness:

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Five steps to effective content distribution strategies

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When I wrote the book Living Networks the content distribution landscape was in the early stages of unfolding. Yet the strategies I prescribed then seem to be just as valid today.

Here they are, excerpted from Chapter 8 on Next Generation Content Distribution: Creating Value When Digital Products Flow Freely.

POSITIONING FOR CONTENT DISTRIBUTION

1. Build evolutionary business models

2. Define and refine strategies for standards and interfaces

3. Develop and implement aggregation strategies

4. Enable versatile syndication models

5. Rework your product versioning

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