Why microblogging has moved to the heart of enterprise social initiatives

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I recently wrote Why conversational skills are needed to create a high-performance, engaged, networked organization, reflecting on an executive roundtable discussion I lead as part of the 21st anniversary celebrations of the Graduate School of Business of the University of New England.

The roundtable was also written up in the Australian Financial Review, which provides a good summary of the discussion in a piece titled Conversation killers: managers who can’t talk the talk.

Interestingly, what the journalist drew out from my contributions was about the rise of microblogging:

Dawson said micro-blogging had soared with employers including Deloitte, the NSW Department of Education and NSW Department of Premier and cabinet using microblogs for internal communication with staff. “Of all the social media platforms microblogging is the most akin to conversation,” he said. “Email is not going to die, but it is reducing,” he said.

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How to make friends with and influence Sydney’s entrepreneurial and self-employed community

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This year we celebrate the 14th annual Entrepreneurs and Self-Employed Xmas Party in Sydney.

As every year, the intention is to provide an opportunity for entrepreneurs and self-employed people, primarily from the technology and creative sectors, to celebrate the end of a great year with their peers. While corporate employees have someone to put on their Christmas party for them, those making it happen for themselves don’t have that luxury.

As we did last year, we have invited companies to support the Entrepreneurs Xmas Party by helping to buy drinks for early arrivals at the event. So far we have almost all the companies that supported our event from last year, who all found it highly valuable, plus a couple more on board.
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The inside is the outside: The Möbius strip and Klein bottle as metaphors for the future of organizations

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In a number of my recent keynotes, including at Connected Enterprise and the CIO Summit, I have discussed the blurring of the inside and outside as a critical facet of the future of organizations.

The Möbius strip is a simple strip of paper folded once and pasted so that it has only one side. A Klein bottle is its (hypothetical) three-dimensional equivalent, where the outside and inside of the bottle are the one and the same.

This is a powerful and highly relevant metaphor for the successful organizations of today and tomorrow.
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Creating a better world through apps: the power of mobile in catalyzing networks for good

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I was recently invited to attend the presentations and awards for the Vodafone App Aid competition and to interview Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the event’s judges.

App Aid selected 10 charities who saw the need for a mobile app. App developers signed up for teams that developed apps from scratch in 48 hours for each of the charities. The winning teams received prizes to help them complete and launch their apps. The video below shows brief snippets from the winners.

What struck me while I was watching the charities’ presentations was that the underlying premise of almost all the apps was connecting resources to where they can do the most good.
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Google Atmosphere: The future of the enterprise and the economy of individuals

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Earlier this year I gave the opening keynote at the Google Atmosphere on Tour events in Sydney and Melbourne.

Below is the 2 minute summary video of the event, giving a flavor for the rich ideas shared on the future of the enterprise.


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Ranking and comparing the world’s top 20 startup hubs

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Earlier this year I wrote about the top 25 startup hubs in the world as ranked by the Startup Genome project.

As I noted at the time, it was based on skewed data from the sample used, but was probably the best available. The project has now released updated and more detailed data ranking the top global startup ecosystems on a wide range of criteria. It makes for interesting reading. You can register to download the full report.

This is considerably better data than the first round, in particular in providing richer comparisons of the differences between the cities in how the startup scene is structured. On the rankings, we think we can do better, and we are planning to launch a framework that will provide insights into the relative performance of startup hubs around the world. For now, the Startup Genome data is the best available, and a great resource for understanding the global startup scene.

Below are quick highlights from each of the top 20 cities. This includes, in addition to brief notes on distinctive aspects of the startup scene, a chart showing performance relative to top-performing Silicon Valley on 8 indices:
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Keynote slides: Creating Massively Successful Networked Organizations

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I have just completed the day two opening keynote at Connected Enterprise 2012, following Brian Solis‘s day one keynote.

Here are my slides for the keynote. As always, the slides are designed to accompany my presentation, not to stand alone, so are provided for the audience at the event and any others who may find them useful nonetheless.

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The global brain is like a child’s brain – let’s nurture it

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In my book Living Networks I wrote about how the networks in which we live are coming to life, making us all part of what we can quite accurately think of as a global brain.

I wrote an extended introduction to the book that went into this concept in depth. However this was not included in the final published book, so I later shared it as an article, Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.

One of the wonderful outcomes of that was that the film-maker Tiffany Shlain, who has long thought on very similar lines, reached out to connect.

Tiffany has just released a marvellous 10 minute movie, Brain Power: From Neurons To Networks, that reflects these ideas. Watch it below, preferably on full screen.


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Design to elucidate complexity: derivatives and the meta-economy

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I just came across the excellent visual presentation at the bottom of this post by information designer Gong Szeto on Design as Derivative: Weapons of Mass Disruption.


Source: Gong Szeto

Financial derivatives are collectively one of the most complex human-created domains, which systemically can have a massive impact in the real world.
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Why conversational skills are needed to create a high-performance, engaged, networked organization

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I have been frustrated recently in having been too busy to blog about all but a handful of the insights generated in my many client engagements over the last months. Fortunately things are close to easing up into the end of the year so I’ll try to cover a bit of the backlog.

This afternoon was the last of 3 Round Table discussions I moderated as part of the 21st anniversary celebrations of the Graduate School of Business of the University of New England. This session’s topic was the art of conversation.

It was a rich discussion, and there was much to take from it. I was interested in the skills we identified that are clearly vitally important to successful organizations, yet often significantly underdeveloped.

Conversation is vital for today’s organizations for many reasons, including:

– Customer engagement. We now all understand that markets are conversations, and organizations must have great ability to build real conversations with their customers in a world of social media.
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