Infographic: Building Success in a Connected World

By

Last weekend I was musing about the elements of success in a connected world. Something clicked, and I was able to pull out of it a visual representation as below. For my keynote tomorrow morning on Building Business in a Connected World I will just run through this diagram together with commentary on how to approach each of the key elements.

Success in a Connected World
Click on the image for full size

This diagram brings together the foundations of success in a connected world: Relationships, Visibility, and Execution, and how to achieve these.
Read more →

11 recommendations to create the future of government

By

The Institute of Public Affairs of Australia (IPAA), the professional association supporting senior Australian public service executives, is not prone to rash statements.

Thus it is very encouraging to see its new policy paper, The Future Course of Modern Government, provide some pointed insights and recommendations on how to create the government of the future.

I have put the 11 recommendations provided at the end of the report at the bottom of this post. The full policy paper is absolutely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.
Read more →

Notes on the future of distributed work and organizations

By

I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly.

I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study. Below are the notes I managed to catch on my iPad as we spoke..

The panellists were:
Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister
Jacob Murray-White, Head of Salmat’s Customer Solutions at Home Programme
Fernanda Afonso, National Chair of Australian Psychological Society and Specialist, Freehills.
Ross Dawson, Futurist

Les Williamson, Managing Director of Cisco Australia, told the story of how Cisco was born from love. Two academics at Stanford University were in a relationship, but worked on opposite sides of the campus. They created a multi-protocol router to communicate, started building them commercially in a garage, got funded, and grown spectacularly since then.

Below are live notes from the panel. I haven’t attributed them as they sometimes bring together comments from several people or my interpretation. It was a fascinating discussion.
Read more →

Crowdsourcing attracts the best advertising clients, and it all began with a tweet…

By

John Winsor, founder of Victors & Spoils, the world’s first crowdsourced agency, gave the opening keynote at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit in September last November.

It was fascinating to hear about how he had brought together an extraordinarily talented distributed team, and convinced major brands such as Harley-Davidson, GAP, Levi’s, and Virgin America to use a crowdsourcing approach.

Harley-Davidson moved on from its long-standing agency Carmichael Lynch last year, shifting to Victors & Spoils for its creative work. The first work from the agency for Harley-Davidson, based on an idea from “passionate amateur” Whit Hiler, has just been launched:

AdAge interviewed Harley’s Chief Marketing Officer Mark-Hans Richer, who said about the ad:
Read more →

11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011

By

Our recently launch Map of the Decade triptych comprised three parts: the Map of the Decade, details on the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011.

I think may have been a mistake to put the Map of the Decade and Zeitgeist themes in the one document, as many only see the front page and don’t get to the Zeitgeist themes, and they come from quite different perspectives (1 year as against 10 years). As such, I’ve taken out the Zeitgeist themes here, with the image and full text below. Click on the image to download the complete pdf – go to page 3 for descriptions of the Zeitgeist themes.

Zeitgeist for 2011

Zeitgeist2011_500w.jpg

ZEITGEIST:2011

1. Networked or Not?

We are all facing a fundamental choice that will shape our lives. Many dive headlong into a world of always-on connection, open social networks, and oversharing. A few cry halt and choose to live only in the old world of tight-knit personal communication. The result is a divided society.

Read more →

The boundaries of crowdsourcing and how it relates to open innovation

By

I was recently asked to do an interview for the Turkish version of CNBC eBusiness magazine on crowdsourcing. I’m not sure whether the article will appear online – I’ll share it if so. In any case here are the answers I gave the interviewer:

1) The term “crowdsourcing” first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wire Magazine article. Does “crowdsourcing” is a new way of saying “open innovation”? Do these two terms have the same meaning? Or does crowdsourcing differs from open innovation?

Crowdsourcing and open innovation are related but distinct concepts. Crowdsourcing covers many approaches, which I summarize as ‘tapping the minds of many’. These can include service marketplaces, competition platforms, idea platforms, and prediction markets. In fact, all of these approaches can be applied inside organizations as well as externally, helping to tap some of the ‘cognitive surplus’ of employees. Open innovation is about looking outside the organization for new ideas and products, in what can be any number of ways. Often this is done on crowdsourcing platforms, but sometimes, as Procter & Gamble does, it is largely about seeking the best existing unexploited products in the market and adapting them for its own marketing pipeline.

Read more →

How do you make talent shine in a world of distributed work?

By

I caught up for a beer with old friend Tom Stewart, currently Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer at Booz & Co, when he was in Sydney recently. We chatted about interesting topics such as business cycles, talent, and where media is going.

Afterwards Tom wrote a great article titled Why There’s No Such Thing as a Talent War reflecting on some of our conversation and his other meetings in Australia, where attracting and retaining talent is top of mind for many corporate executives.

I had told Tom my thoughts on the global talent economy: in a world in which knowledge workers can work anywhere, the most talented can pick and choose choose who they work for – on projects or sometimes in long-term employment.

Critically, the work choices the most talented make are rarely about money, but more often about how interesting the projects are, who they will work with, and how enjoyable it is working with their client.

Read more →

Twitter network analysis of events – what’s possible?

By

I recently connected with Daniel Knox (@djkn0x) on Twitter – which is where it seems most of my connections are happening these days. Among other interesting entrepreneurial activities Daniel is playing with a new venture that does analysis of Twitter activity around events.

To show me Daniel created a visual network analysis of the Twitter activity around Future of Crowdsourcing Summit (#foc10) that we ran a few weeks ago in Sydney and San Francisco.

foc10_twitter.jpg

Here is the explanation of the diagram that Daniel gave me:

Read more →

The top tweets from Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010 #foc10

By

Things have been crazy for me for a little while now. It’s now two weeks since Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010, and I am only just now able to download some of what happened at the event. The feedback from participants at the Summit has been consistently excellent, and we have been keen to share some of the great insights at the event with the world at large.

We do not have full video of the event, however we do have audio, and we will be sharing that before long, together with some written excerpts from what the speakers said. In the meantime, here is a small selection of some of the more interesting tweets from the event. (Note that since Twitter search only goes up to 10 days ago, I have retrieved the tweets from Topsy, which has an excellent search though I’m not sure that it has captured all of the twitterstream.)

You’ll notice some emerging themes from these tweets – I’ll expand on some of these later.

@bhc3: #foc10 Winsor: Victors & Spoils are developing reputation ratings for creatives based on their crowdsourcing contributions.

Read more →

Looking for an outstanding writer/ blogger on crowdsourcing

By

For the next 10 days we need writers to help write interesting blog posts for the website of the upcoming Future of Crowdsourcing Summit.

We are only looking for outstanding writers, who can write extremely well and who really understand crowdsourcing, global business, and the web space. This is intended for people who love the crowdsourcing space and want to write about it rather than professional writers/ bloggers.

We are running this project on Odesk – here is the full job description for Outstanding writer/ blogger on crowdsourcing. Please bid on Odesk giving an hourly rate.

If you are the right candidate, we will want at least one blog post a day from you for the next 10 days.

We want people to write in their own name – this is a fabulous way to build on your existing reputation as a great commentator. The blog is going to get a lot of high-level exposure.

Read more →