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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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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The future of marketing: 7 critical applications of crowdsourcing

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On October 25 in New York City I will run a workshop on Crowdsourcing for Marketing in Enterprise & Agencies as part of the global Crowdsourcing Week workshop series. The following day I will run a workshop that is highly complementary, on Crowdsourcing for Media and Content.

Following on from the broad-based first edition of Getting Results From Crowds, one of the most important topics I have been delving into is the application of crowdsourcing to marketing. The New York workshop will go into the topic in detail, including the primary applications, extensive case studies, industry perspectives, analysis of crowdsourced marketing platforms, approaches to building your own crowds, effective strategies for creative agencies to tap the rise of crowdsourcing, and more.

Just as the field of crowdsourcing is far broader than most people appreciate (with 22 categories in our Crowdsourcing Landscape), there are many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied to marketing.

There are 7 major applications of crowdsourcing to marketing:
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Fantastic insights on the inspiring future of crowd business models

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I have just had my mind blown.

I have got off a call with three of the speakers in the Future of Crowd Business Models session at Crowd Business Models Summit, which will be held in San Francisco on October 22, the day before the major crowdsourcing conference CrowdConf.

What I heard from the speakers on what they will cover and the conversation we had was amazing. This is going to be an awesome session.

I can’t do justice to their ideas in a blog post, but here are a few notes from the conversation.

BYRON REESE is EVP of Innovation at Demand Media, having joined the company when his company PageWise, including its subsidiary Expert Village, was acquired by Demand Media.
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The ultimate in convenient banking: make payments by thinking

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In my presentation at yesterday’s media launch of ANZ’s Banking on Australia program, I spoke about new ways of making payments using biometrics.

An article in today’s Australian Financial Review reports:

“Biometric security” involves using fingerprints, voice records or eye scans to access secure systems instead of number-based passwords, which are much easier to steal or hack.

Speaking at an ANZ event in Melbourne on Thursday, futurist Ross Dawson said the “post-cash world” was coming to advanced economies.

“It’s inevitable we move to biometrics, things that measure who we are to uniquely identify us to enable easy payments,” he said.

“The US Department of Energy, for example, is using our thought waves to identify people. To think of something is obviously a great way to be able to pay for things.”

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The future of banking: biometrics take over cash, payments in fluid economy, personal digital agents

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This morning ANZ announced its Banking on Australia program, in which it will spend $1.5 billion over the next five years to reshape its business and invest in digital technology, with the immediate launch of a range of digital initiatives.

At the media event announcing the program at ANZ’s headquarters this morning I spoke about the future of banking, and ANZ Australia CEO Phil Chronican shared ANZ’s initiatives.

I will try to write more later about what I covered in my presentation. For now here are some excerpts from ANZ’s press release on some of the very interesting statistics from a survey performed by ANZ for the launch, together with some of my comments.
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Come experience Crowd Business Models Summit in San Francisco on October 22

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My book Getting Results From Crowds was designed as a highly practical overview of how to create value using crowdsourcing. However the last section on Crowd Business Models is perhaps where my deepest interests lie, and is one of the most important issues in the crowd space. Business models are increasingly based on crowds, so we need to understand how to make them work.

As such I wanted to bring together an event to focus attention on crowd business models. I am delighted to be partnering with CrowdConf, the premier crowdsourcing conference in the world, to run a half-day Crowd Business Models Summit immediately preceding CrowdConf at the same venue, UCSF at Mission Bay (where incidentally we also held our Future of Media Summit 2007).

For full event details see the Crowd Business Models Summit website on the CrowdConf site.
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The Future of Customer Service: Using technology to increase both efficiency and relationship strength

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Last week I gave the closing keynote at KANA Connect 2012 in Las Vegas, on The Future of Customer Service.

I packed in a wide-ranging view on where customer service is going, including the impact of connectivity, the rise of new channels, where value will reside in relationships, and what supports the integration and integrity that will be at the heart of successful customer service.

One of the key areas I covered was the shift in customer service channels, using a diagram I originally created for a keynote and supporting article on Creating the Future of Customer Relationships.


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How divergence in labor productivity is shaping the future of work

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My recently launched Future of Work framework provides a highly summarized overview of the future of work. Over coming months I will delve into specific aspects of the framework.

One of the most important issues is divergence in labor productivity, mentioned as the fourth point under Labor Productivity in the Economic Structure section.

Across industries as well as countries, the productivity of labor is diverging dramatically, creating job opportunities in some sectors and constraining them in others. There are many broader issues in shifts in labor productivity that I’ll come back to another time. For now, it’s worth looking at these two charts.


Source: Andrew McAfee
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Value polarization and transcending job commoditization: Expertise, Relationships, Innovation

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Yesterday I released a first version of my Future of Work framework.

I think that a detailed explanation of the outline framework would be a very useful complement to the visual landscape, and I aim to provide that over coming months in a series of blog posts, videos, and other content.


Click on the image to download the full framework.

Today, I thought I would look at the ‘Value Polarization‘ section under Economic Structure.
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