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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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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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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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 news: automated, crowdsourced, and better than ever

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ABC journalist Mark Colvin last week delivered the Andrew Olle Media Lecture, a prestigious annual lecture on journalism. Mark is a Twitter afficionado as well as journalist with over three decades of experience, making him a great choice for the lecture this year.

The full transcript of the lecture provides rich stories from the history of journalism in Australia, and an incisive view of the present.

On the topic of crowdsourcing, Mark says:
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Excellent data on the state of global innovation: idea generation, idea conversion, and crowdsourcing

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Strategy + Business magazine has just launched its annual Global Innovation 1000 study, a deep analysis of the 1000 biggest spenders on innovation globally. As it happens I separately caught up with S+B editor Art Kleiner and Booz & Co Chief Marketing Officer Tom Stewart last Friday in New York (more on those conversations later), fortunately getting out before Sandy hit town.

Here is a good video of the highlights of the study:

The theme of the study this year was on the early stages of innovation, in generating ideas and then converting them to products and services.
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Insights on using crowdsourcing for marketing

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As I will be running a Crowdsourcing for Marketing workshop in New York this Thursday, I was keen to attend the Marketing session at CrowdConf today.

Here are brief notes from the speakers through what was an excellent panel discussion:
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Chart: 11 critical success factors for crowd business model

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On Monday October 22 I am running Crowd Business Models Summit, where some of the most experienced leaders in successfully building business models based on crowds will share their insights. The event is being run in association with CrowdConf 2012, the leading industry crowdsourcing event.

Beforehand I thought it worth sharing part of the Chapter on Crowd Business Models from Getting Results From Crowds.

Here is the overview of the success factors relevant across the 8 major business models (see the Crowd Business Models Framework for details), excerpted from the chapter on Crowd Business Models (Chapter 22 in the first edition, Chapter 25 in the second edition). Explanations of each factor are provided below the chart.

Success factors for crowd business models

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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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