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Luis Alberola
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Interesting ... How accurate am I if I think of a world with a few overlords, some happy counsellors around those overlords and then just the rest of us ... Because entrepreneurship is just fine, but it does not create the wealth (entitlements) that the past three generations have counted on to build their lifes.
In the end, I wonder how, in this world you describe, wealth would not end up piling up in the reserves of the multicorns, unable to do anything else with it than returning it to their shareholders, and engaging ever deeper in productivity initiatives...
My fear is that we need a very strong government to push the new regulations that will make this sustainable. See ? Big business, big government and panem and circenses for the masses
What's the Future of Jobs?
What better time to reflect on the future of work and jobs than Labor Day? I’ve written about this extensively with my latest foray on a recent blog post. Is STEM our future? Today, I want to be a contrarian. The conventional wisdom is that the best way to prepare students for the future of wor...
Great post ! And also great comment on brokers by John Maloney - my thoughts exactly as I work on the future of the insurance industry. The opportunity for Independent Insurers with technology is huge, and also wondering whether Google isn't trying to reinvent the old broker model, like they reinvented advertsing (another brokerage)
Disruption by Trusted Advisors
What’s “the next big thing”? Coming from Silicon Valley, I often get this question from executives around the world. Usually, they frame the question in terms of the next wave of technology innovation. They want to know what’s the next big technology that could disrupt everything? That’s an i...
Thanks for the second chapter John !
"This is exactly what these institutions were designed to do – suppress passion". To a great extent, yes, I agree. Which is why when launching institutional innovation experiments (or movements, I guess), at the edge of the organization, there is a real likeliness of short term success. In my experience, a good, intuitive leader (with low risk aversion), often a woman, is enough to secure a project that aims at institutional innovation.
The problems usually come with success : in those cases, instead of the organization understanding that its future lies at the edges, it more often than not tries to bring any innovation back to the center (often killing it in what it meant deep down, beyond the technology app or improved process that stand as its finished product). How then to ensure that the institution learns to let go of its centralisation practice ?
What Is To Be Done? (Part 2)
In my post last week, I made the case that we’ll only be able to overcome the dark side of technology by re-integrating passion and profession. But this is only the first step. If this is all we do, we’ll be doomed to lives of frustration and discontent. Institutions as obstacles Here’s the prob...
It's a great article John, and the whole idea on the dark side of technology as well. And I am looking forward to your points on institutional innovation and narrative.
And yet, I am worried that many of the explorers will be left behind, often because the road they have chosen cannot be explored in good conditions (I am speaking about compensation).
So I assume you are linking passion and leadership, and that great explorers involve fearless followers. Are you also linking passion and responsibility ? My question is, are we now somehow reaching a time when a leader that does not follow her passion is not living to her social responsibility ?
Because passion, if it needs to result in deep transformation, doesn't seem to belong in the "motivational field", but rather be born in a field also containing contrarian thinking, deep resolve and inner leadership.
I am eager to read your post linking passion with institutional innovation
Thanks for sharing this !
What Is To Be Done? (Part 1)
My last post on The Dark Side of Technology definitely seems to have hit a responsive chord. Many of us see evidence of this dark side of technology every day in the world around us. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The same digital technologies producing this dark side also have the potentia...
A great and timely article John. I wonder if you've read Acceleration, by Hartmud Rosa ...
Looking forward to the path you'll propose in your next article.
In my own practice, we try to help our clients go towards institutional mastery of technology by:
- making social technologies take center stage in the digital enterprise; it's a way for employees to exist socially and this offers a way towards collective mastery of digital technology;
- based on these technologies, developing new professional practices (sharing, co-creating, searching, designing, ...), that are needed to take advantage of these technologies in new ways that are not solely focused on productivity; that's a dangerous path
- we work on responsibility development (by adressing the depth of context)
And it's all great work, but difficult to carry on past a certain level if leadership does not take ownership for the needed risk ...
Thanks again for your great article
The Dark Side of Technology
I’m going to disrupt the Silicon Valley script. You know the one. Every talk or article coming out of Silicon Valley follows the prescribed template: start with a dazzling description of awesome new digital technologies and then proceed to explore all the wonderful benefits and opportunities th...
Well, the market only looks for financial value. Whether there are or not unemployed people in America is not the market's concern. Actually, unemployment, by holding wages down, automatically raises prospects for higher profits.
You could say that, with too many unemployed, demand is not enough to support growth. But the point is that even unemployed people are consumers, and for many product markets, only wealthy individuals are important
Markets are not political instruments. There are places where supply meets demand. And today, in these financial markets, there is still little demand for "ethic" or "social" investment.
Hopefully, with facts like the one you point out, we'll get there eventually. But changing the markets is going to take years and a real change of viewpoint for policy makers and C-level officers in corporations
Dow at 11,000 unemployment not going away - Why??
Despite optimism over recent job gains, one grim statistic casts a long shadow over the recovering economy -- a record 44% of the nation's 15 million unemployed have been out of work for more than six months. And the evidence suggests that many of them may never completely rebuild the working...
Interesting debate. Not being à US citizen I might be a bit far from it. I see two different issues:
- treating corporations as legal persons would bring you where you are today, if I understand the Bill of Rights correctly,
- corporations are legal persons that employ scores of natural persons, and yet, corporations are not democracies. What you basically have then, is a social structure with influence in government affairs that is not a democracy. I might be pushing this, but how different is this from having one of the 50 states not being a democracy ?
I have discussed it in my blog, as I understand this issue brings us, in fact, to the need to change big business governance fundamentally
Corporate Personhood Should Be Banned, Once and For All | CommonDreams.org
Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence...
This is a very interesting post and conversations.
I think that this issue (regulation, charter, rules, governance)is key, as without a proper answer I deem it unlikely that the social media environment will reach its potential WITHIN the corporations.
I like the comment of Kristina, even though I think it relies only on the corporate viewpoint. Including the employee viewpoint in the set of rules and how you design them is to me a key notion.
At the same time, I also like the idea of the "leadership team" on the issue. Actually, we are in a fast moving environment and building a community that oversees these regulatory / governance issues and links with corporate governance is a pragmatic way of trying to continuously adapt the relation between the corporation and its employees
Happy New Year! AND do you have opinions about social media governance?
It is nearly the end of January and I haven't blogged in ages. Nearly two months... I've twittered, and facebooked, and linkedin, and talked. Friday I did something new, I podcasted. I joined Matt Simpson of Sweettt.com on his Friday morning recorded talk hour. We were joined by Doug Cornelius a...
Great post. I have been thinking about firms and feudal kingdoms for some time.
Evolution might be a bit more complicated than what we can imagine, and probably, appart from people regaining power through community-based organizations, there will also be an evolution of corporations as they come of age - by that, I mean as they themselves get rid of their dependancy on financial religion (short-termism and growth for growth).
The Death of the Job - The End of the Feudal System Repeated?
I have not had a "Job" since Christmas 1994. I am part of the growing number of folks, 8 million in the US, who are employed in a less structured way. I am sure that many in this group want and need a "Job" but a "Job" is the last thing that I want. In fact one of my ongoing nightmares is that I...
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