Weekend ReadingJanuary 25th, 2009 View Comments |
Looking backwards at a portion of a week’s reading…
- John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, The New Reality: Constant Disruption:
Once businesses learn to harness the disruptive elements of today’s digital technologies—or so the conventional thinking goes—everything will settle back into equilibrium.
But what if the historical pattern—disruption followed by stabilization—has itself been disrupted?
Expanding on the post, Ethan Bauley:
There’s enormous power and creative freedom in accepting that tomorrow will not be like today.
Pure gold: both Ethan and Brooks Jordan picked up the exchange in the comments on the changing nature of organizations and the flow of talent:
In the meantime, the growing gap between the aspirations of talented individuals and the needs of institutions designed for scalable efficiency will drive many of these talented individuals to strike out on their own. But we view this growth of independent contractors as largely a transitional phenomenon, reflecting the misalignment, rather than a permanent condition. Individuals over time will eagerly seek out institutional homes that can help them to accelerate the development of their talent and amplify their impact on the world around them.
- More thoughts on the nature and use of social capital:
Alan Patrick, Karma Chameleons and the danger of whuffie based feudal systems. Food for thought; think of the post as a set of ingredients than a fully-baked meal.
Alvin Toffler: The Thought Leader Interview:
Thirty-six years after his book Future Shock, the world’s most influential futurist sees the informal economy as a basis of revolutionary wealth.
- Mike Bonifer on ChangeThis, Don’t Script, Improvise!
- Startonomics, a one-day workshop in Los Angeles, CA on Feb 6, 2009:
Startonomics is a one-day workshop designed by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs on how to create simple, actionable metrics; and how to use them to make better product and marketing decisions for long-term growth and startup success.
- Alan Patrick, Paris Hilton, Twitter Flight and other viral afflictions of Social Media.
- Andrew Chen, How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)
- Basil Peters, How VCs Block Exits.
- Albert Wenger, No Such Thing as Too Much Seed Capital Availability (Reprise), (via Brooks Jordan).
- David Hornik, Will VCs Continue to Suspend Disbelief:
The startup world is always a meritocracy but never more so than in a tough economy. Those companies that show results will continue to get funded. Those that don’t, won’t. My hope is to continue to invest in those that do. And then work hard to bridge the disbelief gap.
- Wall Street Journal, Media Firms Team Up to Test Online-Video Ad Formats:
Starcom MediaVest and sister agency VivaKi say they are trying to create standards in the online-video market, which is popular with consumers but hasn’t turned into a serious money maker.
What a surprise: any chance the reason consumers like online video is because it doesn’t have ads that interrupt the “value stream”? How good can a business be if its value is primarily derived from interrupting what consumers are trying to do?
January 25th, 2009 at 13:11
Taylor, this idea from the Toffler interview is relevant to the discussion about social capital:
“In 1967, I wrote a paper for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science called “The Art of Measuring the Arts.” My purpose was to show exactly how we can go about measuring this seemingly unmeasurable field and its impact on the economy. For example, you can ask, looking at a country’s output of the arts, to what degree is it diverse? To what degree does it meet high technical standards? How do critics and scholars evaluate it? These are categories that can be defined and measured.”
In other words, you can't measure the value of art directly, but it does have measurable correlates.
January 25th, 2009 at 13:11
Taylor, this idea from the Toffler interview is relevant to the discussion about social capital:
“In 1967, I wrote a paper for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science called “The Art of Measuring the Arts.†My purpose was to show exactly how we can go about measuring this seemingly unmeasurable field and its impact on the economy. For example, you can ask, looking at a country’s output of the arts, to what degree is it diverse? To what degree does it meet high technical standards? How do critics and scholars evaluate it? These are categories that can be defined and measured.”
In other words, you can't measure the value of art directly, but it does have measurable correlates.
January 25th, 2009 at 21:27
This comment is extremely awesome, and I would take it further to say that while you may not measure the value of art directly, you can objectively evaluate many characteristics that determine whether a given artifact Sucks or Not.
A lot of that has to do with Intent.
This loops into the social capital conversation somehow.
Also: Taylor, can you expand on what you meant when you said “Etiquette is not fungible”? I know what fungible means but it's twisting my brain in this context!
January 25th, 2009 at 21:27
This comment is extremely awesome, and I would take it further to say that while you may not measure the value of art directly, you can objectively evaluate many characteristics that determine whether a given artifact Sucks or Not.
A lot of that has to do with Intent.
This loops into the social capital conversation somehow.
Also: Taylor, can you expand on what you meant when you said “Etiquette is not fungible”? I know what fungible means but it's twisting my brain in this context!
January 25th, 2009 at 21:52
Oddly, I think the Wikipedia definition makes the meaning pretty transparent:
“Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution.
… Fungibility has nothing to do with the ability to exchange one commodity for another different commodity. It refers only to the ease of exchanging one unit of a commodity with another unit of the same commodity.”
“Fungibility is different from liquidity. A good is liquid and tradable if it can be easily exchanged for money or another different good. A good is fungible if one unit of the good is substantially equivalent to another unit of the same good of the same quality at the same time and place.”
This actually loops back to our other conversation: http://www.ethanbauley.com/post/72627292/this-e...
There are common threads throughout social groups in how social capital is created, and etiquette is one of the “factors of production”; but trading that social capital between groups gets kinda tough, for reasons I've pointed out previously.
Noting that you're thinking about a non-obvious future state of transparent “social capital accounting system”, even if we do eventually see a system, I believe there are some very good reasons, based on game theory, that people will want to make some “social capital transactions” non-transparent and non-interlinked, perhaps for the same reasons we have informal economies and black markets.
But that's really a subject for a future post…
January 25th, 2009 at 21:52
Oddly, I think the Wikipedia definition makes the meaning pretty transparent:
“Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution.
… Fungibility has nothing to do with the ability to exchange one commodity for another different commodity. It refers only to the ease of exchanging one unit of a commodity with another unit of the same commodity.”
“Fungibility is different from liquidity. A good is liquid and tradable if it can be easily exchanged for money or another different good. A good is fungible if one unit of the good is substantially equivalent to another unit of the same good of the same quality at the same time and place.”
This actually loops back to our other conversation: http://www.ethanbauley.com/post/72627292/this-e...
There are common threads throughout social groups in how social capital is created, and etiquette is one of the “factors of production”; but trading that social capital between groups gets kinda tough, for reasons I've pointed out previously.
Noting that you're thinking about a non-obvious future state of transparent “social capital accounting system”, even if we do eventually see a system, I believe there are some very good reasons, based on game theory, that people will want to make some “social capital transactions” non-transparent and non-interlinked, perhaps for the same reasons we have informal economies and black markets.
But that's really a subject for a future post…
January 25th, 2009 at 22:43
Agree that many transactions will need to remain invisible to others.
Luckily, even marginal gains in transparency/interlinking are clearly
creating massive disruption/improvement
January 25th, 2009 at 23:08
Anyway, I should really start doing research instead of just thinking
January 25th, 2009 at 23:08
Anyway, I should really start doing research instead of just thinking
January 25th, 2009 at 23:48
Good point: we're probably at the point on the curve where marginal improvements to system -> disproportionate returns.
But I wonder where we are on that same curve for individuals: is it harder or easier for anybody to “cut through the chaff” of the masses?
January 25th, 2009 at 23:48
Good point: we're probably at the point on the curve where marginal improvements to system -> disproportionate returns.
But I wonder where we are on that same curve for individuals: is it harder or easier for anybody to “cut through the chaff” of the masses?