Two interesting questions come to mind: How will the application and profile process evolve? We are all social animals. We also have a pretty solid understanding of what differentiates successful groups and successful teams. As freelancers and as potential co-workers, will we become more mindful about how we manage our associations? Grind is testing the hypothesis that there is value in filtering the freelancers who will have access to their space. Is this a leading indicator that the physical, social, psychological, and economic functions of the organization can be effectively decomposed and rearranged in new formats? It’s certainly time to reread Ronald Coase’s The Nature of the Firm. I might also take a look at Jay Galbraith’s Designing Organizations and Bob Keidel’s Seeing Organizational Patterns.

wie der Titel schon sagt ;)

"This is an incredibly naive article on renewable energy. Ms Eilperin makes the ridiculous assumption that nat gas will be the panacea to all our energy problems.  Anyone familiar with the electric utility industry, knows that their pricing is slanted to their favor."

Trifft es ziemlich gut, den !Green Backlash muss es dennoch zwingend geben bevor es wieder besser werden kann

Enterprises theoretically lust after these types of individuals inside their organizations to ‘think outside the box’, shake things up and innovate. Culturally it is very hard to introduce agility into hierarchies with bureaucracies that tend to cross check and ratify everything

TO be sure, shadow work has its benefits. Bagging one’s own groceries or pumping one’s own gas can save time. Shadow work can increase autonomy and enlarge our repertoire of skills and knowledge. Research on the “Ikea effect,” named for the Swedish furniture manufacturer whose products often require home assembly, indicates that customers value a product more highly when they play a role in constructing it.

Agree that it is all about apps . However let's see in a year from now. Android Market already has caught up with App store on mobile. I'm sure they will also on tablets because with Google, Motorola, LG, Samsung, HTC and others pushing for this Android has a good chance to dominate the market. Robert you might want to read Clayton Cristensen books if you have not already: Innovator's dillema, Innovators solution. There you will see that history repeats itself all the time and that fully integrated solutions such as iPad, iPhone in the beginning are very successful but once the market becomes a commodity the winning strategy is where different manufacturers make components.

Damit will ich natürlich nicht behaupten, dass es heute nicht Schwierigkeiten gäbe, progressiv zu sein. Die demokratische Linke, und ich fasse diesen Begriff möglichst breit, so dass da durchaus die europäisch-kontinentalen Sozialdemokraten oder die amerikanischen Demokraten, die Grünen aber auch andere Linksparteien darunterpassen, sie haben heute schon ein kompliziertes Verhältnis zum gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt.

The book's central premise is that institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better address challenging performance needs. This is greatly possible thanks to the use of technology and digital media.

While many are talking about the future of social as communities and collaboration, Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davidson seem to take a different approach. The individual is in fact a key component of future breakthroughs.

The pull environment they describe is based on three principles:

Accessing the people and resources you need
Attracting people and resources to yourself that are relevant and valuable 
Achieving your potential by attaining new levels of performance

So. In summary. The Power of Pull is a masterful book, bringing together many disparate strands of thinking over the years, placing them in a grounded, measured manner within the context of the institution. It helps us move from the decreasing-returns transaction-costs hierarchical closed model of the enterprise to an increasing-returns abundance-economy networked and open model. It helps us understand the move from stocks to flows, how the boundaries of the firm must change as a result, what will happen to firms that don’t. How the right talent is attracted, how serendipitous value is created by that attraction and consequent spiking. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fconfusedofcalcutta.com%2F2010%2F04%2F25%2Fof-push-and-pull

We create, and advise, and design, and invent.
Inspire, build, teach.
Repair, research, heal.
We have craft, insight and experience.
We see. We make. With style and grace.
We move along.

Strange times: The Great Recession and Great Inflection are making our companies ultralean, innovative and productive. But with credit still constricted, we’re like a superfit track star with a weak heart. We’ve got to get credit pumping to our industrial muscles again.

The Gervais Principle is this:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The Gervais principle differs from the Peter Principle, which it superficially resembles. The Peter Principle states that all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It is based on the assumption that future promotions are based on past performance. The Peter Principle is wrong for the simple reason that executives aren’t that stupid, and because there isn’t that much room in an upward-narrowing pyramid. They know what it takes for a promotion candidate to perform at the “to” level. So if they are promoting people beyond their competence anyway, under conditions of opportunity scarcity, there must be a good reason.

Web2.0 is full of attention elasticity problems. You launch a site, you get the buzz, everyone visits your site… until the next new thing comes along that is better. (Or people start going to PopUrls and read them all at once.) Of course, this isn't a new issue. Content providers like radio, tv, and periodicals have always dealt with elasticity of attention. The difference is that the web now makes it very easy to launch things that compete for that attention, which brings me to an important question. How do build an inelastic product?

This oft-referenced article is from the early '90s, and originally appeared in Maximum Rock 'n' Roll magazine. While some of the information and figures listed here are dated, it is still a useful and informative article. And no, we don't know how to reach Steve Albini.

Paradoxerweise reflektiert die gegenwärtige Verwirrung innerhalb der Zunft ihren wahren Mehrwert vielleicht besser als ihr bisheriger irreführender Konsens. Wirtschaftswissenschaften können die Möglichkeiten, die Entscheidungsträger haben, bestenfalls abklären; die Entscheidung selbst können sie ihnen nicht abnehmen.

The music industry is really focused on the ‘industry’ part and not so much on the ‘music’ part. This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible.

"... everything was short-term and everybody is under pressure and everybody is meeting their targets for each short-term period and so they were not managing. It is a management problem from beginning to end, and I do not think this is a banking problem or a finance problem. "

Through the years, I have watched with a kind of morbid fascination the number of once powerful companies that are no longer around. It would appear that Darwinian principles apply to companies as much as to organisms. There seems to be a kind of life cycle to a business, and beyond a certain number of years, the invisible hand of the marketplace lets you know that your time is up. And every so often, a kind of near-mass-extinction event seems to afflict a whole industry, such as is currently happening in the financial sector around the world.

In the next chapter he provides some grounding in that explanation with reference to the Coase theorem, social networks and the limits of traditional efficiencies that come out of organisational structures. This is where everything begins to fall into place. He explains the impact of social software this way:

“Think of these activities as lying under a Coasean floor; they are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing.”

Tech is everywhere. It's seven years since the last recession. Technology has become markedly more pervasive in that time -- it's the air we breathe and the water we swim in. Cell phone penetration in the U.S. has tripled in that time; eCommerce has increased by 85%. While it may have been "nice to have" (and therefore eminently cut-able) back in 2002, tech now sits at the center of companys' operations. IT has become Business Technology. If you don't believe me, start unplugging wires at your company and see how long you can develop, manufacture, deliver, sell, and service your products

"Harnessing collective intelligence" isn't a different idea from network effects, as Nick argues. It is in fact the science of network effects - understanding and applying the implications of networks.

I want to emphasize one more point: the heart of my argument about Web 2.0 is that the network effects that matter today are network effects in data

Ultimately, from the point of view of the buyer, free products provide an important benefit. “Even if consumers do not end up adopting the free product, it can act as a credible threat to the commercial firm, forcing it to both lower prices and invest more in product innovation,”

IBM was nearly one of them. Because of its reliance on hardware and mainframes for the bulk of its profits, IBM came very close to disappearing in the early ‘90s. Plans were under way to split the company into a series of individual units. In "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?", Lou Gerstner wrote ". . . keeping IBM together was the first strategic decision, and I believe, the most important decision I ever made - not just at IBM, but in my entire business career."

yep, Keynes ist ein armes Schwein das von den Neoliberalen auf eigene und unsere Gefahr mißachtet wird

marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero -> Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts — the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero ... bmid!!!! galore galore

Der Urheberrechtsexperte Martin Kretschmer und der Kulturökonom Paul Stepan warnen im Interview mit ORF.at vor einer längeren Schutzfrist: Diese komme hauptsächlich der Tonträgerindustrie zugute und habe nachteilige Folgen für Konsumenten und Kreativ

It is a provocative question ... markets punish companies that diversify into non-related industries, individual investors can get the benefits of diversification by investing in different industries themselves - hehe, innovation as a binary proposition?

What are intangible assets? Wikipedia defines them as "identifiable non-monetary assets that cannot be seen, touched or physically measured, which are created through time and/or effort and that are identifiable as a separate asset." A more vernacular d

L. Prusak
In this essay I look at the history of knowledge management and offer insights into what knowledge management means today and where it may be headed in the future.

8 Generatives better than free", die aus diversen Anwendungsfällen Nutzen und Mehrwert für Konsumenten stiften und die sich in der einen oder anderen Form auf durch das Internet getriebene Branchen übertragen lassen

Open-capitalism is thriving at Semco, and one of these days, it will show up in your industry. What strikes me though is the fact that this model can be used in non-profits, in government and even in the fields without hope - like education.

In order to compete you must cooperate

a manifesto called Trust Economies: Investigating the New ROI of the Web. It’s free to download and is a short 11 page read.

What he does is show how it's bad on a micro scale for certain companies. But, you could make that argument for anything.

"Prices are the central force directing resources and shaping consumption in a market economy. But most economic activity seems to take place without any influence from prices at all. Most employment, and in dollar terms most production, choices are not d

Alternatively, of course, we could try to adapt to the world as it is, rather than dreaming of what it used to be. But hell, where are the headlines in that?

When the marginal cost of producing something tends to zero, the smart thing to do is to treat it as zero and get ahead of the competition and give it away for free in order to sell something else. You can build whole businesses around giving stuff away f

clash of pop-economic titans

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production.

Don Tapscott, the author of an eye-opening new book called Wikinomics, says that we have barely begun to imagine how the internet will change the way we live and work. He tells Oliver Burkeman how everything from gold mining to motorcycle manufacturing is

New technology takes time to have impact .. businesses and society itself have to adapt before that will happen ... Companies do not do well if they spend a lot of money on IT projects unless they also radically reorganize to take advantage of technology

claims that this new mode of production holds the potential to help address what he calls "the core political values of liberal societies—individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice

a very good read for business stakeholders who struggle to understand why anyone wants to open source an in-house project or contribute to an existing open source project

Every company innovates until it finds a cash cow. At that point only innovation that supports the cash cow is promoted. Further, any innovation that threatens or does not support the cash cow languishes or is actively killed.

I think it is largely down to communications: the degree to which a vision is shared and the effective dissemination of new ideas ideas and working practices. Innovation velocity is dependent on collaboration; and collaboration among larger groups and cre

Value networking is a method for examining the relationships among a group of related organizations or individuals to understand and categorize the value each gains from the relationship