by Tom Mandel
June 21, 2007 at 11:19 pm · Filed under
General, Supernova07
I’m dropping notes in here, and will improve them later — the wifi, right now, is a little… lofi (nonfi?), so I’ll just do what I can when I can.
———
Clay and Denise Caruso are talking about the two kinds of communities –
- those of love, ala Clay’s talk, and
- those where people must come together to work on a shared problem, whether they want to or not.
the question of love cuts both ways – when the community goes away, the subject goes into decline. It’s precipitous, but less drastic than when a company goes belly-up and its products are suddenly unsupported.
Kaliya Hamlin comments that ‘love’ sometimes (almost always) equals ‘hard work’ – she is talking from her history of 4 years working on creating a identity community
by Tom Mandel
June 21, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under
General
Clay shows us a slide of a Shinto shrine in Japan — it’s made of wood and is 1300 years old. Wood being a renewable resource, the shrine is torn down every once in a while and rebuilt out of the same kind of wood from the same forest it’s always come from.
Clay compares PERL — and Linux, Apache, and more — to this shrine, pointing out that they too are shrines, maintained by people who care about them, maintained out of love for them, and maintained by a community out of love for each other.
It’s a great and very simple metaphor. Think about the future, Clay advises, based on what people who love each other and what they are working can create. Bet on that.
He convinces me, and I do. What about you?
by Tom Mandel
June 20, 2007 at 12:14 am · Filed under
General
I’m starting to think that we need a new way of thinking about the ‘return’ on new technologies like those comprised by Enterprise 2.0. The traditional metric of “Return on Investment” is really not useful when discussing disruptive steps forward.
The most important ‘returns’ from these new technologies can’t be known in advance, and certainly they can’t be quantified in terms that come from the very contexts they are about to transform! How would a CxO have framed the ROI of telephones in a world where they weren’t in existence? Not possible.
Hence, I propose the idea of Return on Change — ROC — as a new framework for discussing the benefits of adopting the new. ROC can only be communicated in the form of stories — or maybe it would be better to call them scenarios — that envision the possible serendipities, singularities, black swans, or whatever term you prefer when you talk about the unexpected and transformative.
The term “black swan” I take from Nassim Taleb’s book of that title, which I think is essential reading for anyone who wants to investigate this complex world we live in and think we understand. The term refers to the singular, unexpected events that statistics cannot explain, and Taleb argues convincingly that there are more of these than you might imagine.
The idea is relevant to our subject — the influence of new social technologies on business. At its heart, ROI is a form of extrapolation — but you cannot extrapolate the new and change, however fervently you think you can.
Hence… Return on Change. Lets start using this term and thinking about what its radicalness means for the future of those who commit to The New.
