The weekly round up:

  • Bitcoin, Ven and the End of Currency – The author has a vested interest in the outcome he speaks about, but this is nonetheless an interesting look at the possibilities of virtual currencies, and what they might ultimately mean for current financial systems, and continued sovereignty of nation states.
  • When Did Everyone Decide To Pay Themselves Last? – When companies jump into social media, they tend to look at Facebook, Twitter, etc as the important places to be. This alternative view suggests that the first priority should be tending to content and places that YOU own – improve your own assets first, build your own brand(s) before Facebook's …
    One quote: "signal to noise ratio in platforms you don’t control is usually poor, and content there decays quickly – frequently ending up in archive purgatory, never to be read again. Yet content created on your own site or blog has value forever, given infinite life by search engines and getting shared well into the future by users"
  • The Customer-Centered Innovation Map – A lengthy but interesting discussion about deconstruction of customer processes, with the objective of discovering points in the process we can provide value, and/or innovate. An important note – what the post calls "job mapping" is different to "process mapping" (although it may use the same artefacts), because the objective is to find WHAT the customer is trying to get done with each process step, rather than HOW they're doing it.
  • MIT management professor Tom Malone on collective intelligence and the “genetic” structure of groups – When you've got wicked problems to solve, and you want to put together a group of people to think it through, what are the criteria for inclusion? Counter-intuitively, the cognitive intelligence of the group isn't correlated to the cognitive intelligence of the individuals involved – a better predictor is their emotional intelligence, or social sensitivity. So, at the moment the quickest way to smarter groups is to include more women …
  • Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything? – Is the world of chasing a bigger house, bigger car, bigger burger and more STUFF starting to pall? Do you ever think "there has to be more meaning to life than this"? Welcome to the "Eudamoniac Revolution" … it all sounds like fairies at the bottom of the garden, wishful thinking or utopianism. But I dare you to read this and then tell me you don't want a better life, rather than just a bigger one.

    … or as the French would say: "Avoir empêche d´être".

  • 10 visions of the future – … mainly of the Internet. Intel's anthropologist Genevieve Bell has a few ideas what the internet will look like at some point in the future. Australians will possibly be more comfortable than most with the idea that it will be "more feral", and will be used for "sledging" (there's more subtlety in those ideas than it seems, by the way).
  • Developing Talent – Retaining and Attracting Talent – Talent – everybody wants to hire it, everybody wants to retain it. Unfortunately, it often seems no-one wants to develop it. But if your business gets a reputation as a developer of talent, you'll find and retain more talent than you know what to do with …
    But it's more than training programs: "we would suggest that training programs are becoming more and more marginal to talent development. What matters most is the talent development that occurs in our daily work environment."
    And it's more than executives – everyone in the business has a role to play in providing and sustaining customer service, so everyone needs to be developed.