The weekly round up:
- Introducing Anthemis – “New enterprise” is beginning to surface – Anthemis is what Umair Haque would call a 21st century business
Check these principles:
- that an enormous opportunity exists to harness technology to fundamentally rethink how financial services are designed, consumed and delivered.
- that a healthy, resilient and relevant financial sector is absolutely critical to the well-functioning of our economies and societies
- that loosely-coupled networks and ecosystems (not hierarchies) are the optimal organisational forms in the information economy
- that assembling and retaining teams of talented and passionate people is the key to building great businesses.
- Pendulum Swings and Oscillating Systems – A good description of what often happens when organisations swap between centralised and decentralised decision making. This oscillation is a symptom of seeing the business as a machine, rather than as a complex adaptive system.
- VMWare Cloud Foundry – Quick Analysis and Press Pass – Going technical here: a look at VMWare’s CloudFoundry “platform-as-a-service” offering, and a look at where it fits against other offerings with a similar intent. Seems there is a push for greenfields development to move to the clouds (some might say software developers have had their heads in the clouds for decades … )
- Social Business and The Age of Infrastructure – While we are surrounded by hype about social business and social media within organisations, it’s easy to forget that it is just like every other tool that came before it: it’s not a silver bullet, and there’s a lot of hard work to be done before it reaps benefits. We’ll only see real progress when it is no longer “the next big thing”, and no longer appears in the popular press.
- The Fall Of Mass Culture, The Rise Of Meaning – When people under 25 are no longer consuming mass media, how does marketing change? Marketing for meaning rather than marketing for consumption – brands need to stand for a better life. As Hugh McLeod says “the market for something to believe in is infinite“