The weekly round up:
- TEDx Talk on the Open Enterprise – “We live in democracies, but work in dictatorships” … a simple statement of the issue of HOW we work (particularly in Western economies) – the structures and practices of business are thousands of years old, and aren’t necessarily a good fit anymore. This contributes to an estimated 75% of workers (number is from the US, I believe) being disaffected and disengaged from their efforts. Do we REALLY think that 3/4 of the workforce under-performing against their own will is the best way of organising our companies?
- Rory Sutherland makes a change – Every now and then, it’s good to be able to give bouquets to a bank, and not brickbats. Kudos to Westpac (in New Zealand – how about Aus!?) for doing something a little out of the ordinary – making it easy for customers to impulse SAVE, rather than impulse BUY … just hit the big red button.
- Influence Measurement Optimization – There’s a lot of noise around social networks about “reach” and “influence”, as players like Klout and Peerindex attempt to translate numbers of followers/friends and the depth and breadth of conversation (and some other black magic) to estimate how much social currency you might be able to wield. Of course (as Google continually struggles with) any system of algorithmic ranking will get gamed, and (more subtly) just observing something changes what is observed …
- Breakup of the euro? Is Iceland’s rejection of financial bullying a model for Greece and Ireland? – It’s clear that national sovereignty in the Eurozone is subservient to the interests of bankers – the EMU insists that the PIIGs should repay failed loans to speculators by mortgaging their economies for two generations. Iceland still has a sovereign currency, and so far has thumbed its nose to protecting private profits … do Ireland and Greece have the cojones to leave the Euro and re-establish currency sovereignty? The pain will be sharp, but will last two years (cf Argentina) rather than two generations.
- Take your SharePoint implementation to the next level – In which it is demonstrated that it IS possible to turn a Sharepoint implementation into a social business tool … but it’s still lipstick on a pig. There’s a whole lot of good reasons for not using Sharepoint as your social tool of choice – and this is a pro-Sharepoint post! Biggest issue – Sharepoint is document-centric, not people-centric; it is structurally non-social. If you’re interested in Enterprise 2.0/Social Business, there’s a lot of stuff that works better – but hey! – it COULD work.