Tom Adams

I don't care

A charming film expressing the power of Apple as a brand, despite its shortcomings:

MyFacePad

The whole social web in one place, like a magazine filtered and curated for personal relevance, popularity and set on a timeline? 

I give you the Flipboard.

Explamation?

I'm currently compromising the structural integrity of a bookshelf in my living room with The Empathic Civilisation by Rifkin. Like 'The Tesco' has become a unit of measurement for extremely large numbers in economics (GDP of country = 1 Tesco, money spent on education = 1/2 a Tesco, etc.), A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth was until now the benchmark for weighty books, requiring a special bag of its own on a long-distant holiday. The Empathic Civilisation has just taken its place.

Whilst I believe that deep reading leads to deep thought, and am not of the school that thinks the Interspace is rotting our ability to concentrate, this absolutely charming film from the Royal Society of the Arts (created by Cognitive Media) visualises a talk Mr Rifkin recently gave about the themes in his book.

I was able to view this, chuckle, and understand its major themes from the comfort of my iPhone in the kitchen after feeding our youngest her bottle (before 6am). I will, of course, be reading the book anyway. Because. But what a lovely way to present complex ideas. Not unlike the pioneers of Intertube 'explamation' Common Craft, who brought us this lovely film on wikis a few years ago.

Behavioural economics

    I was only thinking the other day (election night was slow), that it's about time macro-economic theory considered the unpredictable, whimsical and altogether dirty-under-the-fingernails motivations of real people. Well, it seems that macro-economic theory is way ahead of me (by at least 10 years) in the field of behavioural economics.

    Ever the masochist, I have set myself the task of understanding behavioural economics (and finance) with a reading list that would weaken the most sturdy of undergraduates.

    As a starter, I'm going to ease in with:   "Advances in Behavioral Economics (The Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics)" Colin F. Camerer; Paperback; £25.97

    As light(er) relief, this will be followed after a short round of deep breathing by:   "Exotic Preferences: Behavioral Economics and Human Motivation" George Loewenstein; Paperback; £17.97

    I will then rush with great abandon towards a just dessert of:   "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness" Richard H Thaler; Paperback; £5.55

    It's not exactly an Arthurian quest, but I'm feeling pretty chivalrous nonetheless.

   

Collaborative webs

This has nothing to do with spiders working in harmony. I have no idea if spiders work in harmony as a rule. Bees do, of course. As do ants. Anyway, this is off the point.

Keith Sawyer, in his excellent and readable book Group Genius, defends a simple but counter-cultural idea: real genius and creativity comes from groups of people working together over time, not (only) a random spark of inspiration from a brilliant mind. He talks about 'collaborative webs' underpinning everything from the development of Monopoly to Morse code and even the Wright Brother's maiden flight. How? Without going into crushing detail here (buy the book), he talks about five features of these webs that seem common to all innovation:

1. Each innovation builds incrementally on a long history of prior innovations

2. A successful innovation is a combination of many small sparks.

3. In collaborative webs, there is frequent interaction among teams.

4. Multiple discovery is common

5. No-one can own the web.

Creativity and great ideas are often thought to come from the chosen few. In fact, we almost feel compelled to attribute them to heroes - from creative directors to great artists - without considering their broader context. When you merge this elegant defense of collaboration with social technologies that naturally build webs of communication and co-creation, the case for a new kind of create business becomes clear. Does this herald the end of the agency as we know it?

My leaders debate summary in 3 words (from left to right)

Blair. Fair. Scare.

The English language, semantic widgets and playbark.

1. Just read this rather nice essay on the decline of proper English by Steve Sparshott. Favourite quotation: 'If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate'.

2. I've added the Evri widget to this page having read about it in nowandnext's excellent Big Ideas for 2010 piece. I'm so very semantic.

3. Having thought gardening was just a metaphor, I now find myself doing some. Bark chippings, it seems, are not in the same league as play bark.

Envy is a terrible thing

In 2005, we huddled around YouTube to watch this Japanese student smashing a PSP before they were released to the rest of the world. I was talking to Tom about this the other day and wondering how long it would take before the iPad version was released.

Well here it is:

Is your company a toddler or a senior citizen?

We talk a great deal about corporate brands, values and behaviours. Not least when it comes to how green companies are, or the way they treat people in the communities they work in. Either way, an organisation's behaviour is now a matter of instant public scrutiny: from individual employee comments on Facebook to large scale product recall in light of a dangerous fault. You only have to consider how last week's mobile Twitter incident was a matter of instant news, or the political capital being made in the US around Toyota's problems that impact market share and share price.

But what if we started to examine corporations at a more abstract level to find the cause of these behaviours? For example, if we talk about 'corporate identity', it suggests that we think of businesses as a whole: they have an identity in the same way a person has an identity. If this goes beyond a logo and colour palette and genuinely carries values with it, these values must be like the values I live by. And, taken further, what if company behaviours are driven by unconscious factors, just like human behaviours? 

So what if you could understand a corporate personality using models for understanding human personality?

Take Eric Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development.

Each stage, from 'infant' to 'senior' carries a particular developmental tension. For example, Toddlers (from 2-3 years) struggle with a battle between autonomy and shame & doubt as they start to become individuals. Apply this to a 2-3 year old company and you might find some interesting answers to why they behave the way they behave - perhaps without even realising their fundamental identity, actions and values are a function of their age, as well as the explicit principles or market conditions they operate within.  

Set this in the context of the change brought by the social web and mass collaboration, and you can start to see how companies of different 'ages' are more or less likely to thrive in a context of real-time communication. Put simply, are 65 year old 'senior' businesses (balancing ego integrity and despair and taking stock of a life already lived) less likely to succeed in the new world than 4-6 year old 'pre-school' companies (addressing the struggle between initiative and guilt). 

Not got an answer yet, but it's an interesting question. 

Pre-shopping

A nice set of thoughts from IPG Emerging Media Lab on pre-shopping. How clever they are.