Seemingly dissimilar items composing a coherent picture

Today is one of these days when I can express better than on most other days why I carefully remain on a spot that is common frontier to several seemingly different worlds: business, marketing, technology, psychology, software development, complex adaptive systems, social media... At the end of the day this is also what defines BusinessQuests: the often treacherous area defined by 'business + innovation + technology', where starting from what drives people is a fundamental starting point. BusinessQuests is where people's quests drive business value and where people's values resonate with quests in business.

What a good day this was! Started early, spent the day in two cities
while cooperating with people in 7 different areas of the world and
discovering refreshing perspectives... I met some pretty creative and passionate entrepreneurs, got exposure to beautiful artistic creations including some nice stuff with Philippe Stark (an awesome super-passionate creator) and had a speedy meeting with Nicolas Martignole a leading practitioner of agile practices in the field of software development.
What's the common thread? Several things:

1. all was made possible thanks to the tsunami of innovation of the past 15 years, which brings quantum leaps in productivity and a degree of flexibility one cannot even dream to have in established companies (there are in fact a couple of exceptions)


2. quality of experience is defined by the encounter between subject and object, between the user and the tool, between the objective and the means... All of the exposure I got today was high-quality in that respect. I'd call it flow and resonance...


3. the fundamental dynamics of all of these moments were defined by emergent forms of organization, nothing predefined or predetermined, no rigidity and yet lots of harmony and order...


4. in most instances today it was all about co-generating creative and productive moments with people who participated to working sessions to co-create, to exchange, to focus on what makes a damn difference, not on pecking order, power struggles and ego-play... Good stuff. Today I came across some chaps who are excellent representatives of what I call "High Tide of Talent"


5. underlying all was the coexistence of content and relationships, the necessary combination of network optimization and content adequacy, which is ultimately a fundamental recipe in many areas of the emerging business environment from SEO/SEM issues to how causes are supported to activism to software development (one of the reasons why agile is gaining traction) to business development and even perhaps to venture and entreprise financing

Apologies for being philosophical on this one, but some things need to be approached from a different angle and make it necessary to use the perenial principle of beautiful creation: COUS, that is Combination of Opposites and Union of Similars... More on that in a future post :)

Patterns of innovation

There's a very interesting analysis by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum on innovation called "Building an innovation nation". It shows how different regions stack-up on the global innovation map and the authors identify assets that are required to drive innovation. It's worth reading, and prompts me to make a couple of comments, some of which have to do with the random nature of our world...

My comments on the piece are in three areas:

1. I'm not sure about the correlation between patents and actual innovation. To give an example: Twitter brings enormous innovation of the real kind (i.e. used by actual people and companies in the economy), but I haven't heard about them filing any patent whatsoever. Another example without any patent would be Jamendo a company that is transforming distribution of music with their service for commercial consumption of music...


2. in hindsight correlations often look like causality and we can build great theories about what made something successful... theories that can be statistically verified over a period of time, but do not necessarily constitute the "truth" if there's such a thing. Reading Taleb's Fooled by randomness and it would make sense to extend the study to past periods of History when there was innovation without any patenting system and without established institutions like governments or companies doing anything to facilitate innovation. Among the excellent examples to study is the period during which the craftsmen of France self-organized to invent practices (innovate), deliver projects like major cathedrals (requiring sophisticated maths to be designed) and to educate the next generations of craftsmen (today we would be speaking of knowledge management, except that these guys did not have Oracle databases or other sophisticated It equipment)


3. which brings me to the last point: to me the world is a chaotic place that you cannot shape with recipes. All one can do, whether a CEO or the President of the most powerful nation on Earth, is create turbulence that causes the overall self-adapting system to change its form... taking into account the fact that other turbulences exert their own influence (see current financial crisis)...

The future of enterprise: what's 2-tier business?

Earlier today I had a quick personal thinking session as to what could well define business organizations of the future in a world of constant (and radical?) change, requiring permanent morphing to adapt and adopt the most relevant form for ever more unpredictable (and improbable?) events. The thinking was prompted by a question someone asked me "what's a 2-tier business?", 2-tier referring to the concepts of Spiral Dynamics. Here's my take in 17 + 1 bonus points.

1. Ask 5 whys like the kids to get down to the deep meaning of what you spend your time doing


2. Give where it makes sense and you will receive in a non-transactional as well as in a transactional manner


3. Transparency, transparency, transparency: no member of the system is negligible, all need to know, all can make a damn difference


4. "Be the change you want to see in the world" =  agile methods, agile management, agile business, agile development, scrum, xp...


5. Compassion, coherence, "getting yourself out of the way", expressing meaning, caring for something larger than your little person / team / company / industry / city / country and hope as key drivers of non-intrusive, non-directive, non-centralizing,... leadership


6. Treating people like adults not like kids or parents


7. "An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching" = just do it, lead by example, follow with passion, learn by doing...


8. "Success is a journey, not a destination" = continuous mutation, adaptation and improvement


9. Listening = watching = sensing = 2-3-4-8-10 x speaking, doing, acting, "running around like headless chicken"


10. Feedback, feedback, feedback + adjust, adjust, adjust


11. Alignment between what you think, what you say and what you do - always, no compromise, total commitment, passion, common sense


12. Thinking, feeling, expressing and acting with your whole being not just your brain


13. No more rules than strictly required by the best form for the conditions of the moment


14. Do things your way, not the academic way


15. Cede control to the "edges" of the organization, to people who face and serve customers all day long, to people who have their fingers on the keyboard, not to the people who chit-chat socially while playing golf


16. Participation, participation, participation


17. Fun, fun, fun

+ the bonus point:  "It's the network, stupid!", i.e. networks of autonomous and interconnected interacting professionals shaping-up to deliver results, not some old-world pyramidal command-chain driven organization...