21st Century Organization

netWORK Beings

“Younger people have grown up with computers and networks in a way that older people haven't,” says Nicholas Brealey whose Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson comes out in November. “The younger generation built Web 2.0,” he says.

Future Files is cited amongst a review in Publishers Weekly of  numerous new management books where a few remarkable themes stand out: 

- the title of the review The Individual Man: Business Management for a new generation can only spark - are you kidding me?? but there are still some gems,

- instantaneous anticipation of respect (some 6 million new businesses were started last  year,

- young leaders are customizing their companies to fit their lifestyles and values (certainly the case with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos)

- leader as a whole person rather than a set of skills or techniques

- young people see themselves as more than a cog in a machine

- sense of individuality, high needs and expectations

- action for managers to “go green"

Other than the Future Files there did not seem to be many books carving out new management or organizational models for a networked world as I would have expected given the enormous social media shifts impacting business.  Put it under the rubric of Enterprise 2.0 which also happens to be a conference where colleague Jenny Ambrozek and I will be leading a discussion on Open netWORKING Organizations - Co-generating Business Value.

But in a stunning triumph of an article by Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stoopid? in the July/ August issue of The Atlantic Monthly I think I see the answers. The relentless march of technology to improve organizational effectiveness and efficency is not new. Any student of business knows of Frederick Taylor and his principles of Scientific Management As Carr describes:

Taylor's system is still very much with us: It remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor's ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its  legions of programmers are intent on finding the "one best method" -the perfect algorithm- to carry out every mental movement of what we have come to describe as "knowledge work."

We are still being Taylorized.

It was the opening of Carr's article characterizing his own awareness though of how his  thinking, patience for reading and writing has changed AW (after web) compared to BW (before web) which struck a chord.  Here is the netWORK being, the generation who's reading, surfing, interacting, expectations and instantaneous anticipation of respect is shaped by the technology.

He points to research which confirms some of these observations that Internet usage affects cognition. Quotes Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain that we become "mere decoders of information."

There is much to this article and it may rank right up there with Bill Joy's famous Why the Future Doesn't Need Us but I think there is a wake up call for those of us consulting to organizations on the intersection of technology and human performance.  We need to remember that workplaces need to be a balance of social and technological systems. Taylor has actually been given a bad wrap for years in that he was actually trying to make work more satisfying for the worker by optimizing efficiency. 

In our Enterprise 2.0 session we refer to the socio-tech balance as relevant today as Tavistock 50 years ago "If a technical system is created at the expense of a social system, the results obtained will be sub-optimal."  Looking forward to the next iteration of netWORK beings.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

 

 

<24 hours at Community 2.0: Revisiting Online Communities in Business 2004

Thursday May 15 in Las Vegas colleagues Victoria Axelrod, Bill Becker and I conducted our Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability Workshop as a post Community 2.0 Conference event.  Our sincere thanks to our participants who had the stamina to stay on after 3 days of meetings and contribute to conversations richer than we could have imagined.

As our workshop followed a "Community 2.0" Conference for reading matter on the flight out I dusted off a copy of Joe Cothrel and my 2004 Online Communities in Business Study.  Reading the conference program, and in the people I met during my less than 24 hours in Vegas, I saw our Report come to life.

Patti Anklam

It began at the Vegas airport connecting with keynote speaker Patti Anklam.  Participating in Patti's 2003 Emergent Learning Network opened my eyes to both the potential and value that comes from viewing organizations as networks, and intentionally putting human networks to work.  Patti was one of the 135 online industry professionals who contributed to our 2004 study.

Jim Cashel

Checking in at the Community 2.0 Conference as Wednesday's sessions were ending appropriately Jim Cashel, both a top 10 influencer and respondent to our 2004 study was the first person I met. (See Top Influencers Table page 21.)

Jim's Online Community Report and Sonoma Conference have become industry staples. His interview with the BBC's Robin Hamman in which Robin explains how the BBC must adapt in a world of low cost consumer participative media tools, remains for me the best ever explanation to media companies of how they must act. The interview is no longer online but from memory I recall Robin describing how the BBC must move from being "the conversation" to "lighting thousands of conversations".

Joe Cothrel

Joe's Community 2.0 presentation addressed "Successful Communities Start Here" and who better to do that.  Co-convening our 2004 study with Joe Cothrel followed years of bumping into each other at industry events beginning with the 1999 Vircomm in San Francisco. 

Collaborating on our study and presenting our findings at the Virtual Communities Conference, The Hague remains a professional highlight. (As this 2004 Virtual Communities Conference was Harry Collier and Infonortics last, our slides are no longer available online so I've reposted to Slideshare here.) Thank you, Joe.

Nancy White

Unfortunately I missed Nancy's Community 2.0 presentation that buzz tells me was a conference highlight.  Not surprizing of course.  Nancy (along with Howard Rheingold) emerged as the most cited influencers in our 2004 study. Thanks to Nancy's tools niftiness and willingness to share, her C2.0 Conference visualizations are available on Flickr. 

Amy Jo Kim

Also a favorite influencer in our 2004 study, the slides from Amy Jo Kim's Community 2.0 presentation "Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software" indicate why.

Lee LeFever

I also missed Lee's presentation but he too contributed to our 2004 study, and emerged as a most-cited influencer that continues through his CommonCraft.

Open Source- Factory Joe- Chris Messina

In 2004 two OCIB survey respondents cited "open source" as an influence. 4 years later at the Community 2.0 speaker dinner I found myself sitting at a table with open source aficionado Chris Messina.

CNET indicates Flock, of which Chris was a founder, started early 2005, after our 2004 study. Consider the range of tools, not to forget "Open Social", that have emerged in these short 4 years.  Clearly sifting the technology candidates today to update the timeline (page 5) from our 2004 study would be an interesting challenge.

The Wisdom of 135 2004 Study Respondents

Revisiting our 2004 study 4 years on was especially thought provoking as the wisdom of our extraordinary respondents appears profound. The 5 themes that emerged from analysing the open text responses (Chapter 2:Strategies) were:

1. Think Local and Real
2. Get Networking
3. Empower the People
4. Raise the Bar on Data
5. Advocate and Educate

"Get Networking" and "Raise the Bar on Data" have directed my focus over the last 4 years. Both are central to the Social Capital:Glue for Sustainability Workshop that took me to Las Vegas. (Slides are posted here.)

For me the bottom line, attention getting findings in our 2004 study (that I suspect are closely tied) were:

"Most organizations can’t measure return on investment (72%)

Many people still don’t understand what online community is (72%)"

I couldn't help wondering if Community 2.0 Conference attendees were surveyed about their ability to measure the value created through their initiatives, whether the situation had changed.

Rereading our 2004 report, page 11, I was intrigued to find we had concluded:

"Conceiving of online groups as networks that is, larger, more distributed, with a looser set of shared goals or understandings―may better prepare us for developing and managing online groups in the years to come."

From my experience studying organizations as networks over the past 5 years, and as we watch enterprise platforms incorporate social networking capabilities, that call is even more relevant today than it was 4 years ago. I wonder what you see?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Thinking about Open Network Business Models: Your Insights Invited

Victoria Axelrod (my 21stCenturyOrganization blogging colleague) and I are on deadline for Effective Executive, an India based business magazine published by ICFAI University Press. Working title of our piece is:

Open Net-Working Organizations - Co-generating Knowledge and Innovation

Our article explores themes we've blogged about here over the past 2 years, research for two recent Inside Knowledge Magazine articles ("Broadcasting Innovation: Organising to Connect Intelligence" and "Prediction Markets: Co-creating the Organisation", my Enterprise 2.0 Summit Hanover presentation, and our forthcoming Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability Workshop, May 5 in Las Vegas, following the Community 2.0 Conference. (As Victoria previously wrote please use code SPKRM2005 for a friends 20% discount if you can join us.)

We like to practice what we advocate so as our article is about open, networked, working we're sharing our article outline here and inviting fresh perspectives and contributions of interesting sources.  Our article focus reflects we are contributing to a special Effecutive Executive Knowledge Management edition.

Overview

"In a March 2007 "Long Live KM" online discussion through the AOK Group, Robert Buckman (described by Infoworld as "KM's father figure") wrote:

"Jerry, thank you for the kind words, but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge. It was because economic value could only be obtained in our environment when knowledge moved across the organization in response to a need."
~ Bob Buckman, March 6, 2007 AOK Yahoo Group Post

Two decades since Buckman's pioneering work to encourage and expand knowledge flow and innovation, taking a network view of organizations and using the tools of Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) facilitates creating open, collaborative organizational cultures. More importantly, an intentional open net-working approach aids understanding how "social capital value" is created in organizations through dynamic interactions and relationships between all of an organization's participants and stakeholders. Examples from our research and experience of organizations using new open network models to promote knowledge sharing, innovation and value creation are included.

While we will revisit open working models investigated in our Inside Knowledge articles:

• Qualcomm's Venture Fest using prediction markets
• The Bordeaux Energy Colloquium, a Think Tank Network,
• Executive to Executive Marketing Networks as implemented at Avaya
• Procter and Gamble's "Connect and Develop" and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive

we're also exploring approaches including:

• Boston Consulting Group's use of mapping tools to understand networks around patents and identify high potential talent. (Did they really just use Touchgraph as Manuel Lima suggests commenting on the Business Week article?)
• IBM's use of open network initiatives including sharing research with partners and clients. (Thanks to John Maloney for this paper find.)
• The innnovative and business critical collaborative knowledge sharing initiatives presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, Hanover.

In writing about open network approaches we're alert to investigating when such models appear not to work effectively. Hence we're striving to understand what caused Boeing's decentralized 787 supply chain to become a critical factor in the company's high profile and costly aircraft delivery delays.

Yesterday discovering Robin Teigland's presentation on Slideshare, (displayed as a "Related Slideshow" to my Hanover presentation), I was reminded of the potential value that can be created through openness in knowledge sharing. This is especially so when you intentionally start by "looking around" as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid encouraged in "The Social Life of Information", 2000.

Hence this blog post sharing our article themes and ideas. Any and all reactions to our focus and examples, insights into Boeing's supply chain issues, and or fresh insights and interesting open net-working business models are welcomed and appreciated.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability - WHY?

I recently attended a presentation given by a colleague who holds a senior position with a global financial services firm nominally on the topic of social capital and networks.  My colleague was open in admitting the the idea of organizational network analysis (ONA) had not yet been "sold" to the organization.

It seemed clear to me why it had not.  There was no business or strategic imperative stated that would make undertaking ONA of value to the organization.  Tactical benefits of identifying high performers (top talent) and information flows was the rationale- good for the current state of effectiveness and efficiency for today but that only helps you hold your own not give you a competitive advantage for the future.

If I do not have a context - Where is our business going and what are we trying to achieve to stay sustainable? my analysis will only confirm the present. Glazed eyes of senior execs. Maybe we bridge some gaps, however for all the effort the big gains are lost.

Making the strategy happen is what lights up business leaders. Being able to identify competencies and skill sets we need to make that future happen needs to be the rationale of the person proposing organization network analysis. Social capital is that illusive bond that your current talent may have and future talent need to be masters at building. 

Social capital is "created by a network in which the people can broker connections between otherwise disconnected segments" or "structural holes" according to Ron Burt. ONA exposes social capital opportunity - the external networks to be brokered by your current talent and new talent entering the firm - for innovation and growth.

Have you ever wondered why some firms seem to have cultures of constant renewal, regeneration and sustainability - it's their social capital capacity.

My partner Jenny Ambrozek just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 Summit at CEBIT in Hannover Germany where her presentation on Structural Holes addressed the importance of identifying the business driver up front.

We will be presenting our workshop on Social Capital:The Glue for Sustainability at the NJOD Annual Sharing Day on May 1st and Community 2.0 Conference at Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas May 15th.  For friends 20% discount use code SPKRM2005 when registering.

The business environment is too complex and moving too fast to not know your social capital capacity - your sustainability depends on it!

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

CIOs as Change Predictors

"CIOs who predicted the return of key innovation are the ones who can link up assets in their ecosystem, create efficiencies and are able to provide more value to customers."

In an interview with futurist James Canton, "prediction" was the favored stance for CIOs yet he claims only 35 to 45 percent of organizations have transformed their current business processes.  Trying to adapt the present while morphing into the future requires a forward thinking culture.

Prediction has always been the elusive brass ring.  No longer.  As change and complexity increase those who have mastery over predictive or emergent collaborative models will be in the forefront. 

It has become apparent that predictive tools and approaches provide multiple perspectives on data patterns that single approaches often miss. However articles on IT are still focusing on the 'hidden potential of IT" and CIOs.

Enterprise 2.0 has thrown us into a technology driven change warp. Any organization not understanding the dynamics of systemic or "echosystemic" thinking is living in the past. All of the organizational roles are equally as important to making a 21st century business successful but some have the benefit of marketplace drivers like technology to boost their roles to the forefront.

Still not convinced - one of the must read magazines for the IT inclined, The Industry Standard announced its rebirth as a suite of "prediction markets" -

IS features news and analysis that covers emerging technologies and companies, venture funding, acquisitions, site launches, and other developments in the internet space. Additionally, The Standard aggregates community knowledge in a quantified fashion, thereby ranking both the knowledge of the individual community members themselves, as well as the value of the information the community provides as a whole. This system is built as a prediction market, intersected with a reputation-based social network.

They clearly get it - participation is the new mindset and a prediction market is the means to tap participation.  In our recently published  article  for Inside  Knowledge on prediction markets  we interviewed some of the best software providers and summarized what we have found to be the key factors for success. If you would like a copy of the article let us know as the full piece is subscription only from Inside Knowledge.

Technology not withstanding, organizations need to value predictive information, aggregated from their whole network, to validate strategies and goals.

CIO, C suite executive or as we have found anyone in the organization can drive innovation if they understand the value of prediction to the bottom line.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

Sustainable Globalization - A 2008 Resolution

Sustainable Globalization is not an oxymoron.  In the last few days of finishing a book chapter on globalization it occurred to me that I have spent close to two years thinking, writing and consulting about the antiseptic "silicon" world while the "carbon" world has been grinding along half way around the planet, namely China. 

The New York Times ran a photo journal series on China - Choking on Growth which causes flashbacks to the US and other developed nations "industrial revolution".  China is not alone as other developing nations, India and Mexico, are keeping pace. We in the US complain about off-shoring, however what many do not realize is that by sending our manufacturing  elsewhere we have also off-shored our environmental issues.   But the chickens are coming home to roost.  We only inhabit one planet. 

"Corporate social integration" as Michael Porter reinvents the term corporate social responsibility has the unique capability to resolve the "tension between business and society."  Imagine leap frogging the 20th century industrial wastes in China by understanding that "business and society are interdependent."

Oddly enough our silicon advances have the capacity to bridge the gap by enabling rapid information sharing and collaboration.  China or any developing country does not need to repeat the unsustainable history of advanced countries.  There are limits to egregious consumption. 

Kimberly Simaha, one of our colleagues in sustainable energy is looking for cases to demonstrate the possibilities.  We link you to her video as an energy boost of its own!

Let me also introduce you to SeaChange founded by husband and wife team - Roger Payne and Lisa Harrow who use natures beauty and immutable laws to bring us to our senses about the state of our biosphere.

man is not the overseer of life but an integral part of life’s complex web, and that our survival requires that we attend not just to our own wellbeing, but also to the wellbeing of the entire web of life.

As Payne points out every religion begins with the notion that man has dominion over the earth - possibly to destroy or save it - but not if we acknowledge that we are only part of an ecosystem.

Hard facts and data appeal to some i.e. carbon foot prints and percent of land, water and fish loss, or global warming. Others are moved by finance  - the worth of all of our natural assets, and some by poetry and song.  Payne and Harrow bring both science and poetry together in an outstanding performance.

In the following weeks we and our writing colleagues will be speaking on various topics from our Sustainability Fieldbook -When it All Comes Together to be published by Geenleaf and AMACOM in the fall of this year.  You can join us on the journey in the Sustainable Enterprise Facebook Group where your participation is valued and we will keep you posted as events unfold. 

Look forward to hearing about your models of "sustainable globalization" from your companies in 2008.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

Verizon's OPEN for Business

Verizon’s leap into opening the use of their cell phone software to other companies is the result of a slow recognition of what Bill Gates’ Microsoft learned several decades ago. Gates was leapfrogging before the term came into use! Verizon saw the benefits of being open with their strategy.

They took the ritual of the industry’s slow evolution of thinking beyond the boundaries of organizational resources, product and core competence hugging plus the willingness to tolerate what appeared to be greater risk by experimenting with outsourcing and open sourcing before some of the behemoths of the industry.

There are of course always multiple factors that contribute to the kind of strategic decision Verizon has made. Certainly one factor is that it is often cheaper to buy hardware than to manufacture it given today’s manufacturing processes and low cost global labor. This is not far from the long-time practice of leasing facilities and equipment rather than buying, which leaves greater cash available for marketing, sales, research, innovation, application and service – to name a few, and of course much greater flexibility to move quickly. 

In addition, advancing technology now allows the integration of many applications into one small piece of hardware such as the cell phone. As Gate’s has proven, the opportunity cost of limiting software design and application to the hardware a company uses limits opportunity to sell what all customers want…to combine the features we think are best for our own particular use. Verizon’s decision expands their market opportunity by creating software and services that can be used by millions more customers.

It would not surprise me that a major contributor to Verizon’s decision was information they gathered through Social Network Analysis. By this decision alone, Verizon has opened their SNA opportunities to collaborate, learn, innovate, and expand their market presence, as well as reduced the constraints of hugging on to the limitations of their own equipment. Further, Verizon may now leverage and enhance their software applications based on the advanced hardware features of their new clients. Certainly an incentive to their clients will be their ability to use Verizon’s great transmission networks.

In the end, we will see more of this type of strategic decision making as the years go by, and at a much greater pace. We are just beginning to share knowledge and integrate that shared knowledge. Probably in the industrial age when things were slower and changes held static for decades it was wise not to share. However, that is a counter productive way of thinking and acting at the pace we work today. The sooner a company realizes the benefits of SNA and the advantage of being open to collaborative endeavors the sooner they will find that the risk is in not being open for business.

~ Bill Becker, Principal
Axelrod Becker Consulting

The Networked CEO

"...the Internet is an immensely powerful tool for multiplying human accomplishment—a goal that is central to the work of every manager and the design of every management system". Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel, in his recent  Moving Management Online Part One for Harvard Business Review Online admits that with all the social tools we have for collaboration, the democratizing effects of the internet and the complex demands of a globally connected economy management is still operating with much the same 20th century models - for NOW.

We have been advocating more relevant approaches for sometime yet collaborative models, which are not new have had glacial adoption.  Part of the slow uptake of these approaches is stalled by current management experts who have a vested interest in maintaining what is familiar.

Example: CEO Evolution 3.0 a recent New York Times article describes the 21st century CEO as one who "makes people feel part of a team" and "delegates", among other management 101s. Really! Feeling part of a team and acting are two different animals. The title is great but nothing new here.

Moving Management Online, on the other hand gets to the point quickly about the essence of management, especially in context of today's highly complex, uncertain and networked business environment.   

Figure 1: The Essence of Management - Hamel

At present it seems most organizations are very good at the aggregating side of the equation and less good at amplifying - just look at any talent management program or succession plan.  Generally, they are all about humans as assets and resources, inter -changeable  commodities.  Amplifying human capabilities takes deep understanding of behavior.

Enter a second dilemma for our waning management models which Hamel portrays as the "market-versus-hierarchy trade-offs".

Big bureaucracies can accomplish what markets alone can not.  Networks form the bridge between the two.

Figure 2: Markets, Hierarchies, and Networks - Hamel

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The social web, for those organizations courageous enough to embrace its enormous potential through networks, melds the best of both worlds.  Look at Innocentive, the  open marketplace created by Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical giant, to create new products. Or Avaya's Customer Councils supporting executive to executive relationships to generate partnered solutions.

"Power to Convene" is the Avaya story. Mark Bonchek, CEO of the Truman Company coined this term which is the chapter title in The Firm as a Collaborative Community. For a 21st century CEO or senior leader the "power to convene" is job one. In particular, recognizing the power to convene those who have both a stake in the challenge and the knowledge to contribute, be they internal or external to an organization.

Sean Maloney, EVP and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of Intel understands the power to convene. Starting in 2002, Maloney began an arduous task of bringing together the industry players to lay the basis for WiMAX, what will soon eclipse WiFi. The Road to WiMax story in   Business Week is a good primer for how to operate as a networked CEO.

Each of the key players he convened over five years, including Intel, has a unique business stake in seeing Wimax come to fruition.

"Intel was looking for something that would prompt consumers to buy new computers running its chips. Sprint needed an edge to set it apart from larger rivals Verizon (VZ ) and AT&T (T ). Mobile handset maker Nokia (NOK ) wanted to expand into providing communications services. And Samsung Group wanted to get into the networking equipment business. The interests of these four companies resulted in a pooling of patents and money to create the WiMAX phenomenon."[our italics for emphasis]

Leaders looking to find innovative management models need to look beyond the well lit cases, the old wine in new bottles, toward up and comers like Maloney.

Lowell Bryan, Mobilizing Minds author with Claudia Joyce (which my colleague Jenny Ambrozek reviewed) and Gary Hamel, The Future of Management were interviewed by McKinsey Quarterly to provide insight on innovative management. 

From their perspectives, tapping the collective intelligence of highly talented creative individuals is where value/competitive advantage will be created in the future.  Social technologies have already provided enormous "profit per employee" gains for the most successful companies.  However, innovative management is not yet in the DNA of most companies.  Strategy is still a top down process, and as Hamel points out " the top can hold the organizations capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt and change."

From our own experience in working with organizations around innovation and growth, knowledge may be distributed but power distribution is not and it is reinforced through enormous disparities in compensation.  Neither Hamel or Bryan take on the issues of wealth redistribution which needs to occur if we are to adopt their metrics of performance - return on capital (ROC) or profit per employee (PPE).  Compensation and reward are two of the last sacred cows of the 20th century which need to be addressed if we are to achieve innovative management and adoption of peer to peer networks.

Hamel plans a Moving Management Online Part 2 where he may address more of the challenges toward moving to innovative models.  In the meantime some lessons learned:

• Start with a business driver - Avaya needed to provide custom solutions when traditional products and services would not meet customer demands. Intel needed to create a new market.
• Co-create - Include customers, users, stakeholders, people with knowledge and diverse views to generate solutions.
• Use the periphery - reach to the edges of your known network to find new opportunities.
• Distribute innovation - as organizations continue to flatten, lateral, bottom-up, top- down, internal and external networks need to be tapped - Innocentive.
• Reward and compensate innovation.
• Use the "power to convene" - executive to executive networks can shape an industry's future - Avaya and Intel.

21st century leaders need to keep adapting and adopting a network approach if they are to move their organizations forward - old management models will not carry them to the future.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

Fast Company Masters of Design

The 2007 Fast Company piece makes fascinating browsing as it explores the "intersection of business and design".

The slide show is here.

Sam Lucente, HP's first ever VP of Design's observations about the value of design across the organization caught my attention, right down to a "Design Capability Index".

An interesting theme is the rise of environmental responsibility in design and architect/interior designer Phillipe Starck's focus on "good":

"The style of tomorrow will be the freedom and recognition of difference. We must replace the name 'beautiful' by the name 'good.' Beautiful means nothing."

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Looking for the Buzz around "Mobilizing Minds"

Thanks to Emilie Filou at World Business magazine I had the opportunity to review the latest McKinsey book Mobilizing Minds. 

I was reminded of the book seeing the overview article by Mobilizing Minds authors Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce in the latest McKinsey Quarterly.  I'd also revisited the book in the process of co-authoring an article on "Learning through Participation and Connected Intelligence" for Knowledge Tree the Australian Journal of Learning Innovation.

It's interesting looking at Mobilizing Minds in the context of Wikinomics and Wealth of Networks to help understand the evolution in understanding creating value through networks. Mobilizing Minds is important for focusing attention to the organizational structures essential to creating strategic advantage from the computing networking technologies that have transformed the way work gets done.

It occurred to me in reviewing Mobilizing Minds that:

"The real value and potential of the book..will be released by mobilising minds around it, extending the network and perspectives on the issues raised and filling the gaps identified by the authors."

Today I see just 5 blog mentions of the book in Technorati and as yet no customer written reviews on Amazon.

So here's my contribution to promoting discussion around Mobilizing Minds. Do you see, as the Amazon summary states, that "organizational design and redesign" is:

"the new model for survival in the modern, digital, global economy. With the right design, your organization will have the capabilities to pursue whatever strategy is necessary to compete on any scale, react to any market change, leverage any opportunity, and sail past the competition."

~ Jenny Ambrozek