“…the most significant factor was the state of a nation’s Social Technology. The rule of law, the existance of property rights, a well organized banking system, economic transparency, a lack of corruption, and other social and institutional factors played a far greater role in determining national economic success than did any other category of factors. Even countries with few resources and incompetent governments did reasonably well if they had a strong, well-developed Social Technologies. On the flip side, no countries with poor Social Technologies performed well, no matter how well endowed they were with resources or how disciplined their macroeconomic policies were.”

What community leaders of all stripes (local, state, government) should see in this statement is that the opportunity for using social networking technologies can have an even more profound effect for amplifying more general social technologies for supporting entrepreneurs. Clearly community leaders that embrace the adoption of these new tools for supporting their entrepreneurs will win. The entrepreneurs (and communities!) whose leaders ignore these trends will lose out.

Thank you to my colleague Greg Hennessy for bringing Beinhocker’s work to my attention.

The trends that Clay has spotted in his talk and his book are the general idea behind the specific focus of the Rise of the Enterprise Tribe that you have been reading about at this blog. Collective action of coordinated entrepreneurs are supporting the group getting better in the entrepreneur community of practice called the Enterprise Tribe.

In the bygone days of innovation, large corporations — like RCA, Xerox and the old AT&T — maintained internal laboratories like Bell Labs. These corporate labs were essentially research universities embedded in private companies, and their employees published academic papers, spoke at conferences and even gave away valuable breakthroughs. Bell Labs, for instance, created the world’s first transistor after World War II — and never earned a dollar from the innovation.Almost no corporate labs based on the Bell or Xerox model remain, victims of cost-cutting and a new appreciation by corporate leaders that commercial innovations may flow best when scientists and engineers stick to business problems.

The one item that I believe the New York Times misses in this article, however, is the role of how smaller organizations and even individuals will fill out the ecology, bringing many of the technologies  to market much faster than large industry can.  NY Times writer Pascal Zackary hints at this when he says: “Will these partnerships produce products you won’t get from two people in a garage?” Mr. Birgeneau asks. “We don’t know that yet. It is an important question.”  Yet, it will take not just industry and academia… but also startups and skunkworks to bring these technologies to market in an efficient, time-realistic manner.

This article is further evidence of the shift from a Knowledge Economy to a Knowledge Ecology.

This is my emphasis- business partners presenting Nintendo with new technologies and ideas… not just the fairly predictable 10% improvement that most companies rely on.  Knowledge Ecologies are going to dominate successful products and services into the future as we can see happening with Nintendo!

Tags: innovation, enterprise2.0, ExponentialEntrepreneurship

Meet Your Future Employee
And the up-and-coming generation puts a premium on work/life balance, having seen firsthand the toll working around-the-clock took on its parents. As a result, they tend to shy away from jobs that demand the 40-hour-plus workweeks typical of IT.

The businesses that figure out how to leverage the trends that the Millennials are expressing will thrive. Those businesses that fight these trends will suffer. What is your business doing to prepare for this shift?

1. The Superempowerment of the Individual: we’re entering a time that not only is it cheaper to build a business because the cost of doing so has gone way down, but also, a true shift to knowledge work is empowering entrepreneurs at a level that has never been seen before on this planet
2. Shifting from a Knowledge Economy to a Knowledge Ecology:  Talking about the Knowledge Economy is oh-so-1999.  Knowledge Economy companies used their old industrial mindsets to drive knowledge work.  Yet work changed, and now many of these old world companies are getting their lunch eaten by swift forward thinking competitors that know how to leverage human minds.  What is emerging is a Knowledge Ecology of providers of open knowledge flows.  Most interestingly, this shows us how even one individual, if he or she is prepared, can create their place in the ecology and thrive.
3. An Attitudinal Shift:  The Millennials (sometimes called Generation Y- individuals that are in their early twenties) are driving a new relationship with work… where work serves living (not the other way around).  Although many companies try to placate these new workers “helping them fit in” what entrepreneurs and companies need to see is that the Millennials are driving a new paradigm of work- that will dominate the way that all work gets done within this decade.
4. Superconductivity:  Social networking technology and word of mouth combined with these new attitudes are drastically shifting how ideas, technology, and life are perceived and adopted.  The world is in motion, and it is moving faster.  Some will see these changes as chaotic;  If you understand the underlying dynamics that are lowering the barriers between people, superconductivity can be leveraged for benefit.

How are you adapting to these trends? what do you see happening?  Let me know.

Blogged with Flock

Let me try to explain… When I mentioned “Superempowerment of the Individual” in my blog recently, several collegues immediately were drawn to think of the lower cost of production being what I was saying- that because cost are now so low, anyone can start a venture or make a business happen… but that is only part of the picture… To recognize the superempowerment of the individual, we must also see that our world is shifting out of the “labor tradition” to the “knowledge tradition”. By the labor tradition, I mean the idea that man’s body is just an extension of the machines that he used, all prompted by the Industrial Revolution, and that we must work harder to be more productive…. We have moved on beyond that. Ideas are what the world is made up now… yet it sickens me to see many of my brilliant friends still stuck in this old mentality… “If I work really hard around the clock somehow I will make it all happen”… resulting in over worked, over stressed individuals that can not use most of their brains to be creative and create solutions that uniquely solve the issues that their companies are facing. Do you really think that cranking on that spreadsheet is really going to produce blockbuster results if you did not sleep the night before? I doubt it.

We must escape the matrix of this historical thinking, and recognize that the tectonic shift towards knowledge work has begun, and is accelerating…. and if you are not finding ways to relax so that you can leverage your whole mind, you are going to get run over by this shift. Superempowered individuals take advantage of the lowered cost of production, and they escape the “extension of a machine” mentality.

The following image is part of a class that I present on this; To give credit where it is due, my this is a concept that I originally learned from Fernando Flores:

The problem that many of us, especially us Generation X’ers (and I would argue even more so for the Baby Boomers before us) is that work has changed, and we are just now learning about it… but emotionally, down deep, something just does not feel right about what the Milliennials (or Generation Y’ers if you prefer) are teaching us… which happens to be Conceptual Shift #3 from my forthcoming book… work is being restructured by the Attitudinal Shift of the Millennials… They might be younger than us all, they might not have the power that we have, but their ideas and desires are shifting all of us towards their way of thinking.  To ground this point, let’s look to Richard Florida, author of the Creative Class who recently stated on his blog:

The workplace is being re-organized radically away from the old bureaucratic corporation Alfred Chandler wrote about. The relationship between workers and their managers and tasks is changing. What people expect at work is changing too. Work and production organization are being reshaped; design and creativity have entered the picture in a big way. Production increasingly takes the form of globe straddling networks. Cities and communities are being reshaped, becoming more specialized economically, occupationally and demographically. We are in the midst of a great migration. Our culture is being radically reshaped.

Or, if you prefer, listen to one of the Milliennials directly.  Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Workweek (book and blog) tells us this directly with his concept of the four hour work week… His subtitle by the way is “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”.  This book describes how to de-engineer (not just re-engineer) your job, and focus on your life.  And for those of you who know me, yes, this is the book that I read this past June that had me cut back on my “work” (read that as “busy work”) and start producing real results while taking much more time off.  Thank you Tim.

The world that is coming is going to require you to learn how to superempower yourself.  Taking advantage of the lower cost of starting and running your business  is only a start.  Escape the labor-mentality Matrix, and free your mind up to create the ideas that truly innovate… or get run over while slaving it out in old-style thinking.

One of the biggest conceptual shifts that I see driving the entrepreneurial opportunities of the future  – what I call  “Exponential Entrepreneurship”- is the concept of the super-empowerment of the individual. Author John Robb writes about this concept in his book Brave New War, although he writes about it in terms of being a “global guerrilla” in a negative sense… but there is also an equally empowering opportunity for entrepreneurs of the world. Today’s news represents a tectonic shift showing the “super-empowerment of the individual/ entrepreneur”- here is an example of what the future is brining:
Trent Reznor, of the band Nine Inch Nails along with Radiohead and Oasis have just announced that they are not going to release their music through traditional channels, but directly to listeners side-stepping the major recording labels that they have utilized in the past.  Trent Reznor released the following statement on his blog two days ago:

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.
Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Exciting times, indeed.

Certainly, other artist, including my friend Sean, have been releasing music directly to their friends and listeners over the last few years… but what these announcements forebode is a major shift disrupting the existing music industry, in the favor of individuals (the artist, the listeners)…. creating a more intimate relationship between the two.  This ties directly into what the Wizard of Ads Roy Williams has been saying since 2003:

But in the waning years of each generation, “alpha voices” ring out as prophets in the wilderness, providing a glimpse of the new generation that will soon emerge like a baby chick struggling to break out of its shell.

Except Trent Reznor, Radiohead, and Oasis’ message is no longer a little chick struggling to break out of its shell.  Alpha voices no longer are “ringing out”… they are storming the castles of the existing order.

Entrepreneurs of the world should look to these trends for opportunities abound as industries of all types start being restructured.  This is not just a passing fad, but represents the way that we all will be doing business in the short future. Entrepreneurs recognizing and harnessing these trends will be empowered, while those who fight these trends will suffer.