The Future is Analogue

Last week, I attended the PurpleBeach launch event (check out the twitter stream at #purplebeachlaunch). It’s one of those events that got me again into hyper-reflection mode.

I was not really sure what the launch was about – initially I thought it was about the launch of a new consultancy firm – but once on site, it looked like being an experiment driven by Annemie Ress about “People Innovation”. Annemie had been heading HR and people efforts at eBAY, PayPal and Skype and I think she was not sure yet herself where this happening was going to land. She was maybe taken a bit by surprise by the number of folks who signed up for this invitation-only event – and in some way I liked a lot the authenticity of her and the team, being and staying open and curious about what could emerge from a gathering of about 180 folks of quite diverse “plumage”.

I got invited via MJ Petroni, owner and founder of Causeit.org. I met MJ last year when he and his team coached the Innotribe team on making quality team alignments and intentions. Petroni is mentored by Mark Bonchek, PhD, former SVP of Networks and Communities at Sears, now heading his own consultancy Orbit about pulling customers and communities in “orbit” around your brand. Enough credentials to follow-up on the invitation and checkout the event that took place in Audi Quattro Rooms, West-Side of London.

Day one started with some strange mix of “quite-ok” talks about mobile, big data, digital identity, trends, leadership, HR, and the blurred zone between HR and Marketing.

In essence, the glue binding the different activities was “business humanization” and “people innovation”. The basic premise that innovation in organizations does not happen without people rediscovering themselves in their full being, a rich combination of left/right brain activities, and greater levels of personal awareness.

And yes, there was some strange Californian “wu-wu”, “mindfulness”, “well-being” and poetry and artistic performance elements as well. After all, we were on the “beach”, a place where you can relax, be idle, and be open to whatever comes your way.

Day one was ok, but not more than that: I was more or less familiar already with the content presented, and was in search for the new insight, the new synthesis, the new “AHA” moment. Alas, I waited in vain for the muse to inspire me.

But Day-2 kicked off by a great discussion about being “on”-line all the time, after a presentation by a trends watcher about future trends, micro work, etc. The presenter was depicting a future of always-on, nowism and “on-ism”, a future where you have to check your smart-device or sensor every second to capture that 5 minute chunk of work on a worldwide marketplace for mechanical turks.

In the following panel, Doug MacCallum (ex eBay but still advisor to the CEO of eBAY and non-executive Director on the board of Ocado) couldn’t hold it anymore:

“What a horror! I don’t want to live in a future like that. People need their time off to reflect and recalibrate. This is a dystopian future”

Doug MacMallum almost got a standing ovation for his intervention, and just the fact he got the ovation is a proof of how deep “presentism” is disturbing our human lives. It was like some sort of relief going through the room.

He went on describing a practice of Executives not sending mails in the weekend, to respect their own free time and that of their collaborators. Great initiative, but I have seen such promises before, and in some occasions the executive is preparing her emails during the weekend, queuing them up, and releasing them on Monday morning, so you have your inbox loaded with fresh instructions and work (sic).

It made me think of Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book “Present Shock” (Amazon Associates Link), about the fragmentation of everything, including work and value, and the addiction that arises when you are not able anymore to step out of the digital time, back into analog time, where you still have some sense of time fluidity, rhythm, and relative perspective.

Penelope Trunk, co-founder of Brazen Careerist, recently wrote a great article in Quartz. I like the section on refusing to present your-self in a linear way:

Agents represent workers who pick and choose projects that match them rather than signing on for indefinite amounts of time. The Harvard Business Review calls this supertemping. Business Week calls it going Hollywood.

It’s about a deep desire for story and narrative, context, being part of something, being for the long haul.

But unfortunately, we are getting fragmented disassembled

UPDATE: @MayaDroeschler retweeted my post and linked it with metaphysics of pure presence, referring to the the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida who introduced the concept of deconstructivism, and who also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism). This is the space of famous architects like Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi. Readers who know me, understand that Maya touched my sensitive chord of love for architecture. Picture below from Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

But I got distracted The Quartz article also mentions new “modern” practices of young people selling stocks in themselves. This is about investing in – or probably better called “betting” on humans.

A “good” example is Upstart, a start-up opening their site with the slogan “The Start-Up is You.’’

Upstart was founded by a group of ex-Googlers, including Dave Girouard, who spent 8 years at Google where he was President of Google Enterprise and VP of Apps.

I can’t help it, but this starts smelling like slavery to me. You already knew that you were the “product” of Siren Servers like Facebook, Google, your bank, your insurance company, your health company; they are getting your data for free and can monetize it without compensation of the data originator. It’s getting worse now: we are now entering an era where one owns the life of another human being, worse even, takes options in somebody’s future and betting on it.

Jaron Lanier has recently published a great book about this “Who owns the Future?” (Amazon Associated Link)

I feel really sorry for otherwise very smart people Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Marc Benioff and other moguls for putting 5.9M USD in the last capital round of Upstart. I believe they are forgetting something very important here. This is in essence a form of digitizing of what it means to be a human being, digitizing the being into binary data blips, forgetting the rich set of emotions, senses and creativity we all can bring to the table. We are more than data present in the moment. We are part of a narrative, a story, an analog context.

Our “presentism”, just having that safety option to do that quick email check in the week-end, to check that Twitter status, the Klout and other scores are probably symptoms of something deeper going on: just having that capability is for some people already reducing the anxiety of loosing out on something.

Somebody shouted from the audience “But we are loosing the obvious!” – meaning loosing of being humans – and then a couple of “minutes” later, the quote of the day:

“The Future is Analogue”

I really believe it’s about loosing or sustaining our analogue human identity. Identity is contextual and one context is the time framework we want to function in. I’d prefer to live in the analogue time context; the way Doug Rushkoff described it: “What do we want: the long now or the short forever?”

This lead to my first “Aha” experience at the event: an experience about identity. As somebody quite active online, I try to be – and believe I am – the same person on-line or off-line. I don’t believe I have a different persona online of off-line. But online, I feel more the need to amplify myself  and my outgoing data streams, and at the same time trying the amplify and maximize the incoming streams of new data. But there is too much info out there, I feel indeed this anxiety to miss out on something. I also sense higher degrees of narcissism on-line, narcissism in the sense of self-amplification and promotion. What does that do with my identity? I think I am pretty the same online as in the real world… But “shaping” my online identity raises deep questions on who I am: as an individual, in a group, in the world at large.

Ron Shevlin @rshevlin, author of Snarketing 2.0 sent out this tweet on 28 Apr 2013:

“If identity is the new money,

schizophrenics have it made.”

It was in this mood of identity reflections when I entered a conversation with another Purplebeach participant: Jefferson Cann from Extraordinary Leadership, a soft-spoken gentleman bringing the topic of intimacy into the debate.

The word “intimacy” worked like a red flag on me. I explained Jeff how I was trying to stabilize/discover/re-discover my identity. His feedback was that he was not sure that one needs to fix/stabilize your identity.

“By fixing, you close yourself for being open to the moment, for the intimacy with the moment. The intimacy of the moment INCLUDES identity, so that the identity can flow, can evolve. In that sense, I hope that your MBTI of 10 years ago is not the same as your MBTI of this year, which would mean you have not evolved.”

This coming together of intimacy and purpose gave lead to my second big insight of the week, the second “Aha” moment.

My readers know that I am sick of the 10 min, 15 min, 18 min pitches and talks. I am hungry for depth, for richness of conversations, for going beyond scratching the surface. One of the reasons why I keep writing these long posts

The insight was that my hunger for depth is really a hunger for intimacy, the hunger for human connection, also on professional environments.

What does it really mean when a manager tells you: “You know, I am a pragmatic man, two feet on the ground, so can you please pitch me your story in one minute, and at the same time tell me what the ROI for the next 2 years will be?”

I suddenly realized that this famous pragmatism and two-feet-on-the-ground is probably a shield to hide from depth, from intimacy. It is a shield against the present that can even be used in Machiavellic ways to include/exclude people from connection. It’s a deep sign of uncertainty and insecurity, the fear of losing control, fear of human contact, the fear of opening up, the fear people will discover there is no substance, and fearing/knowing you cannot compete on content. It’s the fear of having to acknowledge that your leadership power only comes from your position in the hierarchy and not from who you really are.

As Glenn Llopis recently wrote in Forbes about “The 5 Things Leaders are thinking with not talking about”:

Leaders must find a new sense of maturity within themselves to address and navigate these new workplace issues with greater clarity, focus and intention. Leaders must be more proactive in coming to grips with today’s new normal.   In doing so, they must face their greatest fears head-on and get on with the business at hand.  The marketplace, the workplace and those whom they serve demand it.   Until they do, here are five things leaders are thinking, but not talking enough about: 

• I don’t have all the answers
• I have difficulty relating to the younger generation
• Diversity makes me uncomfortable
• I am uncertain about the future
• My leadership skills are not relevant

 

It looks like we are witnessing murder by modernity: murder of the human connectedness through the avoidance of intimacy. It looks like most of us – including our leaders – and not ready from the new normal. We need to send our leaders to “Purplebeaches”, so they find again time to reflect, to enjoy depth, to open up and embrace connections between fellow human beings.

UPDATE: as a real example of synchronicity, Jennifer Sertl just posted this awesome video about being human.

 

Some interesting insights:

• There is no off/on button for feeling an emotion
• How are we teaching people what is human vs. what is technical
• We have to re-enforce the usefulness of being human
• You can’t take care of yourself if your are at the same time taking care of a tribe
• Everything you do becomes part of a data piece
• Playing a higher personal – private – game
• Our ability to have empathy is impacted by technology

“We are loosing the obvious: what we are loosing is our ability to scenario plan, our ability to gain perspective, our ability to know ourselves, and our ability to empathise. Those four things is what separates us from the gadgets”

Life is not digital. The future is one of analogue connection.

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Innotribe Workshop “Network Insights for Growth” on 14 May 2013

On 14 May 2013, the Innotribe team is organising an exclusive invitation-only Innotribe Workshop at Level39, Canary Warf, London. The topic of this workshop is “Network Insights for business growth”.

This workshop is targeted at senior strategists who would like to discover how big data and scenario thinking can lead to early warning systems and new network insights to assist in business growth strategies.

Your organisation is indeed hyper-connected with your business partners. You are not alone. Billions of connected business, people, applications and devices and in future far more sensors, and transactions now add up to create unimaginable amounts of information. This new environment will require extraordinary insights and adaptability: It is as if we are a species from dry land that has to learn to live in the ocean. Already now, we swim in a sea of data and the sea level, so to speak, is rising rapidly. This new environment requires a new design for companies and network insights, representing both threats and opportunities.

The networks that we are part of can be looked at as dynamic fluid systems: the infrastructure of pipes creates a hyper-connected environment. The end-points in networks can be different entities: financial institutions, corporates, and market infrastructures, etc. And physically wired networks can host many different functional sub-ecosystems: some represent major traffic highways, others are more hub-to-hub topologies, others function as pure peer-to-peer exchanges. These different entities and sub-ecosystems also influence each other: they create “ripple effects” up and downstream, as well as “currents” that create significant interdependencies, like ocean currents.

During this exclusive invitation-only Innotribe workshop, we will explore the following topics:

 

• What if you could get deep intelligence about what’s going on in these fluid networks in real-time?
• How could that inform your growth strategies, long term scenario planning and policies?
• What if you could combine quantitative and qualitative network intelligence streams, and combine them with scenario thinking into real insights and possible early warning systems?
• How can you use network insights to inform your future scenario planning and strategies for growth?
• How we use these insights for better informed risk management policies?

 

“Network Insights for Growth” will be organized in the authentic Innotribe-way. We will bring together thought leaders in highly interactive conversations, facilitated by the renowned Innotribe team. In this year’s Innotribe events and workshops, we also try to limit the number of subjects covered, so we can experience deeper conversations and insights.

This “Network Insights for Growth” event will he held at and in collaboration with Level39, Europe’s largest accelerator space, where technology, accelerator and innovation companies are being invited from around the world to come and run their startup and accelerator programs, in one of the most inspiring spaces in London. Situated in the heart of one of the most advanced ‘smart cities’ in Europe, Level39 occupies the entire 39th floor of Canary Wharf’s iconic One Canada Square.

We will start at 10:00am UK on 14 May 2013 with planned closure of the workshop around 4pm UK. With plenty of informal networking opportunities and informal conversations during the networking breaks and lunch. This event is free-of-charge.

If you like to attend this exclusive workshop, please contact me and I will get you your personal invitation. Number of seats is limited.

Looking forward to continue our critical dialogue in London on 14 May 2013.

Detailed program:

10:00 – 10:15                       Welcome and Introduction

• Fabian Vandenreydt – Head of Markets Management and Core Business Development -  SWIFT

 

10:15 – 11:45                       5 different lenses (15 min talks by)

• Kimmo Soramäki – Founder and CEO - FNA (Financial Network Analytics)
• Daniel Erasmus – Owner – DTN (Digital Thinking Network)
• Simon Small – President – Arria NLG (Natural Language Generation)
• Walid Jelassi – Transformation consultant information management and analytics – Hewlett Packard
• Anant Jhingran – VP Data Strategy – Apigee (tentative)

 

11:45 – 12:00                       Break

12:00 – 13:00                       Interactive workshop

13:00 – 14:00                       Lunch

14:00 – 14:30                       Taking Stock

14:30 – 15:30                       2^nd Interactive Workshop

15:30 – 16:00                       Conclusions, next steps and wrap-up

We plan to continue the conversation on this topic during this year’s Innotribe@sibos in September 2013 in Dubai. During the May workshop in London, we hope to establish a solid baseline as a stepping stone for our in-depth sessions on “Scenario Thinking” and “Network Insights” in Dubai. Earlier this week, i posted a preview of our 2013 Innotribe Sibos program.

 

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Innotribe Sibos Dubai 16 – 19 Sep 2013: preview

This year, our annual flagship event Innotribe@Sibos celebrates its fifth anniversary. Running throughout Sibos week, the event offers a comprehensive programme exploring a range of topics crucial to the financial industry.

Innotribe@Sibos in Dubai will once again bring together a powerful combination of world experts to participate in an exciting mix of keynote sessions, case studies, and interactive immersive discussions and learning experiences.

Last year in Osaka, the Innotribe space was a fantastic spacious tent in the middle of the conference patio. It just looked gorgeous! This year, we have a really big conference room accessible from the main conference area through a tunnel. The tunnel will be a magical transition between the more traditional Sibos environment and the subterranean Innotribe Space. The tunnel will also serve as an area for exposition, informal gathering and special multimedia experiences. I have seen some early designs for the space and tunnel, and it all has a very “clubby” feeling to it. It made me think of clubs of the 80’ies with a Vive-la-Fête feeling to it. Just play the video/music below while you read the rest of the post: you’ll get into the rythm

The space and the tunnel are part of the experience, and therefore the tagline for this year’s Innotribe@Sibos is

“There is light at the end of the tunnel”

creating a positive inspiring environment, looking into the future with a mindset of progress, hope and purpose.

Programme

Building on the feedback we’ve received over the last few years, we have tried to observe the following principles in the design of this year’s programme:

• Less topics, but more depth;
• Keep the freshness and relevance of the themes and topics;
• Keep the uniqueness of the Innotribe format: highly interactive and immersive group learning experiences;
• Discovery, awareness, future oriented;
• A healthy mix of technology and non-technology subjects (societal impact);
• Introducing the concept of “journeys”, so that you can follow a track from A-Z as a learning curve, or pick and choose depending on your familiarity and expertise with the topic;
• Our ambition remains to co-discover, co-design, co-create and co-deliver.

We have selected four major themes that will be:

Value/Wealth 3.0

• Continuing from previous conversations on The Future of Money, Banks for a Better World, Social Business, and the great re-definition of wealth and well-being. New are topics on Design Thinking, Investment Management 2.0 and Intangible Assets. We have also partnered with www.happathon.com to crowdsource a global measure of well-being versus wealth.

Innovation 3.0

• Or the re-invention of innovation. In many organisations, the discussion about innovation is hampered by a low quality and polarizing dialogue; incremental vs disruptive, core vs non-core, internal vs external. We can do better: there is a simple line running from where companies were and the processes they needed thirty years ago to a highly externalized enterprise that carries new rules and needs new processes.
• We will also discuss new models from other industries and emerging markets – Jugaad, Shanzai, Reverse Innovation – and inject new thinking modes like design thinking, scenario thinking, business model thinking.
• Last but not least, we will engage you in an interactive game/experience to discover a day in the lifetime of a creative banker.

Start-me-up 3.0

• Whereas the previous two streams are maybe more conceptual, this stream is all about actual innovations, where the “rubber meets the road”.
• In “The future is already here”, we have invited some awesome speakers that will shake the tree and showcase some mind-blowing innovations in financial industry.
• We will also discuss the outcome and ways forward for the “Hypertribes” model, a possible new way to accelerate innovation for the industry at large.
• This stream culminates in the Grand Finale of the Innotribe Start-Up Challenge 2013.

Network Insights 3.0

• The networks that we are part of can be looked at as dynamic fluid systems. What if you could tap into the intelligence buried in these data currents?
• What about combining quantitative and qualitative data streams that lead to early warning systems for growth and resilience that can inform future scenario thinking? Could these new technologies lead to new insights for better informed risk management policies?
• Topics include network cartography, natural language generation, fraud detection, and pattern recognition.

Throughout the week, we will use the tunnel as a hospitality and exposition zone, with fascinating demos about artificial intelligence, augmented reality and multi-media interactivity. And as usual, the whole program is peppered with a whole range of props, humour and fun.

The Innotribe Startup Challenge 2013 introduces the world’s most promising FinTech and financial services start-ups to the global community of financial institutions, venture capitalists, angels and influencers actively investing in innovation. Innotribe@Sibos will host the Grande Finale of the 2013 Challenge, following regional showcases in the America, EMEA and APAC.  From a total of more than 200 candidates, the 15 very best start-ups of 2013 will compete in front of a live audience and professional judge panel for a cash price of 50,000 USD.

Who should attend?

Innotribe@Sibos is open to all who come to Dubai. It brings together strategists, business and technology leaders, trend-setters and trend-watchers, and thinkers interested in taking action and shaping the future. In short, anyone keen to find out how the world is changing and what that means for our industry.

Why attend?

Join us to discover new business and technology trends; share and discuss ground-breaking ideas for co-investment; and challenge each other to build theoretical concepts into tangible prototypes in professionally facilitated workshops.

Conclusion

Innotribe at Sibos 2013 will celebrate its fifth edition with four days of intense inspiration and interactive immersive learning experiences. This is the place to get inspired, where you can share and discuss ground-breaking ideas, connect with great people, challenge each other in professionally facilitated workshops, and most of all… have fun.

Innotribe is about being infected

by irresistible contagious enthusiasm

of open-minded, curious

and passionate people

You can follow the progress of our program on the Sibos website as speaker announcements continue between now and September. Follow our daily tweets at http://twitter.com/innotribe or visit the website to find out more about  all Innotribe-related sessions at Sibos: www.sibos.com

We look forward to seeing you in Dubai!

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Cross-Posted on Innotribe Blog

www.sibos.com

www.innotribe.com

Twitter: @innotribe and @petervan

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Amplify Festival 2013: Shift Happened > Transformation Required

Amplify Festival of Innovation & Thought Leadership-powered by AMP and now is Australia’s largest business innovation gathering of world-leading experts, entrepreneurs and thought leaders.

Theme

Amplify Festival 2013 is themed: Shift Happened > Transformation Required. It will explore the irreversible shifts triggered by the triple revolution of digital, social and mobile technologies and the implications for business models and business transformation, including the Future of Work.

Who attends

Now in its 10th year, Amplify is both AMP’s internal catalyst for change AND open to the public. Already 12 CEOs and 24 C-suite executives from Australia, Singapore, Japan, and China’s leading corporations have snatched up the limited number of tickets (only 80) reserved for business leaders of the Asia-Pacific region.

Please don’t keep this a secret- your clients and friends will love you for passing on this opportunity to deeply engage with today’s business transformation challenges!

International cast of 35

Check out the depth of international thought leaders around Emerging Trends and Disruptive Technologies, Skills for the Future, Business Model Transformation; Enterprise Systems, Multi-channel Immersive experiences and Organisational Change that will be speaking at Amplify Festival.

People like Lucy Marcus ( From Reuters’ “In the Boardroom with Lucy Marcus”); Jason Pontin ( Editor-in-Chief MIT Technology Review); Saul Kaplan ( Founder Business Innovation Factory) , Peter Vander Auwera ( Founder Corporate Rebels and Innovation Catalyst for SWIFT’s Innotribe); Howard Lindzon ( Founder & CEO Stocktwits), JP Rangaswami (Chief Scientist Salesforce) ; Sherwood Neiss (Founder & CEO Crowd Capital); John Heinsen ( Digital Producer OSCARS), Michael Schrage ( MIT Media Lab) , to name but a few of the international cast of 35!
Tickets

The full programme can be viewed and tickets purchased via the website at http://www.amplifyfestival.com.au

The Early Bird (Festival pass) offer closes 15 April. We also offer day passes, breakfasts, workshops, our ever popular $10 event, The Bright Sparks Pitch Night for PhD Students and free access to the EXPO in Sydney on 7 June.

Call to action

This is going to be the biggest ever Amplify! If you are a leader in a large corporation today, can you afford NOT to be there?

Cheers!

Annalie Killian
AMP Director of Innovation & Amplify Festival,
Twitter: @Amplifyfest @Maverickwoman

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Innotribe finalist in HBR/McKinsey Challenge

The Innotribe team is super thrilled having been selected as finalist for the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize Challenge on “Innovating Innovation”. The judges and the MIX editorial team poured over more than 140 contributions from innovators from around the world and from every kind of organization—looking for depth, boldness, originality, thoroughness, and the ability to inspire and instruct in equal measure.

This is a fantastic recognition of our work of the last 5 years, especially if you look at the high-caliber of the judges of this challenge, a real who’s who of leading management thinkers and progressive practitioners, including:

• Scott Anthony - Managing Director, Innosight Asia-Pacific; author, The Little Black Book of Innovation
• Tim Brown - CEO and President, IDEO
• Henry Chesbrough  - Professor, UC Berkely; author, Open Innovation
• Jeff DeGraff - Professor, University of Michigan; author, Innovation You
• Gilberto Garcia - Chief Innovation Officer, CEMEX
• Gary Hamel - Co-founder of the MIX
• John Kao - Chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation; author, Innovation Nation
• Jim Stikeleather - Chief Innovation Officer, Dell Services

Winners will receive significant recognition as management innovators on the MIX, Harvard Business Review and HBR.org, the McKinsey Quarterly and McKinseyQuarterly.com. Winners will also earn the chance to appear at future live events hosted by the MIX and its partners.

UPDATE 20 Feb 2013: we just learned that we did not win. Pity. But still proud to have made it to the last 24 finalists !

UPDATE > PRESS COVERAGE

• Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-28/the-people-who-practice-everyday-everywhere-innovation.html
• Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/the_people_who_practice_everday_everywhere_innovation.html

 

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Who Am I, Really?

This post is an extract from my first guest post on WE THE DATA http://wethedata.org/2013/01/08/who-am-i-really/

I have always been intrigued by identity. Physical-world-Identity or Digital-Identity. But “digital” is an outdated adjective, used my pre-millennial friend to make the distinction with the world as they used to know it.

Today, it is ONE environment, blurring the contours of who-I-am as a human being in flesh and blood and with my own mind, thoughts, and consciousness. Both my body and my mind are getting increasingly augmented and complemented by tools, by ecology of machines, networks, and algorithms. That ecology of an emergent self-correcting organism was labeled as “The Technium” by mastermind Kevin Kelly.

We probably have to invent a new word for this “one environment of me”: maybe the word “Dysical” – as a contraction of Digital and Physical – could do the job?  But it is more than one word we need. We need a new language, a new vocabulary, a new grammar; new ways to create the sentences and the narrative that can capture this new form of being. And when we have developed basic literacy in this new language, perfect it like art, like literature, like poetry, for deep and rich self-expressions of the “Dysical-me”.

That rich self-expression will needed a new data order, caused by ubiquitous connectivity and an increasingly pervasive computing environment, and generating two massive transformations: the enablement of peer-to-peer relations, and the explosion of data: big data, small data, augmented data, fast data, real-time data, etc.

I believe it is time to start reflecting on a P2P “Data-Economy”. Thanks to the ubiquitous connectivity, nodes in a grid can now interact and share with each other without central body or governance. The emergence of the Bitcoin currency is a typical example how new and probably more robust and resilient currency exchanges are possible without central banks, central governance.

My “Dysical-Self” is also getting more and more defined by my context and reputation in this new P2P data-economy. My identity not any longer simply equals my identity number or my digital certificate or passport. My identity is deeply correlated with my relationships with other people and other nodes in the grid. Trust suddenly gets defined at the level of the relationship, not at the level of identity.

That sort of trust will also be very much related to our reputation. Whether that reputation is as self experienced with our human antennas, deducted by algorithms (Klout, Peerindex, Kred,…) or Socially Vouched (LinkedIn, Connect.me,…)

It will require some form of Cloud Operating System, where our mobile device becomes the remote control of our personal and interoperable Data Clouds.

But one could go on step further, where we think beyond the device. Dhani Sutandto , Senior Digital Art Director and the creator of the Oyster Card Ring recently indeed quoted in PSFK Magazine:

“There will be mobile devices but they will be something that you would wear discreetly, without making you look out of place. Instead of constantly looking down at a screen, people will wear something discreetly. Your interaction with technology won’t
be gone, but it will be seamlessly integrated and we will therefore look up and interact in a human way with one another.”

Indeed, when trillions of devices are inter-connected, we need to think beyond the context of the “device”. Device is no longer the context. We – the “Data-objects” – are the context, are the interface:

“We are the data”

And we – the data – will need a common interface to deal with our Dysical Identity, to deal with Access, Trust and Grid-Literacy.

There is more context on the WE THE DATA web-site http://wethedata.org/2013/01/08/who-am-i-really/ with thanks to Juliette Powell for giving the opportunity to share these ideas on a broader scale.

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Innotribe: a tribe of innovators in the financial industry

Just a couple of days ago, I submitted our entry for the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange) HBR/McKinsey M-Prize Challenge. This challenge is about Innovating Innovation and will be judged by some of the greatest thinkers in innovation

Please find below our submission. It is taking stock of a number of innovation evolutions we went through since the start, and also gives some hints on where we will focus in 2013. Enjoy, and if you like what you read, please support us with your “like” on the M-Prize page here.

SUMMARY

Launched in 2009, Innotribe www.innotribe.com is SWIFT’s initiative to enable collaborative innovation in financial services. Innotribe fosters creative thinking in financial services, through debating the options (at Innotribe events) and supporting the creation of innovative new solutions (through the Incubator, Startup Challenge and Proof of Concepts).

CONTEXT

SWIFT www.swift.com is a member-owned cooperative that provides the communications platform, products and services to connect more than 10,000 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 212 countries and territories. SWIFT enables its users to exchange automated, standardised financial information securely and reliably, thereby lowering costs, reducing operational risk and eliminating operational inefficiencies. SWIFT also brings the financial community together to work collaboratively to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest.

TRIGGERS

The initial triggers for having a specific innovation focus and creating a dedicated tem was driven by both product and culture requirements.

Product: A good example of a product requirement was the need for a product for low volume customers. Typically, existing products targeted the top and medium segment of our customers, but we did not really have a product for low volume customers. A black-belt team was formed and delivered a brand new product in one-year time. The team not only revamped the product functionality, but also revised fundamentally the buying experience, on-boarding, pricing model, and business UI experience.

Culture: Given the nature of its business, SWIFT has a strong company culture of “Failure-Is-Not-An-Option” (FNAO). Although this culture was inspired on the Apollo 13 mission, where the NASA team would do “whatever it takes” to get the three astronauts back from space, and learning from mistakes, over the years the FNAO mantra was at times misinterpreted as a culture of no-risk taking, not coming up with ideas challenging the status quo, not daring to step forward. We wanted to create a culture where “failing smart” was accepted. To that end, we created a number of tools and techniques to enable collaborative innovation. One example is our own “sandbox”. The concept is introduced on Kosta Peric’s Forbes blog here. Kosta is SWIFT’s Head of Innovation, and has documented the history and activities of Innotribe in a recently published book “The Castle and the Sandbox” available here.

The sandbox is an “incubator” – a protected place where people with ideas can “play”, or to try out their ideas, without impacting the castle. The “castle” is the metaphor for the mothership, the core of the company. The incubator is the place where you can try, experiment, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually learn and succeed.

We also offer tools to the SWIFT employees like Idea Challenges, Brown Bags, Hackatons, and internal TEDx-like events to encourage team members to learn from the edges, to step forward and to reward initiative.

KEY INNOVATIONS & TIMELINE

Innovation team started in 2007 when the new CEO came on board

• Prototyping was introduced when one of the innovators challenged an executive on a proposed new product line. The executive agreed in funding 2 competing prototype teams, one for his own idea and one for the idea of the innovator. Each team had to pitch their idea and prototype head to head in front of the full executive team. To the surprise of many, the prototype of the innovator won.
• Initially, the innovation team was seen as a fast product development shop where the end deliverables were software products. Black-Belt teams were formed per product, and end-to-end delivery cycles were reduced from 3-5 year to 1 year.
• End 2008, based on an in-depth internal customer review, the scope of the team was re-defined as an unit within the company for enabling collaborative innovation
• The Innotribe brand was launched in 2009 during SWIFT’s flagship event “Sibos” in Hong-Kong.
• Initial focus of the revamped Innotribe was on idea generation and creating serendipities
• By end 2010, we had in place:
  • An innovation framework based on open innovation;
  • A portfolio of tools and techniques for internal (SWIFT as a company and ecosystem) and external (the financial industry at large) innovation. Most of these tools and techniques were used to create the initial tribe and ideation for the open innovation pipeline;
  • A group of internal ambassadors, called “megaphones”;
  • A successful event and facilitation practice
• In 2011, the Incubator and the worldwide start-up challenge were added to the mix and we further scaled and perfected our existing tools and techniques. The incubation phase was particularly important as for the first time we had a multi-million dollar fund for investing in promising innovations.
• By end 2011, our Innotribe “brand” was considered the most important brand SWIFT launched in the last 30 years.
• In 2012, we explored the Acceleration phase to progress the most promising incubation ideas through different forms of co-investment.
• In 2013, we will continue and further increase our innovation efforts, with a greater focus on the core activities of the company for internal innovation, and exploring novel funding models for our external innovation.
• In 2013, we will also experiment with “Innovation Journeys”, a model for enabling business units to win though co-ideation, co-creation, co-delivering. We also plan to complement our existing toolset with scenario planning and story-telling.

CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS

Here are some of the key implementation challenges that had to be overcome:

CEO as sponsor is instrumental:

• When a new CEO came on board in 2007, he made it crystal clear that innovation was one of his big bets.
• A CEO can make or break the innovation agenda, and set the direction and ambition for disruptive innovation or not.
• A CEO “protects” the innovators from anti-bodies who try to fight change.
• A CEO can “force” certain innovation projects to go ahead.
• A CEO can open the door for skip-level meetings to have a direct contact with what’s happening in the field

Executive alignment. Having the CEO as sponsor is one thing, having the whole Executive Team (and the subsequent hierarchies) aligned is another thing.

• In 2008, the company engaged in a company wide “Lean” efficiency exercise. Part of the methodology includes an internal customer satisfaction survey: it became clear that the executive team was not aligned on the mission of the innovation team. Expectations ranged from a pure R&D shop to a facilitating unit.
• The Lean methodology facilitated clarity on the direction of the innovation team: it was collectively agreed that the mission was to enable collaborative innovation.
• Any company wide program with executive attention is a great opportunity for getting executive alignment on innovation.

The concept of “enablers”.

• The incubation projects are funded by the Incubation Fund, a 100% SWIFT Fund.
• To help us deciding where we put our funds, a group of “enablers” was created. This is a group of senior leaders from our industry ànd from outside our industry. They have been selected for their authority and influence as persons, not necessarily because of the organization they represent.
• The role of the “enablers” is to “enable” incubation projects. This is NOT a killing committee or gating process to say “no”. It’s a group of wise people saying “yes” to projects and bringing enabling assets to the table such as contacts, experiences, trend validation, etc

Megaphones iterations.

• Very early on we started with the idea of “Megaphones”, some sort of internal innovation ambassadors in different departments of the company.
• In the initial version, megaphones were “volunteered”, their mandate was unclear and their management was not motivated or incentivized.
• In version 3.0 we got it more or less “right”: we have a novel and very transparent megaphones recruitment campaign, megaphones now have a clear mandate, spend 15% of their time on innovation related activities, and this is part of their objectives, and signed-off at the begin of the year by their managers.

The importance of communication.

• If there is one big recommendation it is “communicate like hell”. If “they” don’t know what you do, they can’t support it, they can’t leverage it, and they can’t sponsor it.
• Although we were doing a lot of the right things, not many people in the company really knew what we were doing. When we were dumping at the end of the year the list of our activities, many people were surprised of all the things that went on.
• For external communication we struggled for finding the appropriate bandwidth from our own communications department. The good intentions were there, not the bandwidth. In the end we mutually agreed with our communications department to hire our own external communications agency. For internal communication, we gave one person in the team that responsibility, and we leverage as much existing communication channels like our corporate intranet, Yammer and Chatter.

Being creative with funding.

• When coming up with new ideas, we heard several times an enthusiastic “yes, you should do that, but you have to stay in your existing budget”. So we explored alternative ways of funding such as sponsorship. 
• A good example here is our Start-Up Challenge that has become fully self-sustainable through sponsoring. This Start-Up Challenge is probably one of the most visible initiatives now of Innotribe. In 2012 more than 600 start-up companies were screened during 3 regional competitions (one for the Americas, one for EMEA and one for APAC), and the two winners get away with a 50K$ cash price. The basic objective of this initiative is to bridge the gap between the start-up community and the heads of innovation of the financial industry. Success story: Mastercard acquired the winner of the 2011 edition in 2012 for 40M $.

Financial: own P/L

• Our best motivation is when third parties pro-actively approach the Innotribe team and ask whether they can buy our services.
• In 2012, we had our first innovation consulting and facilitation contracts.
• Some of the challenges we had were related to accounting of these new revenue and cost streams. In a bigger corporation, it is not so self-evident to create a different P/L and decide what revenues and costs have to be allocated to that new P/L. To be continued…

Legal/Governance: by-laws of the company

• SWIFT is a non-profit co-operative. Certain innovation ideas that are for profit and/or for the benefit of only a subset of the community would require a change in the by-laws of the company.
• The governance of the company is based on a long tradition of customer consultation and consensus making. For example, our 10,000+ members are represented through 160+ National Member Groups. Consultation takes time, and sometime we want to move faster. We have learned to live with some of these constraints, to choose our battles, and remain passionate, perseverant and patient.

BENEFITS & METRICS

The benefits of Innotribe can be clustered in to three “Impact” vectors: brand, revenue, and people

• Brand
  • The Innotribe-brand has a strong positive effect on the overall SWIFT-brand. During our 2011 Innotribe at Sibos event in Toronto, our CEO referred to the Innotribe brand as the “strongest brand SWIFT has produced in the last 30 years”
    • The Innotribe-brand is omni-present at internal and external SWIFT events
    • Our design and facilitation techniques create an immersive learning experience
    • Our curation expertise brings the finest speakers, igniters and subject matter experts to our staff and to our community
    • Customers declare it is “their” Innotribe
    • All our activities are appreciated for their freshness, deep design philosophy, and accessibility.
    • The brand reflects innovation, collaboration, youth, dynamism, and novelty.
  • The Innotribe brand is now strong enough to attract dedicated sponsoring, and initial explorations with an own P&L. We are humble enough in knowing that our brand is and will get a substantial part of its value from the connection with the “mothership” SWIFT.
• Revenue
  • From very early on in the Innotribe history, we are getting challenged on the tangibility of our deliverables, how much they contribute to the company strategy and how much they contribute to the revenue objectives.
  • It is not always easy to find a fine balance between seeing innovation as a means for supporting short-term sales objectives, and innovation as a means to re-define the agenda.
  • A great success story is one of the incubation projects “MyStandards”. As one of the first true incubation ”sandbox” projects, a dedicated team with its own scrum master delivered a new product in one year time, with first paying customers and revenue contribution 3 months after production launch.
• People
  • Our internal innovation activities touched more than 50% of the company during face-to-face meetings, workshops, events, and facilitation assignments.
  • More than 10% of the staff participated in our innovation challenges
  • Several ideas from the challenge have been implemented
  • But we feel we have to communicate better, at all levels: senior management, middle management, and the workforce at large.

Metrics used

• Most of our metrics are quantitative and in essence about influence: we measure people reached, number of events, number of facilitations, number of ideas, velocity of ideas from ideation phase to incubation phase, etc
• We regularly perform NPS (Net Promoter Scorecard) surveys. Participants to our events are very satisfied; non-participants (those who never attended) are skeptical and give us lower scores. Another reason why communication is so important
• We are not (yet) measured on revenue contribution, but we start feeling the heat in the general crisis-climate of the financial industry, with a tendency to proving short team bottom-line results.

We have also seen some unintended side-effects

• Tribe behavior. Our events are really special: we architect serendipities and immersive learning experiences. We create connections at people/human level. Our customers love it. We see tribe behavior – like fans for life, groupies – and return customers, who come back only for the Innotribe vibe and connections.
• We did not plan for it, but in 2012 we are seeing the first customers – both from inside and outside our industry – soliciting us for paid facilitation, consultation and event services.
• We are also very much in demand by our internal departments. This creates capacity challenges. The biggest challenge is to remain focused and dare to say no. We also have decided to do certain internal/external engagements only against a fee and covered T&E.

LESSONS

Here are some of the most important lessons that other organizations should learn from our Innotribe experience.

Communicate like hell: it’s extremely important to communicate what you do.

• Hire a PR agency fully dedicated to your external communication. Design with them a communications plan, plan press events, plan regular press interviews, invite press to your events. Use social media tools like Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Chatter, etc
• It may sound obvious, but have a website explaining what you do, what your methods and tools are, what your deliverables are: this should be the landing page for press and other communication contacts.
• Appoint at least one person responsible for internal communication. Communicate everything: success stories and lessons learned. Celebrate experimentation, celebrate success. Have small ceremonies for winners of internal challenges. Organise brownbags, hackatons, special staff events

Think in terms of an “Innovation Portfolio”

• We recommend you start thinking in terms of an “innovation portfolio”, highlighting how many projects and/or how many budget you will allocate to different areas of innovation: innovation in the core, adjacencies, new functionalities, new territories aka disruptive innovation. 
• Make sure you have some quick wins in core and adjacencies; it will help you getting credibility for doing more disruptive stuff later.
• Keep fighting for disruptive, don’t get complacent or discouraged, it is your mission to challenge the status quo relentlessly.

Accept craziness, stealth work, but capitalize on what works

• Innovators do things differently: withhold some ideas that initially sound crazy or impossible.
• Stealth work. Sometimes you have to walk on thin ice and do actions behind the scenes that are not fully in line with the script or standard procedures. This does not need to be done in secrecy: you can do stealth work in full transparency with your Head of Innovation and your CEO.

Passion, Perseverance, Patience

• Innovation is challenging the status quo. Many people in your organization don’t like change. They will challenge you. They will fight you. Just accept this as part of the job. Don’t get too frustrated too much by it. And if it gets too much, get yourself a trusted friend with whom you can share your frustration, and get on with it.
• Your passion is infectious and viral. Talk to as many as possible people in your organization and keep the conversation going. When they see the passion in your eyes and your irresistible enthusiasm, they will follow.
  
• Don’t “force” innovation but do “coach” and enable innovation. The metaphor is that of a parent learning a child to bicycle: at a certain moment, you have to release, let the child experiment and fail until it can bike on its own. 
• Be patient. Sometimes you have to live with the constraints of your organization, and accept it will take time to get where you want to be
• Innovation is human business

Stay fresh, fun and accessible

• Almost forgotten, but have fun Whatever you do, it must have certain lightness, freshness in it.
• Design surprises/disruptions in the flow of your brainstorms, events, and facilitations. Make people experiment with their hands and build physical things, metaphors: they will love it and smile.
• We design our events on purpose with some “un-polishedness”: we have learned that if what you do is too polished, too finished, you create distance and you don’t leave much room for input and creativity.

CREDITS

This post/submission is only possible because we have a fantastic team building Innotribe into what it is today. Petervan – the submitter of this story – is just one of the team members. Kosta Peric, Head of Innovation SWIFT, heads the team. Key team members are: Mela Atanassova, Martine Deweirdt, Muriel Dewingaerden, Greet Michiels, Karen Declerck, Matteo Rizzi, Nektarios Liolios, Dominik Debuyser.

We would not be where we are without the support of Lazaro Campos (the CEO who put the innovation team in place in 2007) and his successor Gottfried Leibbrandt who has been a sponsor since day one.

We also would like to extend credits to “the tribe”. We feel honored and humbled they consider us as “their” Innotribe.

TAGS

Innovation, Open Innovation, Tribe, Events, Start-Up Challenge, Incubator, Facilitation, Architects of Serendipity

HELPFUL MATERIALS

More information about Innotribe can be found in following resources:

• Website innotribe: www.innotribe.com
• Website Start-Up Challenge: http://innotribestartup.com/
• Our YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/innotribe
  • Example of a Sibos 2012 Feel Good Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UCDJ5ZdCVs&list=UUFOEdkHDEdocKpX4Yei_tWA&index=4
• Our YouTube Foresight Scenario Films: http://www.youtube.com/innotribefilms
  • Example Digital Asset Grid video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzsqtdx40qg&list=UUfot1jp_v38GWuvq8FyQoyg&index=1
• Our Flickr page with pictures from events: http://www.flickr.com/photos/innotribe
• Blogs
  • Innotribe: http://innotribe.wordpress.com/
  • Kosta Peric: http://copernicc.wordpress.com/ and http://www.forbes.com/sites/kostaperic/
  • Matteo Rizzi: http://matteorizzi.com/
  • Petervan: http://petervan.wordpress.com/
• Team twitter accounts: @innotribe, @copernicc, @petervan, @matteorizzi, @karendeclerk01, @Ddebuyser, @Muchedewin, @nekliolios, @mdeweird, @mela_atanassova
• Book Kosta Peric “The Castle and the Sandbox” http://www.searchingfinance.com/products/books-econ-politics-finance/the-castle-and-the-sandbox.html

This post was originally posted on the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange) as part of the HBR/McK M-Prize http://www.mixprize.org/m-prize/innovating-innovation.

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The End of Leadership

I am coming to a stage in my life where I discover that most if not all of the knowledge, models, methods, and principles I learned at school and the last 30 years of my career are completely outdated and irrelevant for the new reality we live in.

That also applies to the concept of leadership. We’ve all learned about heroic and charismatic leaders.  That leaders are leaders when they have followers and when they can create the conditions to engage her followers in a new direction, a place where no one has ever been before, to make 1,000 flowers blossom, etc, etc

With some notable dropout exceptions (Jobs, Gates, Bezos, etc), “leaders” all have the “right” attitude and have MBAs or other impressive certificates. They have the right profile. They went to right schools and the top universities like Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, etc. Career progress and evolution is systematically reserved to this elite. Even upon today, I see companies that reserve certain professional or personal development programs to those who have the right certificates. How sad.

Most of these “leaders” fit a certain “style”, and most have been moulded in the same factories. Well-dressed, always smiling, ready to help, forthcoming, making it in every aspect of the professional and private lives, always reserved, never angry or upset, in control of their emotions, etc. They make impressive careers, mainly by pleasing their hierarchies, by staying in the blueprint and taking no risks.

But over time, I have become suspicious and bitter about these perfectly casted people. In many organisations I have seen how cheer-“leaders” joyfully smile in the face of their subordinates and at the same time put a knife in the back of the same human beings.

Some “leaders” have even “developed” an almost sadistic pleasure in ignoring and destroying well-crafted pieces of work. I would like to illustrate this with a story from during my studies as architect.

We got an assignment to build an exposition hall and the creation of the space had to be based on some repeating element of construction. As part of the coming-out we had to make artistic sketches, draw the precise floor plans and construction details, and work out the whole thing as a model on scale, including the repeating construction element. I think a worked 3 weeks day and night to make the deadline, and I was quite proud of the result. The model was made out of fine balsa wood. During the review session, my “leader” – the professor and coach, I still remember his name – found an immense pleasure in shooting apart with his fingers the fragile construction. I was not amused; in fact I felt deeply hurt and humiliated.

This is of course quite extreme and even psychopathic behaviour  but I am sure each of us can find one or more examples in their career where their project-of-a-lifetime was shot in pieces apart. If it would happen again, I would probably kick and scream, or no, be subtler and present a glass of purifying water, as in this great advertisement from Spa Reine.

Some of the perfectly trained leaders also never take the pain to reach out to those who are more introverts who hunger for depth and they only listen to the extroverts who are most vocal that reach out to them. Decisions about subordinates are made in secrecy.

But the secrecy-trick does no longer work out in this hyper-connected environment, and news that is supposed to be kept confidential in the catacombs of the power hierarchies is dripping through the more and more porous walls of our organisations.

This new self-emerging transparency leads of course to a huge credibility crisis for the leader, as she does not know that you already know, and her “in-control” pose becomes painfully revealing of the true nature of those so called leaders.

Of course, Pepsodent, Spa Reine and the external look-and-feel vestimentary attributes are only metaphors for something deeper going on.

The problem with this sort of leadership is that it is leadership based on what you are (your power position in a hierarchy) versus who you are, your true internal power as a human.

A monkey in a suit remains a monkey in a suit.

We need a more humanistic approach, inspired by meaning and purpose; an “eudaimonic” economy as so well described by Umair Hague in “Is a Well Lived Life Worth Anything?”

That’s an alternate vision, one I call eudaimonic prosperity, and it’s about living meaningfully well. Its purpose is not merely passive, slack-jawed “consuming” but living: doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing – all the stuff that matters the most. See the difference? Opulence is Donald Trump. Eudaimonia is the Declaration of Independence.

We have too many Donald Trumps in our organisations  We need a culture that is based on deep respect and dignity for the human being. In this context, I recently had a conversation with a very senior businessperson of a multi-billion-technology company, who told me the parable of the Indian King.

The king had hired a consultant to advice him on the performance of the kingdom. The expert told the king to fire ½ of his workforce, as they did not have the same performance and added value to the kingdom as the top performers. The king responded “And what will those people do, once they get fired?”. The consultant answered, “Is that our/your problem? Your kingdom will be more efficient, that’s what you hired me for, no?”. The king did not follow the advice of the consultant, as he deliberately chose for a societal role in giving his citizens an job, a meaning, and a future, even if that meant a little bit of overhead. His choice was driven by people’s dignity.

The leadership that we all learned about starts smelling like a myth: the myth of charismatic leadership. But don’t blame them. That’s how they have been trained and educated. And the “training” or “brainwash” already started at those business schools, provided that you were lucky enough to be born in a family with wealthy parents that could pay the bill, or you were prepared to put yourselves in life-long debts as slaves to the financial institutions of this world.

The first thing I notice about the Harvard Business School campus is the way people walk. No one ambles, strolls, or lingers. They stride, full of forward momentum. The students are even better turned out than their surroundings, if such a thing is possible.

No one is more than five pounds overweight or has bad skin or wears odd accessories. The women are a cross between Head Cheerleader and Most Likely to Succeed. They wear fitted jeans, filmy blouses, and high-heeled peekaboo-toed shoes that make a pleasing clickety–clack on Spangler’s polished wood floors.

Some parade like fashion models, except that they’re social and beaming instead of aloof and impassive. The men are clean-cut and athletic; they look like people who expect to be in charge, but in a friendly, Eagle Scout sort of way.

I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination—whether or not he knew the way.

“This school is predicated on extroversion,” and “Your grades and social status depend on it. It’s just the norm here. Everyone around you is speaking up and being social and going out.” “Isn’t there anyone on the quieter side?” I ask. They look at me curiously. “I couldn’t tell you,” says the first student dismissively.

These are extracts from “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” a fantastic book by Susan Chain. The book is an eye-opener in itself about the lost and untapped energy/potential of introverts in organisations.

The essence of the HBS education is that leaders have to act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information. HBS was once called the “Spiritual Capital of Extroversion” where Top of Form “Socializing here is an extreme sport” and where verbal fluency and sociability are the two most important predictors of success.” writes Susan Chain, and goes on: “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Exceptional CEOs are known not for their flash or charisma but for extreme humility coupled with intense professional will: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.”

Leadership as we know it does not work anymore. We need something else. We also need a language to articulate what this new “thing” is. Some are starting to look into that.

The MIX http://www.managementexchange.com/ was co-founded by Gary Hamel and Michael Zannini (ex-McKinsey). They have set up a platform to share best practices on innovation, management and leadership. “It’s time to re-invent management” is their tag line, and Gary Hamel has written several books and rants on the subject. And as part of the M-Prize competition series, they just launched a new challenge on “Innovating Innovation”. I will write more about this and the related M-Prize where both Innotribe and Corporate Rebels United will make a submission before the end of the year.

But if you look carefully, many of the contributors are from mainly male-driven organisations with very extrovert people. They fit the HBS mould. We seem to keep on tapping into the same high-testosterone pool of resources.

That becomes very challenging for those who do not fit that mould: the ones who are introvert, and who are rarely listened too (if they ever get the chance to be heard); the ones who don’t have the right MBA or certificate; the ones who have a more feminine rather than masculine energy (some man have lots of feminine energy, like some women hive high doses of testosterone); the ones of the other gender, race, religion, age, education, etc

Nilofer Merchant, author of  “11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra” (Amazon Associates link) rightly pointed out to me:

I hope our future economy is also about including the people who are unseen today. Those who are right in front of us, creating value but then ignored when it comes to be included as leaders, or thinkers to shape the future. No one does this out of bad intent, but out of blindness. Few people will realize that while Hagel and Kelly and Gray etc are mentioned, many well-respected best-selling women management thinkers were not. Our thriving systems HAVE to be open enough to include those that are currently blocked out. Blindness shifts when we start to be more conscious. Instead of perpetuating talking about the change, we have to embodying the change. 

Indeed, something deeper is going on….

Bob Marshall (aka @FlowchainSensei) is addressing a somewhat similar dimension of “leadership” in his post “Leadership of Fellowship” and especially the section about dysfunctions of leadership.

The concept of leadership introduces a number of dysfunctions. Rarely are these discussable or discussed in our romanticized conception of the mythological leader:

• Leadership inevitably produces implicit (or even explicit) Parent-Child relationships. “Just one of many examples of this type of parent/child exchange is the unwritten pact that if employees do whatever their bosses ask of them (regardless of whether it makes good business sense) the boss will take care of their next promotion/career move.”

• Leadership validates “followership” and thus increased risk of “social loafing“

• Leadership cultivates “learned helplessness”

• Leadership can increases alienation, tribalism and the formation of in-groups

• Leadership often encourages favoritism, patriarchy, deference, sycophancy and obsequiousness, with a consequent reduction in both the quality and quantity of meaningful dialogue.

• Leadership compounds and perpetuates the Analytic mindset

• Leadership subtly undermines systems thinking, by breaking the social body into discrete parts (leaders, followers), and focusing attention on those parts rather than on e.g. the relationships between them, and the whole itself.

But the master of language and insight is for sure Rune Kvist Olsen from Norway. Checkout this excellent article “Leading-Ship: reshaping relationships at work”. Rune’s work is inspired by Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), a visionary in the field of human relations, democratic organization, and management. The tagline of the Mary Parker Follet Network is:

Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim

Rune’s s elaborated thinking blew me away: he is rethinking “leadership” into “leadingship”. It cuts deep in what motivates people. Rune challenges big time all our preconceptions about leaders and followers. I felt deeply inspired by it. So, I got into a conversation with Rune.

During this post-Sibos period of the year, I take off every Friday of the week to create some space for myself to reflect, to catch up on some reading, at times just being there and sitting in silence and trying to make contact with myself again, and then – in that moment of awareness – getting inspired by books and art. One could call it a personal retreat in silence and/or reflection and/or depth.

It was during one of those Fridays that I had scheduled a very long Skype call with Rune so that I could give him my full attention and listen in full presence to the rich language and set of concepts Rune had developed over the years. Since then Rune keeps on sending me wonderful essays and manifestos: describing what is really going on under the hood of human beings in leadership context. It’s very fascinating, and I all encourage you to dive in and discover Rune’s work.

The biggest outcome of Rune’s work is in my opinion that he has developed a language to express this new type of being as a leader in your organisations. It is so new and refreshing, that it needs its own language and vocabulary. Only then you can engage in a conversation trying to understand each other.

A good example of this language is in the following slide (a small extract of a very long presentation)

That language is further elaborated in an essay called “Extracts from Humanistic Management Responsibility in the workplace”. It is about Imposed Responsibility (forced upon from outside) versus Chosen Responsibility:

The practice of “taking control” is a significant way in stimulating and inspiring self-esteem and self-confidence in the art of becoming a responsible and independent person.

Receiving and getting control from managers above implies that the person who is giving, still has control and can withdraw it at any suitable time.

Giving or delegating authority creates and sustain a superior/inferior relationship between the people involved.

This practice of giving as a form of domination is easily encumbered with the feeling of humiliation from the receiver’s point of view. The receiver could suffer the humiliation of not having personal control and not being able to take personal responsibility for the specific action at hand.

By granting power to people in gaining personal control and in becoming personally responsible for their actions, we are at the same time granting them real freedom to become true equals and fully human beings.

It is not difficult to understand that being an object of delegation and a recipient of giving (as a token of shared power), a person can naturally feel the humiliating bitterness engendered by being a powerless and subservient receiver and not having the authority in exercising personal freedom.

The result of this type of submissive role-behaviour, would possible entail the undermining of self- esteem, self-worth, and self-respect.

The most obvious flaw in the context of power concentration in the hands of persons in charge of others is the assumption that delegated responsibility is analogous to a commodity that can be shared among individuals or groups.

Giving or delegating responsibility can be conceived as a disguised way of pretending that people below will be empowered by the person above when this person is handling out some responsibility occasionally.

This is a deception in the sense that managers of other people are not actually entitled to give away any power because their power is connected to the managers’

Rune also signed up for Corporate Rebels United. We are btw now a worldwide group of about 200 people now and counting. And several pods being started up worldwide. More about that later.

As his contribution to the rebels’ story, Rune produced the following essay “The Story of a Corporate Heresy”.

The full version in PDF is here The Story of a Corporate Heresy, but to whet your appetite here are already some salient extracts:

These types of corporate activist movements emerges as a result of profound crisis in the way corporate communities are organizing, managing and leading their organizations. Corporate Rebel United is pointing out the problem:

“Our companies no longer serve our needs. They cannot keep pace with a high- velocity, hyper-connected world. They no longer can do what we need them to do. Change is required.” Corporate Rebel Manifesto 2012.

Why, what and how can offensive, progressive and constructive actions be a part of the solution and not the problem?

“You never change things

by fighting the existing reality.

To change something,

build a new model

that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller.

The next and last question of the solution in reinforcing engagement and passion amongst everyone in the corporation is: “How can we unblock and reopen the free flow of creativity and innovation for everyone, and create engagement, enthusiasm and passion amongst one and all?”

The resolving answer could be lying in removing the factors that institutionalize the system of vertical power, and in replacing this system with a model that are granting everyone personal authority in exercising power through individual competence, ability and capacity.

All the above are useful reflections about our future leadingship models. But how do we get to that ideal model of leadingship?

As Einstein once said:

“A problem can not be solved

with the same methods

that created the problem”.

Rune – and Bucky, and Einstein – indeed indicated, that part of the solution is to get rid of the leadership that has brought us where we are today. But this is dangerous territory, as those are the leaders who still are in the hierarchical power position to eradicate the subordinates that do not fit the HBS blueprint, and try to challenge the existing system. It makes me think of recursive loops, or the drawings of M.C. Esher. At what point does the transition between night and day really happen?

“Day and Night” by M.C. Escher

Rune started sticking out his neck many years ago, in a period where he could not yet amplify his message through social media. Because he attacked the powers and hierarchies without defence, the system expelled him, and he ended up somewhat isolated, albeit in a beautiful self-built house on the borders of a beautiful Nordic lake (the story is correct, the picture below not)

It is not my ambition to get expelled, and I am trying to walk on thin ice every blog again to get your attention for being your true self.

It is in that context that my questions to you are:

• How can we get these new practices out of the reflection room and into the daily value creation practice?
• Who has already implemented these principles?
• What worked and what did not work when rolling it out or letting it emerge?

Let’s share and learn from each other. Let’s document this practice for value creation. This practice of Leadership. Jump in.

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Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Innotribe Health Index

This blog post shares some more details about the Innotribe Health Index. This session will take place on Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

Whereas we are sure that the main conference will cover main topic areas and trends such as Global Shifts in Economic Power, Regulation, and the financial crisis, Innotribe would like to propose some alternative lenses based on New Economies and New Values thinking, aimed at accelerating a positive re-balancing.

The Innotribe Health Index is a brand new Innotribe initiative. Through six different lenses (Reputation and Sentiment, Social Data Capital, Big Shift Readiness, Technology Readiness, Urbanization and Inequality, and Agility), we will try to give an alternative ‘health check’ of the financial system.

The intention is that the Innotribe Index is an annual checkpoint, where this year we establish the baseline, and in subsequent years we look at the progress we make versus this baseline.

The effect we want to create is a bit like the famous “state of the union” update on Internet trends by Mary Meeker (who moved last year from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers).

Here is the data-avalanche presentation by Mary Meeker of last year at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco:

That went fast? Yes, indeed. Like a jet-airliner flying through your living room!

We will at least go as fast, if not faster. Indeed, this session is designed as a “high-speed” session.

Each igniter (that’s how we call our speakers) will give a power talk on their specific lens, and where possible come-up with a readiness index score from 1 – 10, giving a sense of the readiness of our community for that particular challenge. That’s six lenses in one hour!

Some background on our igniters for this session, and why we invited them to be part of this session:

Julius O. Akinyemi

Julius is the initiator of Unleashing the Wealth of Nations project and the Resident Entrepreneur at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The objective of this initiative is to effect a sea-change, a quantum leap for ordinary citizens of developing economies to move from day-to-day survival mode to a personal wealth creation and growth via asset ownership, registry, and mobilization.

To unlock the wealth of nations, we aim to provide practical solutions tailored to the local environment that leverages the convergence of existing technologies. By registering people, their assets, and life events in an eRegistry, and through economic modeling, we will work to mobilize the currently dormant trillions of dollars in local assets in developing nations in order to generate local capital that fuels the economy via asset securitization.

Julius will come with a “Social Data Readiness Index”, as we see the availability of people’s social and identity data as one way to create financial inclusion. This topic will also be covered during one of the breakouts of the Digital Asset Grid session to showcase that unlocking data assets has an important role for the bottom of the pyramid.

Wouter De Ploey

Wouter is Director in Business Technology Office, McKinsey & Company.

He will present results of research done by the McKinsey Global Institute on global economic trends, including urbanization, resource markets, capital markets, and productivity and growth, with a focus on Asia.

• The landscape for supply/demand of labor is changing dramatically: where are the jobs for skilled/unskilled workers? Is the inequality in wages going up/down?
• More and more people live in cities. Urbanization is driving a lot of growth. McKinsey identified 450 emerging market cities. Capital follows activity. Access to capital gets tighter and more localized. Do banks have the right local footprint?

“What’s the readiness of banks to confront these meta-challenges?” is the subject of this lens.

John Hagel

John is Co-chairman, Deloitte Centre of the Edge. He very much supports out-of-the-box and catalyst new ways of thinking. That is for sure one of the many reasons why John is one of the enablers for the Innotribe incubation activities.

John writes regular for HBR, on his own blog, and has published several book. His latest “The Power of Pull” (Amazon Affiliates link) has become a business classic, where John highlights how we move from Knowledge Stocks to Knowledge Flows.

This shift is also at the basis of the Big Shift Index that Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has developed to provide a clear, comprehensive, and sustained view of the deep dynamics changing our world, and what companies can do to address them.

The Big Shift Index consists of 3 indices and 25 metrics designed to make longer-term performance trends more visible and actionable. You can download the Big Shift Index here (PDF file)

We are very proud of having such a thought leader as John Hagel with us at Innotribe Sibos to present the Big Shift Index. You don’t want to miss John’s authentic take on this fascinating subject.

Michael Jones

Michael is VP of Technology, Dachis Group. We have invited Michael to present the Social Business Index.

This index is built on top of Dachis Group’s Social Business Intelligence Insight Platform, analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels.

The Social Business Index analyzes signals from over one hundred million social sources globally and analyzes the performance of the largest global companies and thousands of those companies’ brands. The Index is generated through the use of natural language processing, semantic analysis, and machine learning algorithms.

Think about it as a machine learning engine.

Michael will do a drill down on the data they have available on financial institutions.

William Saito

William is Founder & CEO, InTecur, K.K.

He is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, public policy consultant and educator who has founded start-ups, managed corporations and worked on global information security policy over the past two decades.

To build entrepreneurial spirit in Japan, Saito also acts as CEO for the Innovation Platform Technology Fund (IPTF), a venture capital fund established by ex-Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei and Kazuhiko Toyama, the former COO of the Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan (IRCJ). The IPTF seeks to produce more successful global ventures in Japan by creating a genuine venture environment.

Saito is active in several roles with the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2011, he was named a Young Global Leader.

He is also Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, the first such commission ever appointed by Japan’s national legislature.

With his strong entrepreneur role and his extra-ordinary international perspective, we have asked William – who now lives in Japan – to come up with “The William Saito Index”, an index reflecting agility readiness in financial services.

It will be a very personal take reflecting on entre- and intra-preneurship, in Japan and globally.

Michell Zappa

Michell Zappa is a Berlin-based technology futurist who has spent part of his life between London, São Paulo, Stockholm & Amsterdam.

His work, called Envisioning Technology, focuses on explaining where society is heading in the near future by extrapolating on current technological developments.

His research facilitates understanding the field for those who work in technology by painting a bigger picture of where the landscape is heading. In this, he tries to guide both corporations and public institutions in making better decisions about their (and society’s) future.

I met Michell through a tweet that was forwarded by one of my followers. Once we connected, we immediately spotted a fantastic opportunity to describe the readiness of financial institutions through an amazing interactive infographic. As we get closer to Sibos, we’ll release some pre-views of these amazing insights.

Coming soon: previews of Michell Zappa’s infographic on technology readiness of banks: short, medium and long term.

Michell has really surprised me with his fresh take on technology readiness, and I am very excited by the work-in-progress that I have seen from him in preparation for this session. Next year, I would love to give him a full hour.

So, in summary, fasten your seatbelts for this “faster-than-light” session, were you will be immersed in the readiness of financial institutions based on six different alternative lenses.

See you all in Osaka! Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

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Innotribe at Sibos Osaka – Future of Big and Small Data

This blog post shares some more details about the Future of Big and Small Data session. This session will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 15:30 in the Innotribe Space. This Future of Data session is leading into the next session on Digital Asset Grid. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

Picking up where we left off last year with Big Data, this session will de-mystify what we think we know about data. We will hear opinions of different experts and judge together what are the hard facts, half-truths and complete unknowns about data today: big, small, broad, real time. We will dive into artificial intelligence, augmented reality and algorithms and how they impact our analysis and use of data.

This will be one of those Innotribe sessions, where we go “all the way” with super igniters (that’s how we call our speakers) and the amazing group techniques from Innotribster Mariella Atanassova and her team of designers and facilitators.

We will indeed design this session

as architects of serendipity,

creating collisions of ideas,

leading into

immersive learning experiences

The high-level design of the session is organized around debunking the myths that exist about data. We will look at this from different angles:

• Who is consuming the data: people, business, devices, applications, API’s (Application Program Interfaces)
• Technical and human aspects of data creation, data usage and data management
• The different lenses offered by our igniters

I would like to share a bit more about our igniters for this session and why we have invited them:

For the more “technical” angle on the subject:

Sean Gourley, CTO, from Quid.

Sean Gourley is originally from New Zealand and now based in San Francisco where he splits his time between Mathematical research and his venture backed startup Quid.

He has a PhD in physics from Oxford, and his academic research has taken him from Nanotechnology to Complex Systems and the Mathematics of War. Prior to Quid he worked at NASA Ames in Mountain View, Exclusive Analysis in London, and a (very) brief stint as a consultant at BCG in Chicago.

Sean started Quid back in Dec 2009, and they are doing some pretty amazing things with data, mathematics and visualization. They are building a global intelligence platform, a place where open source intelligence is collected, structured and visualized to help people understand and make better decisions about the complex world we live in.

Sean is currently CTO of Quid. Their corporate slogan of Quid is “Augmenting Our Ability to Perceive this Complex World™ ”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V43a-KxLFcg&feature=youtu.be

Sean will talk about the war of algorithms, a world of machines where black-swans almost become the norm. I have already mentioned this fantastic talk in my blog post about “The Cambrian Explosion of Everything”

Amir Halfon, CTO for Financial Services , MarkLogic

It is Amir’s fourth Innotribe at Sibos.

Before Amir recently joined MarkLogic, he was with Sun/Oracle for more than 12 years, where his last position was Chief Technologist specialized in Financial Services. MarkLogic offers next-generation database technology capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure. So, Amir brings the enterprise perspective.

This will not be a product pitch. We specifically invited Amir for his rich background in financial services and his familiarity with the Innotribe-way of doing things, so we can tap into his broad experience to map the generic big data concepts to our specific market.

Anant Jhingran, VP, Data, Apigee

I met Anant for the first time last year during Defrag 2011, where we had breakfast with Sam Ramji, Head of Strategy at Apigee.

Anant is VP of Data at Apigee. Before he 21 years with IBM where he was VP and CTO for IBM’s Information Management Division, Co-Chair of IBM wide Cloud Computing Architecture Board and one of the “IBM Fellows”.

He is our ideal igniter to talk about data as seen by API’s. However, in the session preparation talk I had with Anant, he already highlighted that discussions about APIs are very people centric in the enterprise:

“What is the governance for publishing the APIs? Some enterprises insist on a central gatekeeper for APIs, others believe in a decentralised Darwinian model.”

Anant blogs regularly. Check-out here how his new start-up life changed his thinking. I love his quote:

“Coding is liberating”

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross, Institute Fellow, Harvard University Institute

Alex is an award-winning scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He serves as an Institute Fellow at the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science and as a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Laboratory.

He has received 107 major distinctions, authored 13 publications, been granted 16 issued, pending, and provisional patents, and founded, managed, and advised 4 technology companies, 1 of which has been acquired. In 1998 and 1999, respectively, he won the U.S.A. Computer Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search.

In 2003, he became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Science and Engineering, and Mathematics, while graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. In 2007, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, where his research on smart matter, pervasive computing, and machine learning was awarded the Hertz Doctoral Thesis Prize.

His work has been featured in over 100 news outlets worldwide including The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.

Alex will share how HFT is driving a latency arms race. He has a fascinating story about “Sea-Steading”, where financial institutions start building operating centers in the middle of the ocean, just to win a couple of mille-seconds in latency.

He has developed an algorithm that calculates the best geographical spot for an operating center, based on a number of criteria given by the customer.

For the more “human” angle on the subject:

Andrew Keen, Author, Andrew Keen Productions, Author Digital Vertigo

I am very proud to have Andrew Keen on board. Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet culture and the trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier and Nicholas G. Carr among others.

Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.

He is sometimes called “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award.

Andrew just published his new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo” (Amazon Affiliates Link), a book I highly recommend, and the thinking developed in this book is the main reason why I invited Andrew to Innotribe at Sibos.

Following extract is typical Keen-speak:

“I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: This idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed.”

He is a real “contrarian” and therefore our ideal igniter to challenge all your assumptions on data and social media. The myth he would like to challenge is:

“the myth that social media

brings us closer together

and unites the human race”

Daniel Erasmus, Owner, The Digital Thinking Network

I was introduced to Daniel Erasmus by Brewster Kahle (who was critical for the Google’s book digitization) during Jerry Michalski’s retreat when he heard about the Digital Asset Grid. Because Daniel was doing some really advance scenario thinking for some clients in the financial industry, Brewster thought i should meet him.

Since then, I enjoyed numerous calls with Daniel on the importance of scenario thinking, and it was almost by accident we stumbled upon his start-up NewsConsole™, which is all about big data and the co-existence of man and machine and the world of augmented reality, in the sense of augmented information reality.

“Every day, an exabyte of information is created – an amount equivalent to half of all information created up to 2001. You will not read it, nor will any other individual, but some of it will be critical to your business.”

NewsConsole™ reads more than a million news articles per day to give its clients strategic overview of today and tomorrow’s news.  The Console is in use in the Financial Services, Governmental, the Energy and other sectors.

I love the way he talks about big data:

“Big data sells the story of “the eyes of god”: sometimes it is there, sometimes is  not. It’s about sort of half-truths, I would call them contingent-truths, as half-truths” has something negative”

and

“We see a computation a-symmetry. Google (for example) can do calculations on my data, but I cannot. This a-symmetry will have stunning implications on the power balances in the world. 20^th century is all about “mass”. The 21^st century is about the interface of one”

Daniel is a very erudite and versatile international businessman. In his scenario thinking work, he uses similar facilitation techniques as the Innotribe team, so Daniel will move between the spaces of advocacy and facilitation.

As for the other Innotribe session, you see that we put quite some effort in architecting, content curating, designing and facilitating our sessions.

We want to do more than just “events”

and listing some speakers.

We’d like to offer you

a memorable experience

In summary, this session is about debunking myths about data. What is the myth YOU would like to debunk? Let me know via the comments option of this blog post.

See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 12:30 in the Innotribe Space.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

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