Idle time is a concept that was introduced into the English language quite early, as an action that is void of any real worth, usefulness, or significance; leading to no solid result; hence, ineffective, worthless, of no value, vain, frivolous, trifling. [Oxford English Dictionary] First mentioned in 825: Dryhten wat eohtas monna foron idle sind (whatever that actually means in modern day English). Idleness always carried a negative connotation. Only in the 21st Century, has idle time turned into the biggest asset humanity has at its disposal to create value.

The metaphorical mapping of the term from the human to machinery arrives in the 19th Century, as in to run idle, to run loose, without doing work or transmitting power. first found in a patent application by Mr Milton in 1805 (Patent No. 2890) “As near..to each active wheel as a workman may think proper, low, strong idle wheels..are to be placed..ready in case of an active wheel coming off, or breaking, or an axle-tree failing, to catch the falling vehicle.”

In the 20th Century, it expanded its use to computers, where it is defined as the time during which a piece of hardware in good operating condition is unused. With networked computers, the idea was that idle time of distributed processors could be put to good use, as long as it can be managed – SETI@home is only one example.

In the 21st Century, when suddenly big user-generated content projects appeared (Wikipedia, Linux, Apache, but also Facebook, Flickr, and Ushahidi), one of the questions raised was about the sustainability of these projects, connected to the idea of “where did the time come from to produce this content?” – At Web 2.0 Expo 2008 and later in his book Cognitive Surplus (2010) Clay Shirky gave where he argues that we are finally able to activate the cognitive surplus generated by industrialization which up to now we had squandered away by watching television.

Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

This transformation from a mass society with its one-to-many media (television) to a network society of many-to-many media (web 2.0) allows us to capitalize on idle time. By segmenting value chains into modular and granular tasks, where anybody can chime in anytime and anywhere.

Shirky’s idea of idle time, however, only touches the surface of the concept. Idle time spent in front of the television that can be reallocated into socially meaningful values makes up a big chunk of the cognitive surplus that we will be able to capture in the next years. However, the bigger part will be captured, when we are able to transform actual idle time into productive time: the idle time when waiting for something/someone, the idle time of the disenfranchised on this planet, the idle time of being between tasks, and the idle time of not working on what fullfills us. So, idle time is about empowering those that are not yet empowered, but also about when you are in the board meeting and bored. Idle time is everywhere! Think of it through the lense of fractal geometry – idle time is self-similar. Once you start looking, you will find it in all aspects of life. My back of the envelope hunch would be that we can multiply Shirky’s number by at least two or three.

Idle Time vs. Down Time: Managing our Wetware Needs

But as soon as we have solved this puzzle, where all this productive capacity for our common futures will come from, we come to the next Luddite summer worry (actually, one of the most emailed articles in the NYTimes this summer):

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

The findings are to be taken seriously and it clearly means that we need to be careful with how we deal with our idle time. In the digitally networked age, we need to take responsibility for our sanity. We need to learn how to schedule downtime and offline-time. But theoretically, that should be easier, because now we can manage our interfaces to the digital network, by blocking incoming information.

And this brings me back to the Amazon Kindle: The Kindle does only one thing, it lets you read books. It does that particular well, with a look that is distinctly Steampunk and after 48 hours it clearly seems to be one of those devices that actually allows you to manage your brain cycles and give your brain that downtime that it needs to solidify impressions into knowledge.

As I am wrapping up my time at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, it is time to write down some of the lessons I learned here at Erfurt University, where Martin Luther developed some of the frameworks for Information Revolution I. The Willy Brandt School is a brave experiment in bringing together students and young professionals from over 40 countries to rethink public policy. It is an experiment that is important in our days, where we are confronted with huge challenges on this planet. One day last year, while walking to my lecture, it hit me that we are working on the project of planetary public policy. I then wrote a short blog-entry that I always wanted to expand:

Planetary thinking is a term introduced by Martin Heidegger, to reflect the role of philosophy (a Greek/Western concept) in comparison to other systems of thought. Planetary public policy balances different approaches to public policy problems, reminds us that problems come in all sizes (local to global), that we can learn from each other, but that solutions need to be “tropicalized” (adapted to the local context). If public policy is about thinking about having a structural impact, then planetary public policy is about “rocking the planet.”

Planetary public policy combines (a) an acceptance of global problems (climate change, trafficking of women, drugs, weapons, etc.), with (b) an appreciation for comparative learning in public policy (e.g. issues of birth control, slum dwelling, public transportation, crisis management are similar in kind in very different environments), and (c) a sensibility for inter-civilizational exchange of ideas concerning our planetary publics. It is a simple doctrine, but remember territorial sovereignty, the doctrine that has been guiding our thinking and doing for the last 300 years is just as simple. Simple grammars allow for surprisingly complex frameworks. But in the 21st Century, no public policy school can ignore it.

Looking back…

The doctrine of territorial sovereignty developed as part of the transformation of the medieval system in Europe into the modern state system, a process that is linked to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The emergence of the concept of sovereignty was developed in analogy to the Roman civil law concept of private property.  Both emphasizing exclusive rights concentrated in a single holder, in contrast to the medieval system of diffuse and many-layered political and economic rights. Within the state, sovereignty signified the rise of the monarch to absolute prominence over rival feudal claimants such as the aristocracy, the papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire. Internationally, sovereignty served as the basis for the anarchic nature of the international system and for its ground rules like the exchanges of recognition on the basis of legal equality, diplomacy, and international law. This led to an international system where states were responsible for their own security and self-sufficient in their social and economic needs.

However, with globalization we moved into a world where somehow these two core rules of the international system are broken. we are moving into a world where states are not reliant on themselves in terms of economic production anymore, and neither are they in terms of security. The most basic question we would ask you is, who of you is wearing clothing that’s made in just one country, at this moment. Even Lederhosen, the typical Bavarian dress, all of them, including the Burghausen style are produced in India.

What we are missing is a unifying doctrine that allows us to place our actions in such a world. Territorial sovereignty has lost its grip over us, but planetary thinking is only slowly emerging. Here are the three basic tenets of this emerging doctrine:

Accepting Global Problems

Global problems become global by being referred to as global. Even if the impact of climate change will be different locally, we have firmly constructed it as a global problem. But others less so. Last year, our planet’s population lost $9.3 billion to 419 scams. 419 is a paragraph number in the Nigerian penal code, in the law, which deals with a very specific cyber crime, which is basically have you ever received an email that said,

I am a princess from Nigeria, and my dad left me $80 million in a bank account that I need to transfer out of… Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Texas, or Southern Bavaria. I need your help to do that, and I will be of course very helpful in giving you 50 percent of what is in the bank account if you help me.

Is that a global problem? Should it be constructed as such?

Comparable Local Problems

Planetary public policy assumes that there are local problems that we can compare to each other and learn from each other. For example, squatting on public lands. What is the Malaysian solution to squatting on public lands versus what is the Mexican solution to squatting on public lands versus what is any other country that has that problem? For a long time, we had assumed that local contexts would be so different that learning across continents would not take place.

Inter-civilizational Meaningful Conversations

Inter-civilizational Meaningful Conversations remind us of the question, how can we develop a fair platform on which we can have a conversation? A conversation between different cultures and through space and time. And that, of course, is the challenge we are facing in the Brandt School, with students from more than 40 countries. But it’s also the challenge that we have to face when we are trying to solve this issue of humanity surviving on this planet.

So public policy in the 21st Century needs to focus on global problems, comparative public policy challenges, and inter cultural, inter civilizational meaningful conversations.

I am back from Berlin, where we were discussing at the google collaboratory how to evaluate the impact of open government. While the excitement about enterprise 2.0, government 2.0, and open government has been building, critical voices in organizations have questioned the return on investment (ROI) of such projects. 2.0 projects are often still looked upon as insignificant or superfluous. The now classical response to this has been to allude to the ROI of  successful projects:

Consider Apps for Democracy, which yielded 47 iPhone, Facebook and Web apps in 30 days – a $2.3 million value that only cost the city $50,000. It’s hard to dismiss an estimated 4,000 percent return on investment in one month’s time. The contest’s success, powered by iStrategyLabs, spurred Apps for Democracy “Community Edition” and spinoffs in other cities.

This approach of utilizing the ROI framework to defend 2.0-strategies, however, has several flaws, (a) it might have been a lucky shot, (b) it might not be sustainable, (c) contests might not focus on what citizens need (d) any impact below a certain threshold, let’s say $ 1 billion does not carry weight in big governmental or corporate organizations, but (e) most importantly, ROI is the wrong tool to evaluate success of enterprise/government 2.0 projects, because most of the value is accrued with the consumer not the producer of the value.

If we look at the most successful 2.0 projects of the last years, we see a pattern, where the ROI is not a relevant indicator to evaluate the project. One of the first big 2.0 projects, Wikipedia, destroyed the encyclopedia industry, but is not generating major revenues.  Couchsurfing and sites like http://airbnb.com/ or http://www.crashpadder.com/ are taking big bites out of the Hotel industry without generating equivalent returns. Open Street Map is having a huge impact on the mapping industry, one of the most profitable industries of the last years. Dynamic ridesharing is creating a secondary mobility infrastructure in most countries, basically competing with our complex integrated public transport systems such as the German Railway, with revenues of more than 10 billion euro in passenger transport per year or shorthaul flights. The combined revenues of the 5 major German ride sharing companies is way less than $ 10 million, but the impact on the lifeworld of their users is dramatic.

There are three lessons to be gleamed from this:

• the impact of 2.0 project are not to be evaluated in ROI, but in consumer-focused metrics (shadow prices, counterfactuals, reduction in average cost, rate of demonetarization, etc.). Ideally, not in monetary terms, because 2.0-strategies aim to de-monetarize.
• for corporations, 2.0 strategies go way beyond “normal” cannibalization strategies. They focus on the de-monetarization of industries. Therefore, as strategists, we need to ask, how can we generate a revenue flow that does not inhibit adoption, but sustains the effort.There is no choice, either we do it, or someone else will do it.
• For public value strategists that are not entrenched in existing practices this is a dream-come-true. You can now recreate a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure (the German railway system) with a web-page.

If this does not sound like a fun scenario from the perspective of an existing organization (be that governmental or private), be assured that there is nothing you can do against it. The two mega-trends driving the development are the dematerialization of the economy which has been going on for over one hundred years (the weight of the US economy per dollar of GDP has been decreasing more than 100-fold in the last century) and the implosion of transaction costs of organization through digitization and the rise of n-to-n (peer-to-peer) media are leading to new forms of organization (open value chains) and new products and services that can be digitally provided at basically zero marginal costs.

An analogy of what is happening today can be seen, when we look at the historical institution of medieval knighthood, probably the most expensive and sophisticated approach to individualized fighting and organization of social and cultural life in the history of humanity. In 1386, at the battle of Sempach, a “web-startup” consisting of Swiss peasants defeated the Austrian knights, by pushing them down from their high horses by using long poles. Not very sophisticated, but sufficient to get the job done. Expect more of that today.

When in Berlin, I also had breakfast with Peter Scheufen, the CEO of Skobbler, a smartphone navigation company that was globally the first to utilize Open Street Map in its core navigation product and that is making the navigation industry very nervous.  Peter sees his role as a negotiator between the world of the voluntary mappers, software developers that might want to build applications on top of his server offering, and consumers that expect a working navigation product for as close to free as possible, and believes he can build a business model where he can generate a non-intrusive revenue stream for his company. Navigating these waters is not easy, but it can be very rewarding for all of us, who believe we can have a positive impact on this planet and generate revenues, by figuring out how to generate revenue streams that do not disturb the value chain. So, ignore the ROI-issue and focus on the big picture of (public) value creation!

Open government is the doctrine and governance approach which holds that the business of government and state administration should be opened at all levels to effective public scrutiny and oversight to improve capacity and legitimacy of collective action. It outlines a “brave new world” of doing governance. The discourse on the topic has focused on the technical aspects (open data) and the legitimatory aspects (e-participation) but has dangerously ignored the managerial aspects (open statecraft). In the following I argue, why we should put more emphasis on this concept.

In 2010 we are confronted with new policy and management approaches in the public sector like technologically mediated policy initiation and formulation (Obama’s Open Government Initiative), distributed intelligence gathering (the US intelligence communities Intellipedia), crowdsourcing of accountability (The Guardian’s British Parliament invoice scandal platform), or peer producing political campaigning (the Obama Campaign), and social media enhanced (twitter) revolutions (Iran). No government in 2010 can afford to not use these types of new public governance. Most governments today are confronted with several policy and administrative challenges (transparency, effectiveness, corruption, legitimacy, etc.) that can be addressed by an open value creation.

Open Value Chains that interface to experts, local knowledge, stakeholders, and crowds allow for new modes of organizing collective action in business, society, and government. Recent dramatic reductions of transaction costs in organizing collaboration have allowed for amazing advances in collective value production (think Wikipedia, Linux, or Ushahidi) and will transform our lifeworlds.

Open government introduces new logics of collective action that move beyond the “modern” core ideas of governance, which are based on institutional legitimation of processes and very restrictive information sharing (arcana imperii/state secrets, administrative secrets, business secrets, complex intellectual property rights regimes). This conceptualization of collective action as open value chains implies three important perspectives:

Open Data

The technological perspective represented by the Open Data Movement. Open data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data be freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

E-Participation

E-Participation is the use of information and communication technologies to broaden and deepen political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives.

Open Statecraft

I propose the term open statecraft to introduce the managerial and strategic perspective, to open value creation. The term statecraft refers to the art of conducting state affairs, sometimes with sinister implication, as used by Macaulay (1855) in his Hist. Eng. xviii. IV. 163 A double treason, such as would have been thought a masterpiece of statecraft by the great Italian politicians of the fifteenth century. So open statecraft openly states the ambition of actors to utilize the logic of openness to achieve objectives. Anything else, would be insincere.

The core technologies of open value creation from a managerial perspective are the wiki (principle-based, user-generated platforms, with flexible moderation capacity), the forum (question driven user-generated knowledge platform), blogging (core message with feedback/discourse loop), social networks (such as Ning-communities or Facebook groups) and work flow management and visualization tools (Government resource planning, government process mapping tools, think SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM, etc.). Together they allow us to structure policy and administrative public value creation processes, by enhancing ideation (idea-generation), deliberation (commenting and discussion), collaboration (generating public values), and accountability (parsing data to hold government accountable).

In the discourse on open government the main focus has been on open data and new modes of participation, often without considering the political ramifications of these ideas. It sometimes even seems that the idea of thinking through the strategic, managerial, and political consequences of opening value chains is considered as untrue to the original idea of the concept or even “Machiavellian.” However, without the buy-in of political entrepreneurs that are able to structure open value creation processes, we will not get there. Utopianism without strategy spells disaster.

Therefore, we need to augment the technocratic ideas of open data and the democratic ideas of e-participation with the strategic, manegerial, or political perspective of open statecraft. Only if we offer a perspective that involves the power politics taking place in any institutional setting, can we realistically discuss and implement Open Government as a new form of collective action.

By foregrounding their solutions (to yesteryears problems) and placing them in their historical context, maybe, we can make room for new logics of collective action.

In 1937, Coase published the Nature of the Firm, defining the idea of transaction costs in order to address a puzzle that mainstream economics had ignored at the time: the question of why firms exist in a world, where markets were assumed to be the most efficient allocators of resources. The analytically powerful tool of transaction costs allowed him to ask situation-specific questions on when a firm might be more efficient then market-based transactions. He clearly operationalized his framework, by stating that other things being equal, “a firm will tend to be larger, the less the costs of organizing and the slower these costs rise with an increase in the transactions organized.” (Coase 1937)

He is wrong, at least in some situations: a new form of (non)organization emerges when transaction costs fall so dramatically that neither a market nor a firm is necessary to integrate global supply chains, as we can observe in the case of Wikipedia or Linux.

In 1947, Horkheimer and Adorno published their Dialectics of Enlightenment, a small book of essays that they conceptualized as a “message in a bottle” to a future audience. Their chapter on the culture industry is a scathing attack on art in mass society. They describe the complex environment of capture where industry plays to a mass audiences taste that itself becomes streamlined by industry. Art looses its relevance as an outside critique of existing power asymmetries.

Their media critique hinged on one technological factor, namely that 1-to-N media outperform N-to-N media. They do not imagine a world of a thousand blossoming blogs and youtube-publishing grandmothers. Most media critics have been raised on their scenario, therefore are not good at imagining a world that is neither elitist nor captured.

Mancur Olson’s Theory of Collective Action (1964) is based on the simple recognition of the category mistake that the common collective interest of a group does not automatically lead to harmonious collective action by its members (I agree). His words “rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interest” have been seared into our unconsciousness. The elegance of his argument has led us to assume free-riding wherever and whenever at least two people get together. We tend to forget that his argument relies on several contingent assumptions concerning transaction costs of collective action (that they are fairly high) and on how we understand human agency (ignoring that most of what we value is inter-subjectively derived).

Thanks to Mancur Olson, we have lost the ability to explain why people act collectively beyond their narrowly defined individual self-interest. So when confronted with the phenomenon, we have been denying its existence. And even after being confronted with lots of empirical evidence (think Linux, Wikipedia, or Mother Teresa) we are struggling to develop the vocabulary to talk about open value chains, commons-based peer production, and massive collaboration. The poverty of our economics (in the original sense of good husbandry) has forced us to rely on a fairly undeveloped metaphorical language of Marcel Maus’ gift economy, the communal cooking pot, or the North American Potlatch system to make sense of something as intuitive as intersubjective coproduction.

Thomas Schelling took the idea of rational interest to the extreme. By postulating a situation of an absolute threat to individual and collective survival (the anarchy of the international system under the threat of nuclear annihilation), he could get rid of all inter-subjectivity. Assuming a world without language (or a world where language had no value, because it would not carry weight), he was able to concentrate on signaling, the thinnest form of co-action. The beauty of signaling is that it is self-explanatory and clear, no messy inter-subjective understanding needed.

However, he purposely ignores all aspects of social life that depend on humans working together to find out something that neither of them knows ex ante. As good acolytes of Thomas Schelling we assume that “talk is cheap” and facebook is suspect. Never mind that anything human that is of value is inter-subjectively created.

Nietzsche said, you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star, but definitely, we should not rely to much on C-H-A-O-S, when constructing the political theories of tomorrow.

Keep an open mind, relearn to speak inter-subjective philosophy, ignore contract thinking in political theory and economics, learn from what you see around you, develop an appreciation for new logics of collective action, and start building open value chains and communities of practice. Imagine what Machiavelli would write about, if he would would write today.

It is a historical moment analogous to the new logic shaping societies when we moved from transcendental to immanent explanations of collective action in the 15th century. And just as Machiavelli tried to uncover the systematic aspects of these logics, we need to focus on new statecraft and new strategy. Below is a  screenshot and link to an interview I did along these lines with an Austrian Monthly, you might enjoy it (if you read German).

I started out by showing a knight, probably the most elaborate (and expensive) personal fighting machine ever developed in the history of humanity and made the analogy to our modern businesses with their corporate headquarters, huge man counts, sophisticated policies, etc.

Well, in 1368, at the battle of Sempbach, a group of Swiss peasants with long poles developed the approach of pushing the knights of their horses and then killing them as they were lying on their back in their heavy armors. Is there anything we can learn for today’s business?

I continued to show how macro-historically, the interplay of technologies and ideas have transformed modes of production and consumption dramatically in the history of humanity and I outlined the logic of “really simple group forming” and how it needs new leaders (what Sofia Elizondo and I call anti-leadership) and new forms of organization (open value chains). Here is the presentation – hope you enjoy it!

I took up that thread and connected it to the idea of statecraft, a concept you can only talk about with a straight face, when speaking in the halls where Metternich, von Stein, Kelsen, and co. voiced their ideas and created the modern state. In this situation, we were able to start an important conversation on how the idea of collaboration in open value chains and social media technologies are transforming public value production.

It was amazing to learn from the top German government officials concerning the topic. There is clearly a very sophisticated, but distributed community out there in government that is starting to make change happen. Expect great changes in the next year.

Anyway, if you want to read the talk, I posted it here. I would love to get your feedback on the text and continue the conversation.
(in German)

This year in our leadership course students came up with new questions that we had not heard before: why do you teach us leadership, if value is created through the collaborative efforts of open source communities? And how does your class help us to foster such collaboration?

While meandering through the Alte Pinakotek in Munich, one of the world’s greatest collections of old masters, where societal transformations of the 15^th Century are painted onto canvas (stark reminders of the power of ideas on our worlds), Sofia Elizondo from the BCG strategy institute and I mulled over this question.

Here’s our raw thinking that will form the basis of an article on anti-leadership. Do join us in this effort!

Moving from Strategy to Second Order Strategy

The world has seriously changed.  Not just the financial crisis, but a systemic profound shift.  We can see this broadly across many different “categories” from politics to our lifeworlds. For example, interconnectedness has changed our societal behaviors and expectations; Technology has changed the way organizations relate to each other and generate value.

In the business world, we used to want to be industry leaders because industry leadership granted security in the # 1 spot.  NOT ANYMORE!   While industry leadership used to last 10 years, it is now common to find industries where the #1 spot is held by a handful of companies during any given year. We also assume that industry leadership is desirable, that market share increases profitability.  That relationship has also disappeared and in some industries even inversed.  So why do many companies’ mission statements still say: “we want to be the number 1 provider of toothpaste?”

To explain this marketplace turbulence, some academics push the “hypercompetition” theory.  We see all of this turbulence in industries because the world is approaching a more perfect marketplace, competition in fiercer so more value is transferred to the consumer..  However, the data show the contrary.  The difference between the top performers and bottom performers within industries is actually increasing, not decreasing.  So SOMETHING must be driving that change.

Now, if we look at classical strategy – the strategy derived from 19^th Century Prussian military thinking, we realize that Clausewitz’ian strategists basically do the following: analyze their market, forecast the future, and optimize the company accordingly through a first order strategy plan.

This might have worked very well for the stable business world of the 60s, but it assumes we can KNOW all of the relevant variables, and that we can FORECAST them.  These assumptions unfortunately do not work very well today.

Now, is classical strategic planning irrelevant in all industries?  Not really.  If we plot all industry groups across a “turbulence chart” measuring rank volatility across the x axis, unpredictability on the y and the difference between bottom and top performers on a 3rd axis, we see that there are particular places where it is much more relevant, and other industries that are hopeless. Unfortunately, it is hopeless in the fields that we care about, such as telecoms, software, internet retail, media (which is not surprising).

So now what?

Let’s replace the Prussian military battle analogy with a metaphor of organizations successfully thriving in unpredictable environments: genetic systems in biology (populations of species, for example) The trick of biological systems is their second order “planning” capability: they adapt flexibly to changing environments without asking their CEO for permission. Naturally, populations randomly generate enough genetic variation to survive environmental changes, such as food shortages, climate changes or new predatory patterns. In that sense, the population is not optimized for lean six-sigma performance, but carries some “genetic slack” that can be very useful for the survival of the species if an Ice Age comes along (or if their food source dies out, a meteor strikes or any other unpredictable event occurs).

Adaptive Strategy’s aim is to set the context for strategies to emerge, NOT to specify The Strategic Plan for the organization. Now as with any metaphor, let us not take the biological approach to an extreme. We can still assume some type of coordinating function, or what we could refer to consciousness or an organization that defines the second order strategies, designs the organization fit to carry these out and intervenes in extreme situations, where adaptation would fail. And this is where anti-leadership comes in.

The Leader of the past

In the past the leader was an authority figure.The term “leader” begs the question: Of what? The immediate answer is: of followers. Notice that it is content agnostic. (Leading towards good or evil is still leading). The leader would focus on the crowds it leads: big, small, fully committed, yet-to-be-convinced, etc. The leader “knows more,” therefore had more authority, therefore, was legitimized.

Anti-leadership / second-order leadership / “designers” begs a different question: not “who and how do I lead?” but “what should be achieved?” which is where the focus should be: the target, aim, direction in front. Not the crowd behind. The anti-leader knows that she does not know, that the emperor has no clothes. In that sense, she relies on the organization’s tentacles to gather, interpret, and act on information.

Implementing Adaptive Strategies through Anti-Leadership

With the advent of constructivist thinking in academia, professors have been slowly moving from taking the role of “the sage on the stage, to the guide by the side.” With adaptive strategizing, CEOs will have to learn this lesson. And it will not be easy to move away from the idea of leading, where essentially all others are blind followers, willing to internalize the messages of the leader.

The core principle of anti-leadership is fairly easy. When you cannot analyze, forecast, and plan anymore, you need to empower your organization to be able to modulate it to turbulent contexts, by allowing for variation (think Google’s 20% rule), define meta-principles of selection through mechanisms such as simulation, scorecards, or actual performance in the market place (think Google’s testing of any interface changes), and amplify what works, through scaling-up mechanisms.

The PILS Framework of Anti-Leadership

This type of modulation can be done by designing your organizations around processes in the following way:

Process: Design a beta-process, deliberately, expose it to the real world before it is finished, so that feedback and selection mechanisms can help it adapt.

Interface: Design as many interfaces to the process as possible, these can be internal or external, they can be to experts or to the unwashed masses. Interface design is a second order strategy guided by the question, who should be allowed to contribute to the process and it is a third order strategy, when you ask who should be allowed to make changes to the process.

Legitimacy: Do not stop in defining interfaces, which can be seen as a technical issue (what APIs to use, what standards, etc.), but imagine communities around them (and again these can be contractually bound to you or not. They might be experts, carriers of local knowledge, or crowds).

Scale: The issue of scaling processes is not trivial. Just as different forces of nature work differently at different scales, think about how gravity does not really affect an an ant – it will survive a fall from a 10 story house, however, wind does. An elephant on the other hand will not be swayed by wind, but could not survive the drop. So the challenge for the anti-leader is to think about processes at different levels of scale and how to get from one to the other.

Skills of the Anti-Leader

Anti-leaders are not loud, they listen. The do not command, but empower. They do not choose, but design decision mechanisms. They do not aim to be smarter than the crowd, or the outsiders, or the locals. But they guide and shape and LEARN. Is this what we teach in leadership class? Is this how you see yourself as a leader? It might be time to rethink our higher education curricula….

A trillion dumb chips connected into a hive mind is the hardware. The software that runs through it is the network economy. A planet covered with hyperlinked chips is shrouded with waves of sensibility. Millions of moisture sensors in the fields of farmers shoot up data, hundreds of weather satellites beam down digitized images, thousands of cash registers spit out bit streams, myriad hospital bedside monitors trickle out signals, millions of web sites tally attention, and tens of millions of vehicles transmit their location code; all of this swirls into the web. That matrix of signals is the net.

The following film done by the IBM a-smarter-planet crowd interprets this idea in 2010:

The net is not just humans typing at one another on AOL, although that is a part of it and will be as long as seduction and flaming are enjoyable. Rather, the net is the total collective interaction of a trillion objects and living beings, linked together through air and glass.

… The network economy is already expanding to include new participants: agents, bots, objects, and servers, as well as several billion more humans. We won’t wait for AI to make intelligent systems; we’ll do it with the swarm power of ubiquitous computing and pervasive connections.

The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness.

The surest way to advance massive connectionism is to exploit decentralized forces—to link the distributed bottom. How do you build a better bridge? Let the parts talk to one another. How do you improve lettuce farming? Let the soil speak to the farmer’s tractors. How do you make aircraft safe? Let the airplanes communicate among themselves and pick their own flight paths. This decentralized approach, known as “free flight,” is a system the FAA is now trying to institute to increase safety and reduce air-traffic bottlenecks at airports.

…and while you are at it, if you have not seen it, watch his TED talk on the next 5000 days of the Internet. And if you are missing the soundtrack to your day: listen to Ortholf’s remixes of Edelschwarz’s postmodern interpretations of alpine-punk/turbo-polka.

Feedback, to someone my age, is everything, whether we are aware of it or not. Everything we do on the web has instant repercussions, creates immediate reaction, which prompts counter-reaction, back-pedalling or refinement: there is a feedback loop in most things we do on the web. We are used to friends commenting on what we post on Facebook, we assume that emails are replied to within a certain number of hours, we get a rating for our transaction on Ebay, and all this spoils us (The Economist calls us feedback junkies). We grow up in a world where we increasingly expect actions to produce immediate reactions. These expectations are translated into how we see our society at work and what we expect from services in the real world, we want them to work like our Facebook walls. This does not just apply to Fixmystreet.com or Recovery.gov, it applies to a wider change in thinking, and it might explain our disillusionment with politics, because failure to immediately deliver is much worse in today’s society than in the decades before. The standards we apply to the public sector are higher today. Everybody knows what is possible, because we use interactive software, gadgets and technology every day that show us how. A culture of feedback means that the citizens’ expectations need to be a) managed by politics and b) translated into proper governance mechanisms. At this purely theoretical level this has nothing to do with deliberative democracy yet. What we need to wrap our heads around is that we are no longer recipients of societal or public sector action, we are part of a feedback loop. We want feedback for our actions (elections, opinions, our participation in consultation platforms, etc.), and we expect politicians and administrations to appreciate and make use of feedback as well. And in that sense, please comment, I want feedback, please!

Sebastian Haselbeck is a graduate student at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy and webmaster of the Center for Public Management and Governance. He is currently doing an internship at Intellitics Inc., an early e-participation start-up based in San Jose, CA.

The evolution of modern society is marked by continuous rise of government size, obligations and market interactions. According to Juergen Habermas, the expansion of the state into more and more private affairs led to a slow demise of the public debates over ideas and conflicts—the expression varying with context, history, and technology. Citizen-government interaction is reduced to election periods, interest groups and media-spin.

However, there was opposition to this development. Henry David Thoreau argued in his essay “Civil Disobedience” in the late 18th century, “government is best which governs least.” It implies a government reduced to the minimum in size accountable to its people. Because American government in the 18th century was already on its way to assemble the contrary, Thoreau suggested that if as many people as possible join peaceful protests, their actions would “clog the machinery of the state”, eventually leading to change. However, he did not succeed. And over the next 200 years, the state developed as the most successful organization form, an “imagined community” that structured the lives of most people on this planet. Today, however, with the advent of new network-based social platforms, Thoreau might have been more successful with his attempt to let his voice be heard and activate others for his cause.

In the 21st Century the ‘network’ has transcended the academic context and entered the wider field of the political discourse. Policy networks, networked governance, peer production, massive collaboration, open government, and radical transparency have become part of our political vocabulary that we rely on to legitimize why and how we act collectively. With web technologies and social media, such as interchangeable data-formats, wikis, transparency, and social networking, network society has become part of the mainstream global public policy discourse.

The early 21st Century evoke a Machiavellian time—a time when new technologies and new forms of thinking and governance emerged. So, if we are living in times of transformative change, where Internet technologies and an understanding of society as a network of inclusive, some-how like-minded, outcome-oriented, collaborators emerges we need to ask, what the logic of network society is, to be able to explain our world and predict future developments. Dave Clark, one of the original architects of the Internet, argued in 1971: We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code…

Read more on Macchiavelli 2.0 – Fundamentals of Network Society at the Harvard International Review.

If strategy is about optimizing choice in situations of strategic interdependence, how do you strategize in and against constantly changing environments? In New Bases of Competitive Advantage, they came up with the concept of adaptive advantage which addresses the challenge by taking strategy to the meta level:

We believe that companies can renew and sharpen their quest for sustainable competitive advantage by pursuing adaptive advantage. Organizations with adaptive advantage recognize the unpredictability of today’s environment and the limits of deductive analysis. They seek to develop the most favorable organizational context in which new approaches to new problems can continually emerge. Adaptive advantage thus enables them to unite reflection with execution and to balance deduction with experimentation.

The meta strategies they outline are: Signal Advantage (detect, capture, and exploit pattern advantage), Systems Advantage (Shape and manage business systems for advantage), People Advantage (leverage human resources beyond the firms boundaries), Social Advantage (leverage new social and ecological expectations for advantage), and Simulation Advantage (simulate for advantage). Read up on their ideas and reflect and discuss what they might mean for your business, brand, and lifeworld.

The media-realists in us know that function follows form and that the media industries need to adapt. It has become conventional wisdom that if new media allow for disruptive modes of production, discovery, search, or distribution and existing media will wither away. Friedrich Kittler developed the framework to reflect this interrelationship between modes of production and text in his seminal work, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks1800/1900). In later texts he predicts that in network society all forms of texting will converge into a general repository of knowledge. But will that happen?

Even as the google books settlement is making its way through the courts and the Ipad is seen as the savior technology for media industries in general there is a certain discursive silence about the withering away of the book, our all-time favorite medium:

Google, in contrast, tackles them head on, but not before reiterating its big-picture take on the settlement: its digitization efforts are the only thing preventing another Library of Alexandria-style tragedy, and making the results available is a public good that should override petty concerns raised by its competitors. “Approval of the settlement will open the virtual doors to the greatest library in history, without costing authors a dime they now receive or are likely to receive if the settlement is not approved,” Google’s filing reads. “Nor does anyone seriously dispute, though few objectors admit, that to deny the settlement will keep those library doors locked while inviting costly, fragmented litigation that could clog dockets around the country for years.”

Book writing and reading is special. Even bloggers admit to writing just to get the potential book deal. So we need to think the book not as a physical thing, but as a an event. Our respect of the “platonic” idea of a book forces to slow down our thinking to a level where we actually reflect on what we write, when we write. And reading a book is about as close to experiencing flying in second life.

Therefore, it is time to re-brand books as experiences not hold on to the idea of books as products of the “Gutenberg Galaxy.” This change of perspective will allow us to think in terms of unconventional business models. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance (there is not one attribute that you find in all games or metaphorically speaking, the rope that holds the boat is not connected by one very long fiber) reminds us that these business models will be different for different books. What does the book mean to you? How do we frame it beyond its material instantiation? What are viable business models for the book of the future?

]]> http://www.philippmueller.de/whither-the-book/feed/ 2 http://www.philippmueller.de/a-revolution-in-140-characters/ http://www.philippmueller.de/a-revolution-in-140-characters/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:14:59 +0000 Philipp http://www.philippmueller.de/?p=806 By: Florian Buhl, Sophie van Huellen, Philipp Müller

Two hours after the polls had closed on June 12, 2009 the re-election of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially announced. Soon thereafter the supporters of Iran’s opposition, especially those of Ahmadinejad’s rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, initiated a protest movement in order to get to an inquiry of the election results.

The protests soon were labelled Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” by Western commentators because the demonstrators made use of web technologies, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, in a twofold manner: On the one hand, the online social media, functioned as a tool to organize and coordinate protests. On the other hand, the web technologies played a decisive role in rising awareness for the demonstrations in the international public sphere. Foreign traditional news media had to rely on the information, pictures and videos posted by Iranian protesters on platforms of the social web, because news correspondents and journalists in Iran were deterred to produce their own content by the Iranian regime. Clearly the interplay of web technologies, the global mass media, and politics in the Iranian case are of great interest, therefore, one needs to ask, how can we analyze the interplay between social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and politics?  [...read on]

Please follow the link to our draft paper,  based on our research project on the interplay of social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and revolutionary politics. We are looking forward to your feedback!

In 2010, it has become a truism that culture, lifeworlds, and our political economies are transforming. It is obvious that the Web is impacting society, bringing in new lifestyles, attitudes, values, work patterns and relationships – it is now even officially (unofficially) nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As the Internet for Peace Manifesto states,

We have finally realized that the internet is much more than a network of computers. It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion and participation. And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict.That’s why the internet is a tool for peace. That’s why anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of nonviolence. And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the net. A Nobel for each and every one of us.

Wide-ranging opportunities for peer production, low transaction costs of participation and prominence of non-instrumental and non-material motivations can potentially transform the social world into more creative, collaborative and active (see Lessig 2008, Shirky 2009, Benkler 2006). Due to this interplay of factors the social reality is transformed from a Read-Only world to Read-Write world. In the latter, people shift from being passive consumers to acting as enthusiastic creators. As argued by Shirky, “revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviors” (2009, p. 160). Technology, however powerful it might be, cannot master the change alone. Technology has to be adopted and used by people, only then it can become ubiquitous and embedded in the everyday reality of society.

Although we witness a plethora of new digital phenomena on a daily basis, we are still lacking an overarching framework to think how these new technologies will transform our cultures, politics, our lives, and even personalities. This understanding and reflection occurs “on the go”, as we are forced to react to change and as we try to craft it. We face numerous questions along the way as technologies shape our lifeworlds and our lifeworlds shape our cultures and politics.

Culture, Lifeworlds, and Politics

Culture is a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Georg Simmel defined the concept as “the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history.” Lifeworld is the social scientific term that reminds us of the incommensurability between academic description and the human experience social life. It is a term that asks us to think culture not only through the systemic perspective of the outside observer, but to hermeneutically engage with the subjects of our objects of analysis. As Habermas (1984: 117) conceptualizes it,

society is conceived from the perspective of acting subjects as the lifeworld of a social group. In contrast, from the observer’s perspective of someone not involved, society can be conceived only as a system of actions such that each action has a functional significance according to its contribution to the maintenance of the system.

Politics is the concept that deals with questions that are described as questions of choice for collectivities (Bartelson 2001; Anderson 1983). It can be circumscribed by the terms community and authority that can be ostensibly related to the questions “Who is member?” (the question of community or identity) and “who gets to decide?” (the question of authority).

From Read-Write to Read-Only and to Read-Write Reloaded

The concept of Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) was proposed by Larry Lessig in his book “Remix” (2008). As he suggested, human culture has for many centuries existed in Read-Write format, where one would not only perceive, but also create and change the culture. Culture was read-write ever since homo sapiens discovered her ability to paint, play music, and sculpt figurines such as the Venus of Schelklingen in the Swabian Alb 40.000 years ago. As stated in Wikipedia, the ultimate collaborative project:

The Swabian Alb region has a number of caves that have yielded mammoth ivory artifacts of the Upper Paleolithic period, totalling about twenty-five items to date. These include the lion-headed figure of Hohlenstein-Stadel and an ivory flute found at Geißenklösterle, dated to 36,000 years ago.^[1] This concentration of evidence of full behavioral modernity in the period of 40 to 30 thousand years ago, including figurative art and instrumental music, is unique worldwide and Conard speculates that the bearers of the Aurignacian culture in the Swabian Alb may be credited with the invention, not just of figurative art and music, but possibly, early religion as well.^[2][3] In a distance of 70cm to the Venus figurine Conard’s team found a flute made from a vulture bone.^[4]

It was only the 20^th century that has shifted the paradigm of cultural development to Read Only – a culture, where individuals are only consumers.

There are some technological reasons for the shift to RO that took place in the 20^th century. Such inventions as phonograph, TV, radio, CD, VHS, DVD enabled wide distribution of culture products and established the principle of delivering culture to people packed in copies. A TV provides a copy of a talk-show. A CD provides a copy of a song. A DVD provides a copy of a film. If in the previous centuries culture was distributed freely and cultural products were easily built upon (like fairytales, told by people to each other without being written down and with possibility to add or change details; like folklore music, sang by people in private circles and on holidays, composed by nobody in particular and by everyone in general), the 20^th century technologies have emphasized and boosted up the growth of copyrighted culture, provided in fixed and unchangeable form.

Now, in the 21^st century, the world has the chance to go back to RW culture and creativity (Lessig 2008, p. 252), but on steroids. Read-Write combined with the power of a global broadcasting platform. The logic of active participation renders obsolete the image of an individual, nurtured by the pop culture of the 20^th century: the image of a consumer. The tools for this shift are provided by the new Web, which favors free creation, voluntary project commitment and collaborative effort; where simple users can become active netizens (Zittrain 2008, p. 161). Through its participatory effects, the new Web fosters the reality of active creation, not passive consuming. Today people “are gratified in significant ways by the ability to play an active role in generating content, rather than only passively consuming that which is created for them by others (Harrison and Barthel 2009, p. 157). There is “substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century” (Benkler 2006, p. 9). As the costs for participation in the new Web fall and as the complexity of  handling technologies decreases, more and more individuals are empowered to become co-creators of our cultures and can have their voice heard. This, however, necessitates also a new way of critical listening.

An Attack on Professionalism

This results in the rise of an amateur culture. In the new Web it is not necessary to pay professors and experts to start an encyclopedia – instead, it is easier to harness the potential of individual knowledge, as Wikipedia did. It is not necessary to pay professional photographers to obtain pictures of a certain event – pictures of nearly everything are available for free and are easily searchable in folksonomies on free photosharing websites like Flickr. It is not necessary to buy expensive machines and spend money on marketing campaigns and personnel to create a newspaper – everyone can be a press outlet of his own with the use of blogging platforms since today “the mass amateurization of publishing undoes the limitations inherent in having a small number of traditional press outlets” (Shirky 2009, p. 65). It is not even necessary to turn on TV to get updates on burning news – livestream of first-hand information is available on Twitter and blogging websites. Similar limitations are destroyed in other spheres.

As a result, professional culture is challenged. A professional is a member of a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, who does not need supervision. Think of doctors or lawyers as classical examples. As a patient, you need to trust your lawyer or doctor, because there can be no absolute proof of her quality, therefore, she needs to convince through secondary attributes (being well-dressed, a fancy office) and/or professional codes of honor. Being member of a profession of course is always exclusive and normally connected to better-than-average incomes. With the democratization of tools of the trade professionalism is under attack.

Firstly, it is not needed in the amount it was needed earlier. As statistics shows, traditional media are suffering losses, laying down the personnel and generally loosing the competition to online media, including the ones run by amateurs (see Keen 2008). Secondly, professionals are not considered as reliable as before. If information, cultural products and meaningful content can be provided in the same (if not bigger) amount, faster and easier than before, there remains little ground for professional culture to preserve its monopoly.The result is the formation of more diverse, more vibrant, more active social universe. Remix culture of improving, changing, sampling, mixing derivative works aspires to replace the culture of permission, that existed before.

Learning to Trust

The new Web stimulates active engagement of people, impacts their lifeworlds and leads to “the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts – peer production of information, knowledge, and culture” (Benkler 2006, p. 5). This active engagement expands the limits of our experience of culture and politics – it changes individuals that participate. Most of us remember the night when we moved from Read-Only to Read-Write, for some it is an experience similar to a first date or to first driving a car -  it might be writing for Wikipedia, posting photos on Flickr or rating links on Digg, with each and every click a person does in the modern Web, he or she is adding value to the community. Voluntary entries in Wikipedia have helped to build the world’s most consulted encyclopedia within a very short time span. Ratings of goods on Amazon.com help other consumers to select products and learn about items in categories they are interested in. Tagging photos on Flickr or music on Last.fm helps other people to find what they are looking for.

Distributed Leadership

It has to be acknowledged that this type of production is not dramatically new, since people were getting together to produce collectively since primordial times. However, only Internet technologies have made the work flow of this type of collective action easily manageable and allow cooperation across both space and time. It means we need different leadership skills,  leaders that have the ability of “convincing people who care a little to care more” (Shirky 2009, p. 181), leaders who can design open processes and engage distributed collaborators to contribute little pieces to bigger projects. Web technologies enable the  decrease of transaction costs of production and participation. Humans make them happen.

In my chapter (p. 275-282), Open Value Creation as a Strategic Management Approach, I argue that

[...] The 
idea 
of 
government
 (or 
business)
 as 
a 
platform
 necessitates 
an
 open
 value
 creation
 process. 
Open 
Value 
Creation 
consists 
of 
Open
 Policy Making 
(participation) 

and 
an 
Open
 Value 
Chain (collaboration). 
The
 distinction
 is 
slightly 
arbitrary
 but 
useful. 
It 
allows
 us 
to differentiate
 between
 coming
 up
 with
 a
 value
 generating
 process
 (policy) 
and
 repeatedly
 creating 
the value 
(value
chain).

Open
 policy
 making aims
 to
 open
 all
 aspects
 of
 the
 policy process
 (initiation,
 formulation,
 implementation,
 evaluation)
to
outside
inputs
and
scrutiny.
It
assumes
 that
 this 
allows
 better
 informed
 policy
making
 that 
is 
more 
legitimate and 
less 
costly.

The
 open
 value
 chain opens
 the
 implementation
 process
 (inputs, 
process,
 outputs, 
impact, 
outcome) 
to 
outside 
contributions
 under
 the
 assumption
 that
 a
 co‐produced
 public
 value
 is 
less
 costly
and 
more
 effective. [...]

Enjoy the book and let us start the discussion!

…on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I’ve come to think about my old country again. Seeing a short compilation of songs about the wall or more precisely its fall in 89, I thought about compiling my personal top 10/11 list of songs from/about East Germany. Not that my generation really listened a lot to East German bands – we were much more in tune with Western (West German, US and UK) music during the late 1980s. However, a few songs still stuck in my mind, mostly from around the time of the Wende (1989/90).

So here goes: 11 songs that bring me back to the GDR (actually Nr. 7 was from a West German artist), accompanied by some comments, plus a bonus track from….New York of all places. Hope you enjoy it!

1. Sandow: Born in the GDR (1990)
(makes – not so friendly – references to the sport star Nr. 1 in East Germany – ice skater Katarina Witt and the concert that Bruce Spingsteen gave 1988 in East Berlin in front of ….160,000 people)

2. City: Am Fenster (1978)
(with an awesome violin solo at the beginning)

3. Karat: Ueber sieben Bruecken musst Du geh’n (?),
(the song was made somewhat more famous in West Germany in a cover version by Peter Maffay)

4. Feeling B: Wir wollen immer artig sein (1990),

(half of today’s Rammstein come from this Nr.1 punk band in East Germany)

5. Electric Beat Crew: Here we come (1989),
(Hip Hop from East Germany!!! Only song from an East German band I know in English)

6. Karusell: Als ich fortging (1988),
(wonderful melody and lyrics written by a local poet – Gisela Steineckert)

7. Udo Lindenberg: Sonderzug nach Pankow (1983),
(in fact, Udo Lindenberg finally did manage to sing in the “Palace of the Republic” in East Berlin in 1987)

8. Nina Hagen: Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (1978),
(who would have had thought that – Nina Hagen grew up in East Berlin; she must have been 18 years old or so when she recorded this song…)

9. Herbst in Peking: Bakschischrepublik (1990),
(the hymn of alternative East German rock during the Wende)

10. Die Skeptiker: Strahlende Zukunft (1990),
(a band labelled the East German “Dead Kennedys” – I think for the (political) quality of their lyrics they’d probably better be described as the equivalent of “The Clash”)

Bonus track:
11. Grandmaster Melle Mel: Beat Street Theme (1986),
(the movie “Beat Street” about life, rap and hip hop music in New York was shown in GDR film theaters in 1986 or 87 and revolutionized the local, unofficial music scene – lots of breakdance groups imitating the moves from the movie sprung up like mushrooms)