The Blog Anniversary is coming

About two years ago, at October 1st, 2006, I had my first post at Thinking Space. At that time, I was just thinking of a casual place that might allow me to throw a few random thoughts of my research irregularly. I had not thought to build a site that would one day have consistently hundreds of readers everyday from all over the world (and the number is still growing dramatically). Be honest, it was just a little bit more than a dream for a nobody with no fame, no money, and no any sponsorship at all, and we know that there are thousands of this type of new blog sites created every day!

As what I did at the last year, I will post an anniversary special at the blog anniversary day. It is both of a thank-you note for my readers and a memo for myself. If anybody (actually mainly myself) wants to look for what Thinking Space has discussed and thought before, the anniversary posts are the best place to start searching. They categorize nearly all the posts in the past year and the posts are recorded with a brief summary of content.

Unlike the last year, however, this year's anniversary post will be a mini-series with three installments.

(1) Thank you note, including special thanks to a list of news and blog sites and individual bloggers that have brought me resources of thinking. I would recommend this list of sites and bloggers to all of the Thinking Space readers because they are really good and you can learn much from their writing just as I have learned.

(2) Particular share of three selected posts at Thinking Space, two are the most popular posts voted by the readers like you (based on the visiting status records) and the last one is picked by the author, i.e., me.

(3) Summary of the posts in the past year.

The second-year anniversary post has been scheduled on early morning at October 1st. Thank you and wish it could be a good gift of innovative thoughts for every one of you.

New generation business demands new DNA

Due to the spread of financial crisis at Wall Street, more people start to rethink the intrinsic problem in the present business infrastructure. In a recent Harvard Business Publishing post, Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, appealed to "building a better kind of business" that would challenge the rot he saw at the heart of the institutions of business.

Among the five steps of resolution Haque recommended, I am particularly interested in his third suggestion (which mentioned by himself to be the "simplest, and most fundamental step"): understanding that next-generation businesses are built on new DNA, or new ways to organize and manage economic activities.

Haque believed the reason behind the institutional flux to be that "the centuries-old institutions of orthodox capitalism cannot support the transition to a hyperconnected global economy." Therefore, a tactical adjustment of the present financial policy might not be enough to really solve the problem. By contrast, Haque asked for a strategical revision of business fundamentals.

Unquestionably bold the claim is, I do agree to his words about "bringing new DNA to a table." This is what we need to do now.

What is the new DNA?

In his article, Haque, however, has not clearly explained what the new DNA of new business is. He mentioned the demand as well as the functions the new DNA must hold in order to "addresses the rot which pervades the economy at every level." But there is no explicit interpretation of the new DNA itself.

Certainly to define such a new DNA is not easy. I would also not pretend to knowing the answer. However, from a Web researcher's point of view (since many business people including Haque believe that Internet is the future of economy), I would like to share a few of my viewpoints.

I believe the new DNA would be mind asset. The crisis happening at Wall Street right now is rooted by the fundamental of capitalist economy. By nature, capital is near-sighted and selfish. As long as the economy is still built upon capital transaction, there is no way to really overcome the problem occurred today at Wall Street. The only possible solution is to revise the fundamental. By saying that I do not mean communism. By contrast, I expect the rise of mind asset and a new form of human society (harmonious society?).

Mind asset, as the name suggests, is property of human thoughts. The term is contrast to capital asset, which is property of all kinds of products and services.

About four months ago, before this financial crisis I have discussed a vision on the rise of mind asset when sharing with Adam Lindemann, CEO of Imindi. This vision is a reasonable derivation by my theory of Web evolution.

Web evolution is essentially a gradual increment of quality of Web resources. Meanwhile, Web resource is the basic presentation form of modern mind asset. Therefore, the eventual formation of modern mind asset is an inevitable consequence of Web evolution. Since mind product (in contrast to capital product) is the essential asset type of input and output of the postmodern industry, saying the Web industry (or Internet industry), mind asset would replace capital asset being the basis of the coming new economy.

To understand why mind asset being the new DNA can overcome the fundamental problem in the capitalist economy, we need to learn another subtle difference between capital and mind. In essence, capital is mass/energy while mind is information. As we discussed earlier, mass/energy cannot compute itself unless it consumes while information may compute by itself without consuming extra energy.

Now back to the current financial crisis at Wall Street. The crisis happens because the greedy Wall Street bankers tried to let capital compute itself to produce more wealth without literally consuming any real-world mass/energy. Fundamentally this thought contradicts to the computational nature of mass/energy. Therefore, this financial behavior itself is a bubble to burst from its beginning. It only matters when (but not whether) the financial crisis would come.

On the contrary, in theory information may indeed compute by itself without consuming any real-world mass/energy. Therefore, by replacing capital asset with mind asset we may eventually solve (or at least greatly eliminate) the future financial crisis when it is in reality impossible to get ride of the financial business at all (and nor might we remove greed from human's heart).

Referenced resources:

• How to Build a Next-Gen Business Now (Harvard Business Publishing)
  
• Who Needs Unfinished Business? (Torch is Wicked)
  
• We are in a new transition, part 1 (Thinking Space)
• We are in a new transition, part 2 (Thinking Space)
  
• Programming the Universe, Part 2 (Thinking Space)

Modern management and creativity

At a recent Harvard Business Publishing post, Professor Teresa Amabile asked an interesting question: is management the enemy of creativity? Teresa argued that it was the bureaucracy in management that caused the gradual loss of creativity in big corporations. Therefore, a major revision of modern management must be up to the calendar.

I, however, have a different thought of this issue. I think that by nature management is to control, in contrast to encourage, creation.

As Ralf Lippold mentioned in his comment. "What makes CREATIVITY often so dangerous ... is that CREATIVITY always means leaving the traditional and known paths ..." Though as a thinker I am a definite advocate of creativity, I earnestly support this comment. Creativity many times is synonymous to danger. A company is not living in dream, but in reality. Therefore, stability of its execution is generally the most critical demand. The primary goal of management is to support this stability instead of breaking the stability, though inevitably it also causes bureaucracy.

Innovation or creativity is another story. Controversially, I believe that it is small companies instead of big companies that must have strong research departments. For big companies, what they need is actually a department of venture investment other than a department of research. In my view, such a distinction is the right balance between management and creativity. Small companies are light management, heavy creativity. Big companies are heavy management, light creativity. At the same time, big companies use its stability to protect and foster the growth of real creativity in a broad base of small companies. This infrastructure would eventually maximize the protection of creativity and at the same time would guarantee the stability of our society.

Marketing strategy in social networks

In a 2-minute yBC video clip, Anastasia Goodstein, a Gen-Y book author and the founder of Ypulse, shared how corporate campaigns might have missed their mark on marketing the social networks. I am impressed by her observation that opaque marketing is not the right way to explore business opportunities in online social networks.

By Goodstein, quite a few present retail firms try to hire online young ambassadors to spread their positive buzz over varied social networks such as Facebook. Instead of regular salary, the retailers give the young ambassadors free stuffs as gift. The retailers, however, advise their young agents not to disclose the gifts they received. The retailers ask their young ambassadors pretending to be objective volunteers who happen to like the services or product instead of being "paid" salespersons. The policy seems smart, while indeed, however, it is a miss of the mark on what social networks are.

Here are some thoughts that Goodstein did not explicitly say in her short speech while I want to extend the speech a little bit.

Social networking is to connect people with various "expertise". A social network is where one helps everyone else and everyone else helps her. To help each other, in social networks people look for a member's strengths but not the amateur comments. This is why the strategy executed by the retailers is wrong.

In short, objective volunteers are not necessarily experts (and most regularly they are not), even if their names are on the list of one's friends. This is where the whole problem is sitting. A person wants to seek professional suggestions in contrast to unprofessional buzz through her social network. Therefore, if the young ambassadors are known competing to be the official service/product representative and receiving free stuffs from the service/product providers are the proof of their expertise, their recommendation and comments would immediately become more valuable than the others among the friends.

Note that there is a subtle issue of trust inside social networks. In a social network, by default there is already existence of certain degree of trustworthy between declared friends. Hence being "professional" or not is a more crucial issue than the issue of trust since the latter one already has been reached. If I have two varied recommendation of services from two friends, I will certainly pick the service recommended by the friend who I believe is more expertise on the related domain. I trust both of my friends; but when trustworthy is not longer an issue, I choose the expert's suggestion.

Now the error the mentioned retailers made has been clear. These retailers are addressing the issue of trust instead of expertise. In real life we have learned that many salespersons are not trustworthy. Hence the retailers want their young ambassadors to be looked like trustworthy. What they missed is that the issue of trustworthy has already been automatically solved by default in the social network. The young ambassadors, no matter whom they are, are already quite trustworthy among their friends (or otherwise they should not have been friends at the first place). What the retailers really need to invest following is to train the young ambassadors so that they looks like professional in front of their friends. That is the miss of the mark!

yourBusinessChannel, the Web 2.0 marketing

yourBusinessChannel is a site to offer expert business development advice for entrepreneurs. The site claims to be the world's best collection of high quality online TV shows featuring business legends. Through yBC.tv, its online TV channel, some of the biggest and best respected names in business may give people free but serious guidance on almost every aspect of business. In short, I would tell the site being where the traditional marketing meets Web 2.0.

youBusinessChannel intends to build an online society of marketing experts and entrepreneurs. When entrepreneurs look for advises to expand their product market, yBC brings a team of marketing experts onto the table for help. At the same time, yBC provides an additional (and probably becoming more and more important with time) channel for marketing experts to broadcast themselves into varied rapidly growing business sectors. It is a win-win strategy and the business model is a typical Web 2.0 marketing.

Invited by Jacqui Gray, the Editorial Research Manager at yourBusinessChannel, and Andre Dent, the Global Syndication Manager, I have agreed to be one of the broadcast partners of yBC. Hence from time to time, I may post a few commentary on some of its shows here at Thinking Space. Certainly, however, my selected shows as well as my comments must be Web-related.

Technology

By Kevin Kelly,

Technology is a type of thinking. ... However what technology ultimately offers is far greater that some more bad and some more good. In the sum it offers increased possibilities and choices. And this is why we gravitate to it so.

Technology is a type of thinking. So may Thinking Space be renamed as "Technology Space"? Sounds not bad, isn't it?

In fact, technology is a type of productive thinking. An essence of technology is to produce. Good or bad, technology produces. More production eventually leads to more choices and then more possibilities, which is thus the beauty.

Teach your kids what is happening at Wall Street now

I just read a post by Jason Kolb. It is fantastic. I guess every father or mother could use it as a textbook to teach their kids about money and what is happening at Wall Street now.