Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Howard Schultz's Starbucks Tale, Onward, Is a Page Turner

I think that few people in the marketing game really understand the art and science of branding. If that were not true we wouldn’t see the biggest and sharpest agencies in the country launching a New Coke or “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. But one person who does understand what branding is all about is Howard Schultz, the co-founder of Starbucks.

In his new book Onward, Schultz clearly shows a deep understanding of brand husbandry.  Prior to the Crash of 2008, when Starbucks was flying high on Wall Street, Schultz, who had retired from the CEO position,  knew something was not right with the Starbucks brand. He revealed so in a now famous email to Starbucks management that was leaked in February 2007.

In reading what for me was a page turner I almost felt as though I was in Howard’s living room hearing him talk about Starbuck’s running off the track and his efforts to put it back on course. It has all the makings of a business classic written from a highly humanistic point of view.

An Interesting Read: In Praise of Dissent

Catch this article in Ode, a fascinating magazine devoted to "intelligent optimists." The article has nothing to do with the central theme of this blog, but everything to do with life. If you have ever read About under my signature picture with a mule named Dusty, you have a clue as to why this article appealed to me. I dedicate this posting to all of you out there who have what it takes to avoid groupthink. As we move into this next decade you may find the tests of your will against those immobilized by the status quo increasing. As I indicated several posts ago we are in for changes taking place at warp speed in directions beyond most people's imaginations a decade or so ago. So -- damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Why Do Relatively Few Women Make a Big Name in Business?

Quick: Name the five most famous books written by women on the subject of management. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.  Bzzzzz. You lost out. Sorry.

Let’s try an easier question. Aside from Marrisa Mayer, Ursula Burns, and Carol Bartz (to take out the easy ones) name five leading women in tech.  Tick. Tick. Tick. Oh, forget it.

Where are all the women in this age of gender diversity in the workplace, especially in tech?

Women supposedly account for more new businesses than men do. According to the Kaufman Foundation which studies such matters, between 1997 and 2002 U.S. women-owned firms grew in number by 19.8 percent, compared with a 10.3 percent growth rate firms overall.

During the same period, however, women-owned firms recorded lower survival numbers, as well as lower numbers for size, growth, earnings and profits. The data suggest that women-owned firms are smaller and less growth-oriented than men-owned firms.

What’s behind these disappointing numbers?

First, let me answer why I’m writing about gender and the workplace. I started looking at the topic in connection with a new book I’m doing. It’s hard to find women’s names that resonate in the business community like those of Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, Tom Peters, Michael, Porter, Jim Collins, John Kotter, and Warren Bennis and so on and so on.

Then, a Fast Company article appeared in my email today on “The Most Influential Women in Technology.” The number of influential women in tech is shockingly small. Women as a founder or co-founder account for less than 10 percent of all tech startups.

I’ve read that women have greater challenges getting credit, that they still must learn to play by rules laid down by men, that they have to face social stigmas associated with women who abandon family  for career, and other reasons why fewer women make it really big in the business world.

Alicia Robb, Kauffman Foundation senior research fellow said, "The interesting thing about women entrepreneurs is that many of them may be purposely starting businesses as a lifestyle choice. The number of women-owned businesses growing faster may reflect that women are going into business as a viable way to move out of the traditional employment market and gain flexibility. It's hard to know if those kinds of businesses are where they want to be or if they would like to grow faster."

In other words it is not fair to women (or men, for that matter) to compare them on equal terms. Women often start businesses for different reasons than men do. And probably by virtue of lower testosterone levels they generally pursue business less competitively.

Do we see women who are as competitive as any man? Of course – but not as often because women are indeed different. Their brains work differently and they have characteristic values that weigh in heavier in their decisions than they do in men’s decisions. For example, research shows that women tend to be more collaboratively-minded than men are. Men are more likely to make a go of it on their own.

One thing I’m seeing is that while women’s influence in tech may be what some would call appallingly low, women’s influence on the business ethos in general is growing and men’s is ebbing. Perhaps from the standpoint of what’s good for society, maybe women’s influence on corporate behavior is more important than on corporate growth. I’ll get into more detail in my next post on this topic because it affects every aspect of business from employee relations and product design to marketing and customer servicing.

Motivation: The subject of Daniel Pink's Latest

If you would like to get a great synopsis of Daniel Pink's new best seller about workplace motivations go to this mind map-illustrated 11-minute presentation by Pink. His book is called Drive:The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Why Lemmings Drown Themselves and Companies Go Bankrupt

Everyone knows that overpopulation turns lemmings toward the sea to correct the problem. That’s kind of  what happens in  stock markes from time to time. When irrational exuberance lifts stocks to unsustainable levels, investors destroy value by dumping stocks so fast that supply far outpaces demand and prices precipitously plummet. Too much of anything triggers correction in due course. It must be a law of nature.

No one would attribute the action lemmings take to correct their population problem to rational decision-making. So why should we regard matters on Wall Street any differently when investors sell off stocks in a frenzied rush to correct the Street’s valuation problems?

Wall Street’s behavior fascinates me endlessly. One company sneezes and a big sell-off involving hundreds if notm thousands of stocks occur. Often the opposite happens. One company reports quarterly earnings that beat analysts’ expectations and the whole category it is a part of rises. The next day, a competitor’s earnings report fails to meet analysts’ expectations and the whole category falls.

Remember when the Wall Street Journal ran a quarterly contest between two teams on picking stocks? The first team had four star analysts who named their top stock picks for the quarter. The second team had just one lonely soul.  He was a Journal reporter with four darts. The darts won an amazingly number of times.

It seems to me that we often amuse ourselves by contriving reasons for actions we take when all the while little of what we are examining reflects much involvement of our conscious selves, aka, our egos.

The ego is a wonderful thing. Without one, we wouldn’t know who we were. It is our conscious self. We also have an unconscious self. Freud called it the id. The id contains all our basic drives associated with the four F’s: fight, flight, feeding and reproduction.

Then there’s our super ego. It mediates information that flows back and forth between the unconscious self and the conscious self and tries to get us to do the right thing from a moral perspective. Thank God for the super ego. It puts the brakes on destructive behavior that we might be tempted into by drives welling up in the primitive, amoral id. The superego is the seat of our conscience.

A big problem with the ego is that it tends to get too full of itself. It wants full credit plus compounded interest on successes it believes it has caused to happen and full absolution for all errors in judgment, none of which it thinks it was responsible for in the first place. The ego is the generator of defensiveness.

So, if we can agree that our conscious self is only one of several actors in our decision-making scenarios – and often off stage at that – then we can move on to why colonies of lemmings and stock market investors (and companies they buy stock in) often act in self-destructive ways. It all has to do with the behavior that takes place in complex adaptive systems.

Complex adaptive systems are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements. They are adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience. Everyone knows from the story of the dinosaurs that a specie's failure to adapt to humongous environmental changes is usually sentenced to extinction.

Every unit of organic life is a complex adaptive system. But complex adaptive systems may also be inorganic, though they can be as dynamic in their adaptive behavior as lifeforms. An ecosystem is an example of an inorganic complex adaptive system. The biosphere is another.

So why should any of us in marketing or any other sector of business be interested in complex adaptive systems? For starters, markets are complex adaptive systems. Consider the stock market. It continuously adapts to environmental changes: changes in the CPI, unemployment rate, currency exchange rates, consumer confidence and even the weather.

Companies are also complex adaptive systems, although one might add that failure to learn and adapt in the face of major changes in the operating environment is not unusual among business organizations. Dinosaurs were complex adaptive systems, but they failed to learn and change in response to cosmic changes in their environments. That happens to a lot of companies. Halicrafter (radios), Ipana (toothpaste), Teal (liquid teeth wash), Oldsmobile (cars) Pan American Airlines and Dumont (televisions) are examples of companies that ended up like dinosaurs in museums .

The human ego is one of the biggest factors behind corporate extinctions. The identities of chief ego officers often get so wrapped up with set ways of doing business they are unable to learn and adapt to new rules for survival imposed by the disruptive forces of major environmental changes.

Since I’m at the limit of my self-imposed word count for my posts, I’ll stop now and resume the discussion of complex adaptive systems in my next post.

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 1)

The Socialization of Business: The Biggest Change in Capitalism Since Adam Smith

In my last post I promised you a list of 10 ideas that I believe are doing more to change the world than the 10 ideas Time listed in its March 24 edition. You may recall my intention to draw my list from the same categories Time used. However, once I went to work on my own list I discovered that sticking with Time’s categories would be to ignore some of the most influential ideas of our times.

Take business, for example. Time ignored that category despite the role of business in society undergoing the deepest conceptual change since Adam Smith laid down the foundations of capitalism in Wealth of Nations in 1776.

Like a person who has evolved from the self-centeredness of youthhood toward the others-centeredness of self-actualization, capitalistic enterprises are projecting more advanced states of socialization than ever before seen on a broad front. Legions of companies have taken up purposes of social significance far beyond service to their bottom lines. Many have adopted a multiple stakeholder relationship (MSR) business model.

Management in MSR companies intentionally address needs of other stakeholders from customers and employees to suppliers and society. Economist Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in eradicating poverty, calls this “conscious capitalism.”

Ever since British Parliament passed the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844 corporations have been relieved of any social purpose. As Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman famously said, “(T)here is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

Friedman regarded executives who operated their companies with a sense of social purpose as being un-American:

The businessmen (who) believe … that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends, has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution are preach­ing pure and unadulterated socialism. (They are) are unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

Ever since Friedman wrote those words for a 1970 New York Magazine article, academicians, business leaders, social commentators and others have waged vigorous debates about the role of business enterprises in society. But as songster Bob Dylan sings, “The times they are a-changin’.” Those who believe that business’s only social responsibility is lawfully making profits are an endangered species.

As the size and power of companies have grown, so also has the “social conscience” of business. Some would counter that claim by calling attention to the recent Enrons, Tycos and WorldComs scandals. However, while commanding fewer and smaller headlines, companies in growing numbers have unabashedly incorporated a resolve to help create a better world into their missions.

Many are the companies that are taking on tasks traditionally considered the job of government and NGOs. For example Starbucks uses its considerable purchasing power to improve the life quality of people in coffee growing countries. It offers growers multi-year fixed prices regardless of fluctuations in market price. In exchange, growers must plow some of their profits back into educational, housing, healthcare and other social needs of their communities.

For the first time in history, companies economically rival most nations on earth. Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 43 are business enterprises. Their annual revenues are greater than the GDP of all but 57 nations. Within the next decade they will become the majority.

Foes of globalization see the growing power of companies as a dire threat that warrants government intervention. However, not many nations are likely to take actions that curb the growing power of business. They cannot afford to.

After a century of socialistic behavior, developed nations are finding it increasingly difficult to pay the bills. They are experiencing the double whammy of population shrinkage, which leads to falling tax revenues, and unprecedented growth in elderly populations, which increases the per capita costs of entitlements.

In the past, governments depended on taxes to cover costs associated with fulfilling their social agendas. Often, raising taxes is no longer politically or economically defensible. So, governments must look elsewhere for resources to meet public needs. One rapidly growing trend is selling public infrastructures from roads and bridges to ports and prisons to private enterprises on a revenue-sharing basis.

Many companies have moved on their own to address major social problems. GE’s much hailed ecoimagination initiative is one prominent example. Like a growing number other companies, GE sees profitable opportunities in taking actions that benefit the environment. Other social issues commanding the attention of globally operating companies include exploitation of workers in poorer nations.

One of the most impressive examples of business moving into traditional government territory to solve a major social problem is seen in the operation of the Grameen Bank.

Bangladeshian economist Muhammad Yunus invented the microlending industry to help the poor escape poverty. With a loan of as little as $25 to buy materials for handicrafts that she can sell in the open market, a depressingly poor woman can take herself and her family out of abject poverty.

Philanthropic activity is growing at an unprecedented rate. Some of it flows from corporately sponsored foundations. Other philanthropy is supported by individuals who have amassed great fortunes from business operations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a notable example of the latter. The Gates Foundation is dedicated to ridding the world of malaria. It has also tackled illiteracy in poor nations around the world. The Gates Foundation has partnered with a number of public school systems in the U.S.to improve student performance by applying principles of sound business management to the administration of public education.

In the 20^th century, the welfare of societies and their members was largely left to government. In the 21^st century, business enterprise is playing an ever larger role in addressing the social agenda of nations around the world. Surely, the socialization of business is one of the most powerful ideas now shaping the world. Yet the March 24 edition of Time gave it no attention in its cover story, “10 Ideas that are changing the world.”

 

 

Howard Shultz's Strategy for Dealing with the McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts Threat

There must be nearly as many definitions of what a brand is as there are people who offer one, but one world comes through probably more often than any other: promise.

However, if one starts with the premise that a brand is a personality – and there is good reason to believe so, based on recent brain research indicating how the mind/brain complex processes a brand – then calling a brand a promise is like defining you by the word smart. Smart you may be, but that hardly defines you as a personality.

I favor the definition offered recently by a client that I cited in this space last week: “Our brand is everything we do.” Is that not a robust way of describing a personality? Are you not the sum total of all you do? All you dream, perceive, think and do?

Howard Shultz views his Starbucks that way. The Starbuck’s brand is not coffee. It’s not even the taste of coffee, or the taste plus smell of coffee. Starbuck’s is the sum total of the customer’s experience. Shultz shaped one of the most amazing stories in marketing history based on that idea – that definition of a brand.

The Starbucks brand definition includes one of the most generous employee benefits plans around. It was the first company to offer liberal healthcare benefits to employees working less than half time.

The Starbucks brand definition includes its intentional efforts to save small family farms and improve the quality of life of people in agricultural villages around the world. It enters into multi-year fixed price contracts with coffee bean growers, thus relieving them of gut-wrenching angst over volatile commodity markets. In exchange for price stability, growers contractually commit to devoting as much as 10% of their revenues to help meet such local community needs as schools, healthcare and housing.

The Starbucks brand definition includes its humanistic devotion to needs of people in every core stakeholder group. It informs employees of a higher purpose to thier efforts, thereby engendering an infectious niceness that makes a customer's day perhaps a little brighter.

And, not least of all, Starbucks brand definition does include the sensuous qualia of the product, to be sure, but also the ambiance of the stores in which people buy and imbibe the product. Nothing in what you see in a Starbucks is just incidental. Everything within the compass of the human eye and ear is deliberately where it is in the manner that it is.

Skilled observers study customers' behavior in the store from the time they enter until their last step out the door. They study body language responses to the environment and seek ways to accommodate customers' natural ambulatory and sensual rhythms rather than trying to conform customer behavior to some designer's concept of how customers should behave.

Shultz’s famous leaked email was about his deep concern that Starbucks management had lost connection with the brand’s personality. In the interest of revenue growth, additions were made to the list of products to be sold that bore no relationship to the brand’s essence. For example, breakfast foods were introduced that diminished the warm, comforting aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Now, as of April 1, breakfast eats will be eliminated from Starbucks shelves.

Shultz wisely knows that a brand’s essence cannot be copied. There is not enough money in the entire world sufficient for turning a Pepsi into a Coca-Cola. Now that Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s are nipping at the weakened Starbucks heals, Shultz wants to take Starbucks back to its spiritual roots as an extraordinarily sensuous coffee-based delight in a setting where people come to meet for social and business reasons – the third place, in Shultz’s words. Neither Dunkin' Donuts nor McDonald's can copy Starbucks' expression of this idea.

I believe that despite some probable short-term disruptions in revenue patterns that Wall Street won’t like, Shultz’s strategy for dealing with McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts as well as thousands of long tail competitors across the land is a correct strategy that will in the long run pay off for everyone – investors included.

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Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #5 for Surviving and Thriving:
Operate with Transparency

Last month millions were horrified by a clandestinely filmed video of animal abuse at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in California. The video showed cattle too sick to walk on their being prodded with electrical shocks and forklifts toward their place of slaughter.

Under USDA rules no meat from animals unable to walk on their own can be lawfully sold for human consumption.

Westland/Hallmark president and CEO Steve Mendell declared in a press release:

“Words cannot accurately express how shocked and horrified I was at the depictions contained on the video that was taken by an individual who worked at our facility from October 3 thru November 14, 2007

. We have taken swift action regarding the two employees identified on the video and have already implemented aggressive measures to ensure all employees follow our humane handling policies and procedures.”

One can only speculate whether Mr. Mendell was really shocked and horrified – or whether his shock and horror was over his operations being secretly filmed. However, with the ubiquity of the Internet, murder will out – no pun intended.

No more can we blithely assume that any action we take that is observed by another person will not ever show up on the Internet.

Welcome to the Age of Transparency.

Companies that Raj Sisodia and I write about in Firms of Endearment have learned that transparency is not as fraught with risk as hierarchically organized command-and-control organizations and their lawyers have long believed.

In the first place, an ethos of transparency is a vaccine against the kinds of executive cupidity seen in such iconic scandals as those represented by the names Enron, WorldCom and Tyco.

However, beyond that, an ethos of transparency strengthens employee loyalty and productivity. Privately-owned sneaker maker New Balance shares an uncommon amount of production and financial data with employees. This enables employees to gauge their performance. It’s apparently a more effective way of inspiring workers to higher performance levels than supervisors’ criticisms and commands.

New Balance makes more than 30 percent of its shoes in the U.S. with plans to increase that percentage. That is impressive given that sneakers can be made in China for 1/14 the hourly wage New Balance pays its U.S.workers. However, New Balance’s U.S.factories are the most productive sneaker producers in the world. Much of the reason for this, according to New Balance CEO Jim Davis, is the transparency of his operations to employees.

Organic grocer Whole Foods publishes everyone’s salaries to avoid corrosive rumor mongering about who is paid what. JetBlue teaches employees how to read the company’s financials so that they can better appreciate their contribution to its bottom line.

A felicitous consequence of operating with transparency internally is that employees do the same with customers, thus building greater trust between company and customer.

Transparency responds to rising expectations for authenticity in producer-consumer relationships. After enduring many decades of exaggerated company claims, customers are turning off in ever greater numbers to unauthentic messages. Additionally, everyday whole armies of consumers post go online to tell their stories of gaps between a company’s claims and its delivery.

A useful guide to operating with greater authenticity is Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore’s new book, Authenticity. Click on the book cover in the left column  to be teleported to Amazon where you can read about Authenticity.
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If you have the stomach for it, watch a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) film about animal abuse that has turned untold numbers into either vegetarians or customers of companies like Whole Foods who only buy meat and dairy products from producers that have been certified as humane. The PETA video underscores the decline of corporate secrecy which is making transparency less and less an option. To borrow from Google, "Don't be evil" because sooner or later you'll be found out if you do.

 

 

 

Strategic Action #5 for Surviving and Thriving:
Operate with Transparency

Japan's Incredible Shrinking Markets and the Wal-Mart Mission for a Better World

Two articles in today's Washington Post and the New York Times sttod out for me as worthy of readers' attention.

The Washington Post article, "For Japan, a Long, Slow Slide," begins, "As the United States fret noisily about a recession, Japan is quietly enduring a far more fundamental economic slide, one that seems irreversible." That, about the economy that observers were predicting as late as the ending years of the 1980s would overtake the U.S. economy by 2000.

In 1994, Japan' share of the world's economy was a staggering 18 percent. By 2006, it had fallen to less than 10 percent.

What happened to the Japanese Miracle and why should we care, anyhow? As the cited article points out, the combination of Japan's aging population (the world's oldest) and population shrinkage caused by five decades of annual births insufficient in number to replace the population  is translates into steadily declining consumer demand. We should be concerned about Japan's deteriorating economy because it presages a similar scenario for most of the world's developed nations that also are aging and facing population shrinkage.

While women in the U.S. like Japan and nearly all other developed nations are not having enough babies to replace the population and is also experiencing a boom in the aged population, immigration for all its current controversy in the 2008 elections will help keep the economy growing, even if at much less robust pace over the next decade than we've seen since the Great Depression.

In the weweks ahead, I will continue posting articles to the "Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times" thread that I've been weaving. There will be companies that will do quite well in the years ahead despite the end of the salad days for the U.S. economy. Most of these companies will have leapt ahead of their competitors in developing specific nontraditional business models and strategies better suited to the lean times ahead.

The New York Times article, "Wal-Mart: The New Washington," describes how Wal-Mart has embarked on a huge turnaround away from its niggardly past when it used its buying power to mercilessly crush anything and everything in its take-no-prisoners economic imperialism that spun on for decades Now, Wal-Mart wants to use its unparalleled economic power to make the world a better place. And it is doing that by taking on big social issues as though it were a government, according to New York Times columnist Michael Barabaro

Importantly, Wal-Mart's new leaf is not just a PR gambit. It is a new strategic approach to doing business that Bill Gates urged companies to take up at the Davos World Economic Forum two weeks ago. All of a sudden, it seems, hard-nosed capitalists are learning that new wealth creation opportunities in doing good while doing well are virtually limitless.

(To access the cited articles you will need to register with respective papers, but the articles are available for no cost.)

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 2)

The Role of Collective Intelligence

Experts own the world. No other classification of human mental output holds more sway over our lives.

Experts appear with predictable regularity in courtrooms, congressional hearings, corporate retreats, academic symposia as well as in our personal lives in the personages of doctors, lawyers, financial planners, spiritual advisors and a plethora of other roles.

Recently, the role of experts in our lives has been coming under sharp questioning. James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds argues that “large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant – better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions and even predicting the future.” (From the front piece.)

The subject of the collective intelligence of groups of people is garnering growing interest. How is it possible that input from random aggregations of people can often outdo a gaggle of PhDs in choosing the best course of action in an undertaking?

James Shanteau offers some answers to that question in an online article, Competence in Experts: The Role of Task Characteristics.

Presumably, experts in a particular subject area enjoy considerable consensus among themselves. However, Shanteau’s research indicates that in a number of fields agreement among experts falls below 50 percent. These fields include stock-picking, livestock judging, and clinical psychology.

Raj Sisodia, my co-author of Firms of Endearment, and I were struck by how much FoEs strive to tap the “wisdom of the crowds” – that is, to enlist the collective intelligence in their organizations in problem solving.

Most companies do not permit collective intelligence to develop. It cannot thrive in the hierarchical social structures most organizations have. After all, people called CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CMOs and the like are a company’s in-house experts. Lowlifes on the front lines have neither the knowledge nor the thinking skills need to forge wise decisions.

Most companies are organized like a machine. They are made up of various moving parts that somewhat predetermine the general nature of outcomes. Each part has a designated function. The role of management is to see that each part is doing what it’s supposed to do, and to keep the moving parts working in harmony.

However, there is a better way to organize and operate a company. Instead of organizing a company artificially like a clockwork mechanism, organizing it more naturally as a complex adaptive system permits the wisdom of the crowds to form and express itself.

Like the self-correcting, self-organizing characteristics of Wikipedia, companies that are organized and operate along the lines of a complex adaptive system have an ability to make course changes far faster than mechanistically organized companies. They also more quickly spot and exploit new business opportunities.

Everyone agrees that the scale and pace of change that companies face today is unprecedented. Surviving and thriving have never been more challenging. On the other hand, so also are the opportunities unprecedented. And the companies that are being most successful in developing new business opportunities tend to be those that operate as complex adaptive systems that tap the wisdom of the crowds that flows from the operation of collective intelligence.

Finally, for a company to enjoy the greatest success in adapting to Web 2.0 (see th previous post), it is necessary to become less of a mechanistically organized and operating company and more of a complex adaptive systems organism. Hierarchical, command and control organizations are highly incompatible with the free-flowing, open source nature of Web 2.0.

 

 

 

Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 2)

The Role of Collective Intelligence

Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 2)

The Role of Collective Intelligence

Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 2)

The Role of Collective Intelligence