For those needing an additional nudge, besides my recommendation, download and read the excerpt (pdf), which is, in my humble opinion, a paltry sampling of this Nobel laureate’s wit, wisdom, and insight.

Here are some recent reviews of Thinking, Fast & Slow – relatively decent reviews from people that clearly aren’t winning any prizes for writing creative headlines.

Business Week

Salon: The Effect Effect

Wall Street Journal: Why the Grass is Always Greener

New York Times: Two Brains 

“Companies are improving their mastery of social technologies, using them to enhance operations and exploit new market opportunities—key findings of our fifth annual survey on these tools and technologies, in which we asked more than 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy them and the benefits they confer. When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share, respondents say, confirming last year’s survey results.”

Some of the findings are very interesting, for instance, “We found statistically significant correlations between self-reported corporate performance metrics and certain business processes that networked enterprises use (Exhibit 5),” as well as, “Another key performance measure, self-reported operating-margin improvements, correlated positively with the reported percentage of employees whose use of social technologies was integrated into their day-to-day work.”

All in all, I found it an interesting, if brief, report that offered some interesting and quantified insights into how enterprises using social tools are gaining competitive advantage.

Benefits remain consistent over time

Download report here.

Hyper-Social Design Studio Overview

A thoroughly new remix technique: combining a focused UX Book Club idea with Design Studio Methodology. Starting with the book “The Hyper-Social Organization“, participants including designers (service, experience, interaction, organization), creative technologist, strategists and product managers will read the book. On the day of the studio, each partipant will present key concepts to one chapter, having only 5 minutes to do so, with no more than 5 slides in power point. After a quick break, participants will break into teams and explore concepts introduced in the book to a specific business case study and have a limited amount of time to explore, ideate, sketch and deliver innovative solutions to the problem space which is broken into seven separate functions within an organization.

Saturday, Fall 2011 1PM – 530PM

Location: SoHo, New York City

Price: Free, but a commitment is required.

Interested? Contact me

Schedule

100 – 115      Introductions

115 – 230      Lightening Presentations: 5 Minutes, no more than 5 slides (template to be provided) All slides due 1 week before Saturday

230 – 245      Break

245 – 300      Game Storming – Intro to 3 techniques

300 – 400     Design Studio

One case study will be presented – a company with background information on their structure, management, customers, and suppliers. Additional information about the company’s brand and product lines, as well existing customer touch points will be presented as background material. All teams of 2 will break off to take that shared problem space and use design studio to explore potential solutions enframed by their topic area, i.e. PR, Product, Innovation, Leadership, Customer Service, Sales, etc. Each team will, at the end of the time, present designed artifacts of processes, concepts, and strategies to the problem space using the book as the framework.

415 – 5PM     Team Presentations

Post Mortem and Lessons Learned.

Goals

• Gain a solid understanding of the book, especially the SEAMS Framework
• A collaborative exploration of the problem space
• Explore a framework for organizational change addressing multiple vectors
• Design compelling and differentiated product solutions

Considerations

All Slides from Lightening Round will be combined into 1 Power Point deck and socialized on Slideshare.

All Designed Artifacts from Design Studio will be captured and posted online.

Session will be photographed.

Still Interested? Contact me

Background on The Hyper-Social Organization

The book starts with a simple explanation: “Human 1.0″ is the way that people have interacted and worked together for thousands of years. Only recently (the last few decades) information technology has forced people into working in much more constrained ways. Mass media brought the rise of companies that communicated with the masses through a corporate voice, which has had the advantage in telling people what they want and what they can have. Social media flips the mode, and brings us back to communicating one-on-one. This is not a new way of working, it is actually the original way that people worked, it is just that social media allows this to happen on a scale never before contemplated. A Hyper-Social organization is a return to the natural way of interacting, which is why the authors make a compelling argument that it is inevitable.

After the introduction, the first half provides four pillars of hyper-social society:

• Forget market segments. These were just constructs to allow corporations to coordinate their approach, offerings and message to the market. Instead, you need to think about tribes and humans. A tribe is a group that identifies in some way with each other, and will be the most important way of influencing purchasing patterns. Identifying tribes is the secret to success.
• Forget company centricity, and think human centricity. Hyper-social organization can be more personal at all levels, and engage customers to focus on and satisfy their needs directly.
• Forget information channels, and think about knowledge networks. Companies could prepare mass market messages to push through well known channels such as media and events. This communication was the only option that the consumer had, and corporations could control what the public knows. But in a social world the customer already has contacts to other members of the tribe, already is finding out accurate information about your products from others online. Pushing a company line will not work. Instead, share knowledge well, and work to gain trust.
• Forget process and hierarchies, and embrace social messiness. They recommend something they call SEAMS: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, and storytelling. The processes will be less and less pre-defined, but embrace that, and allow people in the organization to interact as humans.

“By its very nature, design is about exploring, about options, about embracing many disciplines and multiple points of view.Within this sometimes confusing and often contradictory diversity, leadership is the ability to discern vistas and pathways.”

Read more on UXLeadership.com

To understand leadership as designers, we need to step outside our field. Too often we are ‘inward-facing’ as a discipline – reading and discussing strategies and tactics that may make us better practitioners of our craft, but will not provide the tools necessary to become leaders within an organization. To do this, we need to understand the nature and needs of business, organizations, and power. We also need to understand the grammatology of power within businesses.

This talk started out as a stone in my shoe. I had been reading on the various UX related lists including the IxDA and IA Institutes mailing lists people complaining about the lack of empowerment they felt in their jobs within organizations. Some of these posts bordered on whiny kvetch-fests saying in essence that they had no influence within the organization; their ideas where not considered; engineering had all the power; or they simply had no seat at the table.

This got me thinking about influence and power, because I knew that over the years, the user experience profession had developed a powerful set of tools for understanding problem spaces, and designing innovative solutions to those problems.

Why complain? Not to put too fine a point on it, but, why whine like little bitches suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Why couldn’t we take activities, methods, and processes from UX itself and try to solve for this problem space. This talk presents a history of management theory, and exploration of the philosophy of power, a deep dive into the attributes of successful leaders, and a list of key attributes that designers seeking power can use to become the leaders that have the ability to become.

@semanticwill

New York City, May 11-12th, 2010 Hilton, Registration ($300 off regular price)

ENTERPRISE SEARCH SUMMIT is a highly intense, in-depth, 2-day conference that covers how to design, develop, implement and enhance cutting-edge internal search experiences. If you are an intereaction designer, information manager or IT or search professional, ENTERPRISE SEARCH SUMMIT is where you will learn strategies and build the skill sets you need to make your organization’s content not only searchable but “findable.” The emphasis for ENTERPRISE SEARCH SUMMIT 2010 is on how effective enterprise search delivers real value to organizations. This year’s Summit will examine the ways to leverage search tools, information architecture, experience design, classification, and other strategies and technologies to deliver meaningful results—not just in terms of information, but to the bottom line.

Expert speakers tackle tough topics such as tuning search to deliver optimum results, making the most of search logs and analytics, applying Web Service-based solutions to metadata challenges, facets, topic maps, and much more. Breakout sessions pack more hours of programming into the concentrated conference schedule and give you the chance to select topics of special interest to customize your conference experience.

This year’s Keynotes will be: UC Berkeley’s Marti Hearst, author of Search User Interfaces; Semantic Studios’ Peter Morville, author of Search Patterns as well as Susan Feldman from IDC and Leslie Owens of Forrester Research.

Detailed information and registration can be found here: http://socialsear.ch

Why Enterprise Social Search?

Knowledge management and information retrieval in large organizations is a huge problem. A number of orgs are making efforts to address these issues; and leveraging social data — or information that people within the company hold — is one promising route.

Why a design workshop?

Although the premise of our workshop is social search in the enterprise, we won’t be satisfied by just writing or thinking about it. We want to bring together the sharpest minds in the enterprise world and mix them with designers, researchers, and IT professionals to come up with some practical solutions that actually could be implemented.

What next?

After our workshop in San Francisco, we’ll take our findings and carry them onto future workshops in Australia and Washington DC — to build upon our ideas and find ways to develop them even further.

Where can I learn more?

You can read more about who we are and what the workshop will entail over at http://socialsear.ch.

Also don’t miss…

…this presentation that we gave at the Enterprise Search Summit last Fall. This presentation gives a flavor of that topics that will be covered in our Enterprise Social Search Design Workshop in San Francisco.

Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two different models of social search should be incorporated into enterprise and conventional search systems today. Collective Search involves aggregating social metadata, trends, and previous tags, bookmarks, or information shared by social networks. Collaborative Search, or question-answering, occurs when two or more participants actively engage in an information seeking task. Interactions include everything from replying to a one-time question to dually negotiating the query formation and relevancy of specific results to arrive at a shared consensus of best fit.

This talk will frame the relevant models of social search in the context of Brynn’s research, and discuss the potential benefits for both users as well as organizations. We will extend these trends and findings to concrete design considerations that we encourage system designers to consider in order to leverage social search capabilities within the enterprise.

Complete notes and citations were done by Brynn and everything can be found here.

Just got a nice review in EContent Magazine.

Fittingly, the ESS West track ended on Thursday with “Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search,” presented by Will Evans, director of experience design, Semantic Foundry and researcher and author Brynn Evans (no relation. The duo delivered a highly conversational presentation about social interaction design, or what they call “SxD,” in a truly interactive way. As a team, they explored the various stages or manifestations of social search and provided a graphic look into its potential impact in the enterprise, revealing ideas about a potential engine and how it might work; incorporating things like “friend filtered search,” “social scents,” and even a suggestion box that says something like “You seem to be having trouble, would you like to ask your network for help?”

Conceptual Model of Social Ecosystem based on SxD (PDF) (Illustrator *AI File)

Companies have traditionally relied on branding and communication to develop positive customer perceptions of their products and services, and have engaged advertising and marketing agencies to do this work. Marketing teams often work closely with their design partners to ensure that what is promoted is actually delivered. Companies are now aligning around “social business” without a strong understanding of experience design or even what it means to be ‘social’ in online mediated spaces, nor how to leverage that to increase value and engagement with their core customers. Conversational relationship management doesn’t exist yet – but it will, and it may be led by agencies offering things coined and service marketed with names like ‘digital influence marketing,’ or ‘social influence design,’ or ‘social business x,’ without really digging into depth about what it means to influence, what is the science behind sociality, and how does one actually design sociality into a business, as well as into the greater ecosystem that includes vendors, clients, co-consumers and the cadre of pundits and prognosticators tied to this dynamic social ecosystem.

However, these agencies have no core understanding of experience and social engagement design, social interaction design (SxD), or business intelligence analytics, and therefore holistic experience often suffers at the expense of form – they have the idea, but dig deep and there isn’t much there, there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. This wouldn’t be so bad, if these coined terms actually had some deep meat on the bone combined with a strong understanding of social interaction design (SxD) which has a huge body of work created by Adrian Chan.

The messages communicated through advertising, public relations and digital marketing support only one side of the branding equation, and are classically use “push” media – and these people are now responsible for designing and engaging in conversations with your audience? It has become increasingly clear to me that the customer’s user experience of products and services themselves is a powerful branding moment – made more so when they are social experiences. For instance, a customer’s delight with the experience and emotive power of an Apple iPhone, an airline’s online reservation system, or the interior of a coffee shop are examples of powerful branding moments – things that can be powerful social moments. This means that the entire experience needs to be designed to be social. Interactive Ad agencies can’t do that for you yet, which means your going to have to push them towards this new reality.

The experiential interactions that generate these positive perceptions are critical to achieving customer engagement with increased and repeat business. Creating positive customer experiences is particularly important for businesses that are increasingly relying on the social digital ecosystem to attract, convert and retain engaged co-customers.

By adopting a strategic experience design approach, companies benefit from a form of thinking that is unique to designers. Often referred to as ‘design thinking,’ coined by IDEO, it is different from more traditional approaches to problem-solving in that it is at its most effective when it includes all, and not just some, of the following attributes:

• Co-Consumer, Customer, and User-focused: It is ultimately about bringing an engaging, social platform to your customer.
• Creative and Innovative: It is about evoking new ideas and solutions and successfully bringing them to market.
• Experimental: It is about conceiving, building and testing prototypes in an iterative fashion.
• Evaluative: It requires gathering the best information from design ethnography and allowing stakeholders to make recommendations about which steps to take and what to build – this means creating an analytics framework to provide a 360 degree view of the social mention ecosystem.
• Collaborative & Collective: It incorporates multiple viewpoints from various organization divisions and global operations leveraging a social enterprise platform the frankly doesn’t exist yet but Socialtext is leading the way in this.
• Integrative: It provides integrated ecosystem solutions that keep the bigger business picture in mind
• Emotive and empathetic: It builds emotional appeal and encourages positive perceptions through experience based on theories of sociality in social interaction design.
• Experiential: It’s about usability, emotability, aesthetability, culturability, and sociability.

A strategic approach to social engagement design, driven by design thinking and human-focused design principles, can have a profound impact on a companies customer experience strategy. For companies whose customers are increasingly doing business with them through social networked digital channels, and where traditional channels are being increasingly redesigned to drive social engagement to digital channels, creating a positive social experience across the entire dynamic complex ecosystem – including web sites, mobile devices, social appliances, conversational television, and more – is critical.
To succeed, companies must:

• Design an online social engagement experience that successfully connects the strategic goals of a company’s business and brand with the social goals, interests and passions of their customers
• Design an online customer experience that is in-line with the other customer touch points, as well as a company’s overall brand and marketing strategies, to create a unified experience across all customer touch points
• Build a design organization with the necessary business and design skills to support the experience strategy and to ensure that design is incorporated into the innovation effort.

Here are 12 Design Thinking resources useful in providing a good groundwork for understanding how design thinking shaped this little post and provided much fodder for consideration:

• Design Thinking: HBR Special Tim Brown (pdf)

• Design Thinking: What to read after our report (MIT Sloan)
  

• Design Thinking… What is That? Fast Company

• Design Thinking Business Week Special Report

• Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You Harvard Business, Blog

• Design Thinking Digest

• What is Design Thinking Anyway? (Design Observer)

• Design Thinking: What To Read After Our Special Report

• Design Thinking, Social Marketing and Behavior Change

• Tim Brown urges designers to think big (TED)

• Designing Thinking Business Week TOC Innovation

• Tim Brown on creativity and play (TED)

To discuss social media strategy in the context of design choices affecting application design, functions, as well as user-centricity in social media design, the unique attributes of online communication which can only steer individual and aggregate engagement within the social network through cues, incentives and community enforced social norms must be well understood. Further, to discuss strategy and design patterns in social media site architecture/design and their impact on human behavior requires at the very least a general understanding of the writing on topics concerning sociology, social networking theory, anthropology and marketing. Taken one step further — to adequately advise companies seeking to leverage social media effectively as part of their customer communications and marketing strategy requires a rigorous, and not haphazard understanding of these new channels – attributes unique to them, because they are social in nature.

Until now, at least, I have not seen a list compiled of essential reading. Many people herald themselves and promote others as ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ when it comes to social software, social media, and the design of strategies, platforms and solutions around these topics for enterprises and government entitites. I thought to myself that this expertise must be born of something more significant and tangible than simply writing a blog about the topic, or having a vast number of connections (friends?) on Facebook or Twitter. I needed some metric, some standard by which I could discern charlatans from strategists. This is my measuring stick. When I rant/rage/ruminate about social media douchebags, I should define my terms and set my standards. This list is an effort to do so. You certainly don’t need to read these – but these are how I measure. To toss around social media douchebag with no standard by which to hurl such an accusation would be as intellectually bankrupt as those that would seek to raid the coffers of well-meaning companies without the skill, passion, or empathy required to deliver real results. This is my list. This is my yard stick.

Needless to say, I just included the Amazon.com reviews or descriptions for lack of time, but all these come highly recommended. These are definite (actually – not quite, but this is all I have read) – these are the shit!

If you have recommendations to add to this list – please chime in, because it’s important. This list is a living organism that must be fed.

13 Books You Must Read – Social Software, Social Networks and Social Media Primer

Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

Joshua Porter

Designing for the Social Web

Description: Josh is a web designer, researcher, and writer living in Newburyport, MA, USA. He run a web design and consulting company called Bokardo Design. From Amazon: No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.

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Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers

by Tyrone L. Adams (Editor), Stephen A. Smith (Editor)

Electronic Tribes

Review: The major contribution of this book is that the idea of ‘tribe’ is fully and robustly explicated in ways that challenge existing wisdom, particularly the idea that Internet users are best understood as communities. . . . The richness of diverse research resources is evident in every chapter. I particularly commend the editors on the international perspective and the inclusion of such a surprising array of subcultures. (H. L. Goodall Jr., Director, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University )

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First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

First Person

Review: “You have entered the rotunda of a gleaming, new conference center. Above you hangs a banner: ‘Welcome to First Person.’ In front of you, you see doors leading into separate conference rooms, each of which is marked with a sign in large, Futura Bold letters: ‘Cyberdrama, ‘ ‘Ludology, ‘ ‘Simulation, ‘ ‘Hypertext and Interactives, ‘ and so on. You soon discover that every room in this virtual conference called First Person is filled with informed discussion and lively controversy from major figures in the emerging field of Game Studies. Some are arguing that digital games (as the heirs of the novel and of film) constitute the next great arena for storytelling; others respond that games are not narratives at all and require a different theoretical framework and a new discipline. Still others are describing their own exciting contributions to interactive fiction, poetry, or visual/verbal art. By the time you return from this virtual tour of the world of Game Studies, you realize that all of these rooms (and all these topics) are connected in an intricate and compelling architecture of ideas. You begin to understand the rich possibilities that computer games offer . . . as drama, narrative, and simulation. You come to appreciate the great theoretical task that lies before us in exploring both the formal properties and the cultural significance of computer games.” –Jay David Bolter, Wesley Professor of New Media, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

Groundswell

Description: Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.
When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

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Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means

by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Linked

Review: How is the human brain like the AIDS epidemic? Ask physicist Albert-László Barabási and he’ll explain them both in terms of networks of individual nodes connected via complex but understandable relationships. Linked: The New Science of Networks is his bright, accessible guide to the fundamentals underlying neurology, epidemiology, Internet traffic, and many other fields united by complexity. Barabási’s gift for concrete, non-mathematical explanations and penchant for eccentric humor would make the book thoroughly enjoyable even if the content weren’t engaging. But the results of Barabási’s research into the behavior of networks are deeply compelling. Not all networks are created equal, he says, and he shows how even fairly robust systems like the Internet could be crippled by taking out a few super-connected nodes, or hubs. His mathematical descriptions of this behavior are helping doctors, programmers, and security professionals design systems better suited to their needs. Linked presents the next step in complexity theory–from understanding chaos to practical applications.

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Networked Publics

by Kazys Varnelis

Networked Publics

Review: “Networked Publics is a lucid, timely, and broadly interdisciplinary look at the most important technological and social change of our time: the sudden wiring and un-wiring of the planet into a broadband network, with communication devices in the pockets of a significant proportion of the world’s population. There is very little that is more important, more discussed, and less widely understood than the meaning of the emerging technosocial networks that are adopting digital media for a wide range of social, cultural, political, and economic ends. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, economists, educators, designers, political scientists, computer scientists, legal and policy experts—the Networked Publics group—was the only way to try to capture the meaning of a phenomenon that is interdisciplinary by its nature. The team project blog was a beacon of clear thinking while the project was in progress, and the book is a sound foundation for debates about what networked publics mean, how they can be encouraged, how they should be regulated, how to protect against their dangerous aspects.”
—Howard Rheingold, author of Smartbombs: The Next Social Revolution

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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

by Erving Goffman

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Description: A study of human behavior in social situations and the way we appear to others. Dr. Goffman has employed as a framework the metaphor of theatrical performance. Discussions of social techniques are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.

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Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition)

by Duncan J. Watts

Six Degrees

Review: You may be only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but would he let you borrow his car? It depends on the structures within the network that links you. When the power goes out, when we find that a stranger knows someone we know, when dot-com stocks soar in price, networks are evident. In Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts examines networks like these: what they are, how they’re being studied, and what we can use them for. To illustrate the often complicated mathematics that describe such structures, Watts uses plenty of examples from life, without which this book would quickly move beyond a general science readership. Small chapters make each thought-provoking conclusion easy to swallow, though some are hard to digest.

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Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton Studies in Complexity)

by Duncan J. Watts

Small Worlds

Review: An engaging and informative introduction. Science Playfully and clearly written… [Watts] uses examples adroitly, and mixes abstract theory with real-world anecdotes with superb skill… I have not enjoyed reading a book this much in a long time. — Peter Kareiva Quarterly Review of Biology [Small Worlds] will be seized on by those seeking a first rough map of this fascinating new mathematical land. Those entering can expect to find some amazing connections between areas of research with apparently nothing in common, such as neurology to business studies. But then, it’s a small world. — Robert Matthews New Scientist Informally written and aimed at a wide audience, this book shows how mathematics yields new vistas on ubiquitous and seemingly familiar aspects of our world

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The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You

by Mark Buchanan

The Social Atom

Description: Buchanan (Ubiquity: The Science of History) reaches out to the audience for pop social science like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics with the concept of “social physics,” a scientific model for the patterns that emerge from the interactions among large groups of people. Though his observations that people excel at imitating the successful behavior of others and will often form collective bonds over such fundamental pretenses as shared ethnic heritage aren’t startling, Buchanan leans on his background in theoretical physics and treats these ideas as “a quantum revolution in the social sciences.” His presentation is muted by a tendency to talk around the subject, recapping prior discussions and promising future developments instead of establishing a clear, compelling thread. Though the real-life scenarios he uses to illustrate his theories—such as the unexpected revival of Times Square or the outbreak of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia—are engaging, some sections draw upon computer simulations of arbitrary behavior that illustrate his thesis but don’t command equal interest. This is a great idea for a magazine article, but awkward at book length. (June)

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Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

by Seth Godin

Tribes

Description: A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have joined tribes, be they religious, ethnic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature. Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born – groups of ten or ten million who care about a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.

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The Wisdom of Crowds

by James Surowiecki

The Wisdom of Crowds

Description: While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” To support this almost counter-intuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we’re all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people’s errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are “smarter” than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki’s style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

Cluetrain Manifesto

Description: The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”; thesis no. 20: “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them”; thesis no. 62: “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall”; thesis no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” The book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrain will strike many as loud and over the top, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique. This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace. All aboard! –Harry C. Edwards –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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• Context: Your environment, position, resources, skills, ecosystem, marketplace
  • Example: Single, white male professional living in Boston
• Objectives — Strategic position to be attained or a purpose to be achieve
  • Example: To be in a long-term relationship
• Goals — Specific, measurable achievement behind an objective
  • Find a girlfriend
• Strategy (dimensions of strategic plan)
  
  • Strategy: The set of decisions made to best ensure achievement of the desired objectives, based on an assessment of:
    • One’s own current situation/position; capabilities & shortcoming; competitive position
    • Options & Alternatives – Risks
    • Timing
  • Example: Find and sleep with as many women as necessary to precipitate a relationship forming with at least one of them.
• Tactics
  • Tactic: a device for accomplishing an end
  • The set of requirements for a plan to take effect
  • Example:
    • Go to bar after having showered, shaved and trimmed nose-hairs,
    • Bring wing-man,
    • Identify target rich clusters of women
    • Buy drinks for aforementioned women
    • Use humor to disarm
    • Focus attention on the “second-from the hottest girl“