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First published to Gigaom Research . Cast your mind back a decade or more. Did you request specific hardware from your company’s IT team? If so, you started a trend that continues to play out to this day, and will continue to its logical and exciting conclusion. You may or may not have been successful in your request given IT’s historic intransigence, but nowadays many of us expect to rock up to work with the laptop and tablet and smartphone of our choosing – often our own – and expect the IT team’s full accommodation. We’re also bringing our own applications. Non-IT staff have adopted software-as-a-service without necessarily going through their IT colleagues. Yammer, Trello and Slack for example. Perhaps Google Docs crept in without organization-wide adoption of Google for Work. Meeting schedulers. Note-takers. Expense trackers. Skype. Dropbox. Instagram. The list is as long as the kind of things you need to get done. It’s useful to think of this in terms of Enterprise IT and Work IT. The enterprise owns Enterprise IT whereas the worker owns Work IT. In simple terms, Enterprise IT is focused on the organization, Work IT on organizing. Enterprise IT is top-down with the starting position of locking everything down, whereas Work IT is bottom-up, thriving by facilitating sharing and openness. ...

Updated 16th September, embedding the videos of the session below. The Global Commission on Internet Governance (ourinternet.org) was established in January 2014 to articulate and advance a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance. With work commencing in May 2014, the two-year project is conducting and supporting independent research on Internet-related dimensions of global public policy, culminating in an official commission report. ...

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman: Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up. He adds: … No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network. Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right? ...

The third in a series on the topic of the purpose of business. Follows: What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker Debating the purpose of business Business exists to establish and drive mutual value creation. Steve Denning challenged this statement, preferring Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. I responded, and he has challenged my response: we may be talking about different things: theoretical purpose of a firm and how to run it “satisfying all the stakeholders” isn’t a viable heuristic to run a firm. See Making Management as Simple as Frisbee “satisfying all the stakeholders” was tried in mid20thC. It led to Garbage Can firms. [tweet tweet tweet ] Garbage Steve refers to “garbage can firms” in his Forbes article, Is The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending? , an eloquent take down of prioritizing the pursuit of shareholder value. When it comes to garbage it quotes a trio of academics – Cohen, March and Olsen – who in 1972 explained: ...

The second in a series on the topic of the purpose of business: What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker Debating the purpose of business Talking garbage and the purpose of business Steve Denning published an article to the Drucker Forum last week, How The Internet Is Forcing The Humanization Of Work , an argument founded on Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. Steve found my post on the purpose of business post-Drucker via a thread with Kenneth Mikkelsen and tweeted his comments. His first quotes my re-definition of the purpose of business: [The] Problem with “establish and drive mutual value creation” is that it doesn’t tell me what anyone has to do. and then : “Delight customers” as the goal is crystal clear as to what everyone has to do. and lastly : Since power has shifted from seller to buyer, “delighting customers” sets priorities right, for firm to survive I share Steve’s optimism that we may be on the cusp of the potential to possibly humanize work (can my optimism be more tentative?!), but I cannot subscribe to his rationale. ...

The first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business: What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker Debating the purpose of business Talking garbage and the purpose of business Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time. The assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker’s heuristic. ...

[Originally posted to the hi:project blog .] In an article in the Guardian last week , Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data. Pentland directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, and I’m surprised how often his name crops up in my hi:project related research, yet I find it difficult to reconcile his observation here with his fluency in the power of decentralized networks : Social physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition. Pentland continues under the heading: How can we move from a market-centric to a human-centric society? ...

I have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening’s London meeting of the Change Management Institute . I’m keeping most excellent company alongside Karolina Lewandowska , Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and Faith Forster , Founder and CEO Pinipa . The image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – The Quantified Organisation: can change become routine? ...

The diagram here portrays where I’m going with this post, so let’s dive in. The quantified self The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).” And it doesn’t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we’re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”. That’s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it’s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls : We can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket. The quantified organization Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on ‘quantified organization’ : … a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state. ...

I have curated a Flipboard magazine for 16 months with the super title: Social Business Design magazine – Purpose & policy, openness & agility, structure & culture, communication & trust. Organizing to create more value for all faster than otherwise. Trips off the tongue. The service dutifully informs me that of all the stuff I read I have considered 913 articles worthy of inclusion in my niche ‘publication’, attracting 73 followers and 670 viewers. ...