Interesting Enterprise 2.0 Readings - Week 3 2010

Ross Dawson: "How reputation measurement will transform professional services"

What is changing is the extraordinary visibility of people’s actions and character and how others perceive them. One of the most valuable functions of the emerging ‘global brain’ that connects our insights is to make reputation more visible. For over a decade people have talked about how the internet is lowering transaction costs. Still today, the biggest single cost of business transactions is assessing the reputation of your potential business partner. Easier assessment of the reputation of suppliers will have a significant impact on the global economy.

Esko Kilpi: "Networked knowledge and the process of knowing"

Majority of information on the Internet is worthless to majority of people. This obscures the transformative change going on at the moment. People store less and less information “inside”, inside computers, in private folders or in memory because there is a new, better alternative: In the always on, always connected world, information is available “outside” on the Internet, easier and even cheaper, with considerably smaller search costs. This is causing a fundamental shift to the way we manage information, use our ICT-tools, or understand the competencies needed in the knowledge intensive economy.

David Gurteen: "If traditional incentives can have a negative impact, what's the workaround?"

The problem with traditional incentives, rewards and talk of motivating people, engaging and empowering them etc. is that this approaches the situation from a mindset of "doing things to people"...People see through this; they resist; they become cynical and it actually makes matters worse!..."Stop doing things to people and start to work with them!"

Mike Schaffner: "How Technology Enhances Collaboration"

Collaboration technology can also be a vehicle for people to put forward their opinions and allow others to comment and discuss the merits of someone's positions. Technology doesn't care who you are or what your rank in the organization is. It dispassionately publishes your position to all, where it must stand on its own merits. It can be a great leveling device. Warrior states that NGCE "captures global opportunities, while eliminating the barriers of time, location, culture and language." I hope it also helps to eliminate barriers of power, position and the reluctance to voice your opinion.

Liz Gannes: "U.S. Military Turns to Social Networking to Encourage Sharing Official and Sensitive Info"

Filler clearly wants milBook to be as open as possible, allowing military employees to share “official and sometimes sensitive information” in a way they hadn’t been able to do so before due to geography and rank...“We understand there is information that needs to be more secure, so we advise and offer the ability to label appropriately,” he said. “At this point we are seeing a nice variety of both open and closed groups so that is a nice surprise in a traditionally closed environment.”

Mark Gould: "What do we do with knowledge?"

The key thing in all of this, for me, is that whether we talk of knowledge sharing, transfer, or management, it only has value if it can result in action: new knowledge generation; new products; ideas; thoughts. But I think that action is more likely if we are open-minded about where it might arise. If we try and predict where it may be, and from which interactions it might come, I think it is most probable that no useful action and value will result in the long term.

John Hagel: "From Research Monographs to Story-Telling: New Forms of Communication in the Big Shift"

The Big Shift cascades through all dimensions of our life. The Big Shift will also transform how we communicate with each other. We are moving from a world of deep analysis communicating explicit knowledge to a world of rich, personal narratives communicating tacit knowledge. Narratives powerfully help to shift perception from static objects to dynamic relationships.

Jordan Frank: "Structuring for Emergence"

To enable a collaborative culture, all arrows seem to point to a conclusion that Control Doesnt Scale, but that you have to balance best practices and starting structures to achieve the most fluid, most intuitive outcomes that facilitate collaboration rather than confuse it with starting structures (or lack thereof) that misalign the natural processes that are used to work in the flow of communication and collaborative content development.

Mitch McCrimmon: "Showing leadership"

When we think about leadership we envisage being in charge of a group, not how to show leadership viewed as a discrete act. This is hugely disempowering. First, we overlook occasional acts of leadership shown by people who don't have what it takes to BE a leader, including ourselves. Second, we put a halo on the heads of those who can be leaders, thus discounting their ineffective acts of leadership and expecting too much of them.

Viana, Gordo, Sucena, Moita: "Cognitive and Motivational Requirements for the Emergence of Cooperation in a Rat Social Game"

...rats understand the payoff matrix of the PD game and the strategy of the opponent. Importantly, our findings reveal that rats possess the necessary cognitive capacities for reciprocity-based cooperation to emerge in the context of a prisoner's dilemma.