Politics within the Corporation - how bad things happen and nobody feels responsible

The lastest fiasco from Societe Generale is another good exemple of how the political game is played within the corporation:

- let's start by saying that the whole corporate system is conceived to promote people who do not take risk: taking a chance and trying things means taking a chance that it will not succeed, and when the time comes to select a candidate for the next level up, if you took a chance and it did not work, you will be eliminated in favor of the guy with the perfect track record, the guy who did not take a chance.
Granted this is not the complete picture because you also need to ride the various hypes as they come, so that you are always seen at the right place at the right time even though you are not doing anything (the beauty of delegation and getting credits for what your reports do right)

- In such an environment doing nothing also means letting your reports do things that may not be 100% ethical as long as you can maintain an ability to claim ignorance. If the results are good, you will benefit from it, and if the results are bad, you can always join the chorus and protest at the discovery of the facts.
Nobody is fundamentally bad, but it is human to do things that benefit you as long as you know (or think) that there will be no serious consequences to your actions. And not everybody has the same level of tolerance when it comes to evaluating the acceptable from the bad.

- In the end, the dilution of responsibility is built into the system, and it becomes very easy for everybody to never feel really responsible for what is happening. And this is how you get the Enrons, Societe Generale and many other stories that don't always make it to the front page of the International Press.

I worked for many years in this type of environment, I have seen it happen at a small scale, and from where I am today I still do see it happen at a much larger scale in some corporations.

Now: why do we let these things happen? This is the power of status quo: when issues pop up, the press makes a lot of noise and a few bad people are punished, and maybe the corporation is shut down, but who cares if this is not really affecting me. Or is it? But then who am I to make a difference?
The very sad thing about all this is that when the large corporation loses, the real losers are the little guys who have their retirement in mutual funds.
Should we care about these little guys?

Something becomes wrong with Corporations when the entrepreneur who started them disappear behind investors or even worse behind a multitude of public stock holders who do not really have much details (and much less control) on what these corporation are doing! Back to my previous post, let's hope that the changes brought by Social Networking and Peer-to-peer collaboration will bring us better systems to organize how we work together...

Open Business: a world of guilds

Social Networks made a big splash, and we are still trying to recover from the hype (where is Facebook going?). But while it is nice to share pictures and videos, this is not much more than entertainment and another cool way to waste time.

Meanwhile I also see the workforce getting organized and social networks with a purpose. There was the grassroot movement during the previous presidential election, the voting machine incident with Diebold against a network of activists as described by Yochai Benkler in "The Wealth of Networks". And all this is now getting corporate: I watched the coworking movement start in San Francisco and expand all over the Globe, I see efforts at the infrastructure level, such as FON, and I see discussions around social networks of business development consultants, CFOs, developers, designers, tech support experts, etc... Soon you will be able to do business by just getting resources from the relevant network. You will pick them from each other based on their rating, how far they are from people in your direct network and how much they cost.

Michel Bauwens talks about P2P civilization and Xavier Comtesse talks about Direct Economy (and even Direct Anything)
I see the emergence of a world of guilds of specialists, similar to the ecosystems that John Seely Brown describes in his book "The Only Sustainable Edge".

Ultimately, I see a lot of opportunities: if this is where we are going, what else do we need to make the guilds system completely functional?

Web30: Xavier Comtesse was right

While "semantic web" is a very confusing name, and web30 will tell you nothing, I finally got a better understanding of what this is about (sorry if I am a bit slow) when I read the Semantic Wave 2008 Report from project10x.

And I realized that the matrix presented by Xavier Comtesse one year ago (see my previous post on this) is a very good lens that helps figure out what this is going on:

Xavier's matrix looks at 2 axis:
1- Knowledge
-- raw data
-- data with context
-- data with context over time that leads to
-- modelisation and then to
-- forecast

2- User involvement in the value chain:
-- receive info
-- pick and choose (self service)
-- customize (Do-it-yourself)
-- co-design
-- co-creation

From what I see, web10 was about getting raw data on the web, and providing tools to pick and choose. Web20 was about connecting people. Now ajax, mashups, geotagging (connecting intelligence) are giving people the ability to customize how the data is delivered to them (do-it-yourself), and so what is coming next becomes fairly obvious when you look at the matrix. What worked to explain the success of eTrade also works at the macro level to explain what is happening.

If you haven't read this yet, I recommend you look at what Xavier presents: http://thinkstudio.com/text/directeconomy_slides.pdf