Gary Hamel has been a prolific and provocative thinker about management for quite some time now, and he’s pulled off the remarkable feat of actually getting large numbers of practicing executives to listen to him, to take his ideas seriously, and to put them into practice. The Wall St. Journal recently named him the world’s most influential business thinker (and I don’t say nice things about him just because he blurbed my book).

His most recent big venture is the Management Innovation eXchange, or MIX, ‘an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management.’ I like the way the MIX Manifesto opens: “What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are highly adaptable, endlessly inventive and truly inspiring? Why not indeed. That’s the goal that lies at the heart of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX).”

Gary kindly invited me to join in the fun as one of the ‘MIX Mavericks,’ and the site just posted the first of a series of interview clips. The MIX asked me to contribute a blog post to kick off my involvement. The below is what I came up with, under the intentionally provocative title “We’re About to Find Out if Companies Mean What’s in Their Mission Statements.”

I’d love to hear what you think of it, either in a comment to this post or at the MIX itself. And I encourage you to throw yourself into the MIX; I think it’ll be a very lively environment. Gary and his colleagues have convinced some very sharp thinkers and innovators to participate, but have also had the good sense to treat this primarily as a crowdsourcing exercise, rather than one more area for ‘experts’ to pontificate to the masses. I hope to hear from you there, or here.

I don’t mean to pick on these companies; they’re just particularly clear examples of how all organizations talk about their people. I’ve never come across a modern enterprise that publicly states anything like “We want our people to put their heads down and do only the jobs that have been assigned to them. We want their thinking to stay ‘inside the box.’ When we want their opinions, we’ll ask for them. Our machines and business processes are our most important assets; our people just keep them running.” Instead, virtually all organizations stress the empowerment of their people.

We’re at a very interesting juncture just now: we’re about to find out how many of these companies really mean it.

I study information technology’s impact on the world of business—how it changes the way companies perform and compete. In recent years I’ve spent a lot of time looking into the phenomenon that I call Enterprise 2.0 —the use by organizations of the Web 2.0 toolkit of emergent social software platforms like wikis, blogs, microblogs, social networking software, tagging systems, prediction markets, location-based services, and so on.

All of these tools share a few properties. The first is that they place very few rules or constraints on their users— no pre-defined workflows, differentiated roles and privileges, membership criteria, or standard operating procedures. The second is that despite this apparent fondness for chaos, they actually become pretty orderly environments; users can find what and who they’re looking for, and patterns and structure appear over time even though no one’s dictating them up front or from on high. Third, they deliver results that are impressive even to the most hard-headed pragmatist: Wikipedia is the world’s largest reference work and its factual accuracy rivals that of the Encyclopedia Britannica, prediction markets do better than polls at predicting election winners, and strangers and friends alike answer each other’s questions on Twitter. Fourth, these tools are pleasing and even addictive to their users. Humans are social and (at least somewhat) altruistic creatures, and we like well-designed technologies that let us interact and share with each other without mandating how we do so.

One final commonality, though, is less heartening: many organizations appear scared to death of Enterprise 2.0. They’re worried that people will use the new tools and accompanying freedom to broadcast hate speech or porn, or harass each other. They’re worried about secrets slipping over Chinese walls and firewalls. Or that people will be too critical or contrarian in public forums. That ‘social’ is too close to ‘unproductive’ or ‘time-wasting.’

They’re worried, in short, about what will happen when they actually do empower their employees with the digital tookit of Enterprise 2.0. They seem quite concerned about what will happen when they give demonstrably powerful tools to their most important assets.

Some of this hesitation is justified, at least for a bit. These tools really are something new under the sun, and it wasn’t initially clear if people would use them maturely, and for productive purposes. But virtually all the evidence I’ve seen over the years convinces me that people (whether employees, partners, or customers) can be trusted, and do predominantly use the new social software platforms in ways that provide benefit and credit to the companies that establish them.

So I think the real reluctance comes from someplace else. I think it comes from a deep-seated desire to not give up control.

Executives these days feel like they have less and less control all the time, so it’s natural for them to hold on to two areas where they still have a lot: what their people do, and how their business processes are executed. And at least in the latter area, they’ve been taught that control is immensely desirable and valuable. I used to teach operations management to MBA students, and if there was one mantra we drilled in to them, it was “if you want to control the outcome, control the process.”

I still think that’s the right mantra in some situations, but the successes of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have taught me another mantra. It goes something like “If you want a good outcome, back off on process and get out of the way of people. Let them come together and interact as they wish, and harvest the good stuff that emerges.”

I admit that’s a little bulky. I also admit that we (or at least I) don’t yet have a clear idea when each mantra is appropriate. But I am certain that the latter mantra fits in perfectly with mission statements about empowerment and people as the most valuable resource. I’ll be very keen to see how many companies come to share this certainty, and how quickly.

What’s your experience? How much progress are companies and their leaders making in the difficult work of deploying the new digital tools, giving up control, and harvesting what emerges? How closely are corporate mission statements aligned with today’s digital cornucopia? Are companies practicing what they preach? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

When a brand-new protein rolls off the ribosome assembly line within a cell, it’s basically just a strip of amino acids in a pre-determined sequence. It then quickly bends, twists, and folds itself into a convoluted shape, the same one every time. This final folded shape is determined by….

no one knows.

Some of the basic rules are clear, but most of them are not. Despite 45 years of vigorous research, we have only the dimmest understanding of protein folding, despite the fact that we’d really like to know more. As Joachim Pietzsch writes, “Of all the molecules found in living organisms, proteins are the most important. They are used to support the skeleton, control senses, move muscles, digest food, defend against infections and process emotions.” Because they’re so vital, we’d love to know more about what makes them tick (or, in this case, form).

So why not use computers to simulate the folding process, thereby gaining a better understanding? Why not write an application that takes a given protein’s fresh-off-the-assembly line shape, applies all known folding rules to it, and tests to see which ones get the molecule into its final (known) shape? Programs like Rosetta do exactly this, but they run up against a nasty problem: even simple proteins are so complex that the fastest simulations can’t test all possibilities. Pietzsch explains:

“Cyrus Levinthal calculated in 1969 that finding the [final shape] by simple trial and error would be impossible. He said that even if a protein only consisted of 100 amino acids and each of these flexible residues could only take on two different spatial orientations, the protein could theoretically adopt as many as 10³⁰ possible conformations. Assuming a protein could try out 100 billion different conformations per second, it would still take 100 billion years to try all possibilities.”

Rosetta and other protein folding algorithms do much better then simple trial and error; they incorporate all the rules and ‘tricks’ that we know about. But as Pietszch writes “Any realistic hope of cracking the folding code… is probably a very long way off.”

If the smartest biochemists and fastest computers have made so little progress on this bitterly difficult problem over half a century, it seems ludicrous to think that novices will be able to contribute much. But a paper published earlier this month (pdf) in Nature shows that amateurs can fold proteins better than anyone or anything else when they’re given the right training and incentives, and when they’re given digital tools that allow them to experiment, collaborate, and self-organize.

A few years back a team at the University of Washington took cues from both the phenomenon of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games and the concept of crowdsourcing scientific problems and developed Foldit, a protein folding game. Foldit presents protein folding as a visual or spatial challenge to the player, whose goal is basically to arrange an on-screen protein into the smallest possible shape that obeys all the game’s rules.

A set of starter puzzles familiarize players with the game’s interface, rules, and solving aids. After completing these, players are ready to tackle actual proteins. As they do so, they can work alone or join groups, many of which are open to all comers. They can also read and contribute to a wiki about the game and its strategy.

Players strive to get high scores on each puzzle; since correctly folded proteins are in the lowest possible energy state, a players’ Foldit scores are the opposite of the energy of the molecule they’ve created. Keeping score, of course, leads to rivalry and competition as people and groups strive to outdo each other and be recognized as the best at the game. There are no cash rewards.

The first public beta Foldit downloads became available in May of 2008, and since then more than 57,000 people have played the game. How well are they doing? The Nature paper reports the results of ten blind challenges — prediction puzzles involving proteins whose final, folded shapes were known to the paper’s authors but not “contained within publicly available databases for the duration of the puzzles.”

As the authors write, “we hypothesized that human spatial reasoning could improve both the sampling of conformational space and the determination of when to pursue suboptimal conformations if the [random elements of current algorithms] were replaced with human decision making while retaining the deterministic Rosetta algorithms as [tools for players].”

Was this hypothesis correct? In three of the ten challenges the best Foldit players and the best current simulations performed similarly — that is, the two approaches got about equally close to the final folded shape of the protein. In five other challenges, the best result from Foldit was substantially better than the best a superfast computer alone could do. In only two of the ten cases did the simulation do substantially better. These appeared to be the two hardest puzzles; neither Foldit players nor computers alone were able to get very close to the correct shape.

What explains this astonishing result? How can it be that crowds of people playing a game on desktop computers do better at this important task than supercomputers programmed by superscientists?

Are the scientists themselves the ones playing Foldit? Maybe, but they’re not the best at it; none of the five highest-scoring players took chemistry classes beyond high school.

The team behind Foldit realized that even ‘normal’ people have a number of interesting attributes that make us well-suited to tackle protein folding challenges.

• We are particularly strong at spatial reasoning, or literally seeing solutions. As is the case with all primates, a substantial portion of our brains is devoted to processing visual signals. This means that when a puzzle is posed to us in spatial terms, we can apply a lot of our cranial horsepower to it. And protein folding is, at its heart, the work of folding an initial shape into a smaller shape.
• We have intuition, especially after lots of experience in a given domain like Foldit. We develop a sixth sense for smart moves in the game, and even though most of us couldn’t explain where the idea for a particularly far out move came from, protein folding seems often to rely on such moves. It’s very hard to program computers to make intelligent-yet-far-out moves. We can program in randomness (and the best protein folding programs do just that), but it’s hard if not impossible to program in smart, intuitive randomness. As the Nature team writes, “We found that Foldit players were particularly adept at solving puzzles requiring substantial backbone remodelling… stochastic Monte Carlo trajectories [in other words, random computer guesses] are unlikely to [find] the coordinated backbone… shifts needed…”
• We have great adaptivity. We can change our strategies and approaches over time based on what we learn and intuit about what’s working well, and what’s not. The Nature paper has some cool graphs showing how people change their mix of Foldit ‘moves’ after the first hour, first day, and first week of playing. Again, it’s hard to program computers to do this well.
• In addition to being highly visual, we humans are also inherently tend toward collaboration. We form teams and share knowledge among members pretty effectively, thanks to the gift of language. Many scholars believe that is what most fundamentally separates us from all other animals. And technologies like wikis are a big step forward in facilitating collaboration within geographically dispersed groups.
• While collaborating, we exercise a high degree of self-organization. The Foldit researchers found that “Within teams, there is often a division of labor. some players specialize in early-stage openings, others in middle- and end-game polishing.” I would bet that these roles were not assigned by team captains; Instead, people fell into them unconsciously over time, and also fell into effective workflows and divisions of labor within teams. This is exactly what’s happened with Wikipedia, and I’d be surprised if the situation were radically different within Foldit.
• Finally, we love competition. The desire to get ahead of a rival or be on the game’s leader board can be a powerful motivation. Foldit’s designers did a great job of tapping into this motivation. They also made the game engaging to play and provided frequent feedback to players, thereby increasing intrinsic motivation as well.

Taking advantage of all these features simultaneously led to better outcomes in the dauntingly difficult domain of protein folding. By studying what people did to rack up high scores in Foldit, we may be able to improve how well computers alone work in this domain. As the authors write “More in-depth analysis of player strategies should provide further insight… and could lead to improved automation algorithms for protein structure prediction.” I’ll go a big step beyond that statement: it could be that studying how people succeed at Foldit might help us better understand not only computer simulation of protein folding, but perhaps also protein folding itself.

The Foldit team did science that was both rigorous and creative, and they deserve at least as much attention they’re getting. They also deserve credit for realizing that when faced with a nasty problem, the smart approach is not always to retrench – to rely more heavily on established experts and powerful computers.

Instead, when the tools needed for effective problem solving can be widely and cheaply distributed, the responsibility for problem solving can also be. And as Foldit results and lots of other evidence shows, expertise — for problem solving, innovation, etc. –  is emergent. It’s out there in large quantities, and in hard-to-predict places. A problem solving approach that lets pockets of enthusiasm and expertise manifest themselves and find each other can yield surprisingly large rewards, even in the unlikeliest places.

Where else have you seen widely distributed problem solving work well? Where else should it be applied? Leave a comment, please, and let us know…

p.s. If you’re not an American older than about 35 or a big Kenny Rogers fan, the title of this post might not make much sense. In which case this link and this one might be helpful…

Here are some quick initial thoughts after the first day of the Techonomy conference:

I was struck by ecoguru Stewart Brand‘s willingness to embrace ideas that he used to disdain, and that much of the mainstream environmental movement still sternly resists. Brand has spoken favorably about nuclear power and genetically-modified foods. He’s also no longer worried about the digital divide, population growth, and Malthusian crises. It’s rare to find someone who lets evidence trump ideology, so I was floored by Brand (just as I was when I read The Whole Earth Catalog for the first time as a kid in the late 1970s).

I was also floored, once again, by Eric Schmidt‘s skills as a speaker. He is direct, funny, clear, thoughtful, and informative. And he actually answers the questions he’s asked. Way impressive.

Attendees got advance copies of Kevin Kelly‘s upcoming book What Technology Wants. I’m looking forward to it, but am not sure about the title’s question. Does it really make sense to talk about technology ‘wanting’ anything? I’m reminded of Andy Grove’s great quote: “Technology happens, it’s not good, it’s not bad. Is steel good or bad?” Would a book called What Steel Wants make any sense?

I love the feeling of optimism among participants here. As I wrote a little while back, some of the prominent recent writing about technology has a fretful or pessimistic tone, and it’s great to hear something very different here. People at Techonomy are worried about climate change, the current recession and recovery, and a few other things, but overall we’re strongly optimistic about the combination of human ingenuity and technology. It’s music to my ears.

That’s all for now – I’ll try to post more later. Comments and feedback on any of the above are very welcome.

It is undoubtedly true that modern technologies can keep us from getting our work done. We drown in email, surf the Web endlessly, check in with our social networks, and constantly get interrupted and interrupt ourselves. Today’s digital workplace tools, the ones that are supposed to be making us so much more productive, seem to instead serve up endless diversions from the high road of effective and efficient knowledge work.

This is something new under the sun. Writer W.N Taylor observed a while back that “Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure time that men are made or marred.” He appears to have overlooked office romances, but he had a point. For many of us, the workplace used to contain fewer distractions than other environments.

But not any more. News, sports, video clips, games, chats with family and friends, gossip, shopping, and scores of other temptations are now as close as the nearest screen, and many of us spend most of the day in front of a screen. This is novel and uncharted territory.

Except that it’s not. Temptations have been around as long as people have, and sages have realized that they can actually be good for us. This is because the work of overcoming them and getting back on the high road forces us to confront our weaknesses and learn from them. This work forces us to acquire some self-mastery. It forces us, in short, to grow up.

St. Augustine, one of the great minds and souls of the early Christian church, realized this fact and articulated it with economy and grace. He wrote:

Our pilgrimage on earth cannot be exempt from trial. We progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial, or receives a crown except after victory, or strives except against an enemy or temptations.

I have a colleague who unplugs his wireless routers when he needs to get serious writing done. Another gets up absurdly early and plays white noise through his headphones so he can concentrate. I’m thinking about adopting techniques like these because if I’m not getting enough good work done, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

My friends and coworkers aren’t to blame, nor are the vendors of tempting technologies, nor, certainly, are the technologies themselves. To borrow a turn of phrase from Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can make me unproductive without my consent.

The right strategy, surely, is to realize that the distractions and temptations of modern technology are just another set of temptations, and to react to them accordingly. This often means turning away from them or turning them off, at least for large chunks of time, so that real thinking can get done and we don’t spend all our time wading in the shallows.

Why do we find this so hard to do? Is it because today’s technologies are more seductive and addictive than what’s been available before? Because our bosses, customers, and colleagues are more demanding than ever? Because our IQs and coping skills are inferior to those of previous generations?

I don’t think so. I think we find technology hard to resist for the same old simple reason: temptations are hard to resist, and we prefer not to. And here again, Augustine got it exactly right. He distilled the eternal battle between virtue and vice into the most honest prayer I’ve ever heard: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

What do you think –  do we stand a prayer against the modern technologies of temptation? How, if at all, do you rise above them at work? What kinds of self-mastery have you achieved or observed? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I had a few phone calls with American Express Travel Services yesterday afternoon, and am so bewildered by the experience that I have to write about it.

The calls started with a pre-recorded message telling me I should expect delays because bad weather in the US had increased call volumes. Fair enough. But then Amex started dropping my calls. The first time it happened I thought it was my phone, so called back and then called from a land line. But as the calls kept just dropping off with no warning I realized it wasn’t me.

One time I got to stick around long enough to hear another message (that I couldn’t ignore or fast forward through) telling me that if I wanted to fill out a customer satisfaction survey I could stick around after my call was ended. I then got transferred to what I thought was going to be a human operator. Instead, it was the survey, which I couldn’t also opt out of or fast-forward through. As you might imagine, I gave Amex very low marks. Then I got dropped again.

Because I’ve come to expect this kind of service from large companies (especially older ones), and because I needed something only Amex could provide me, I kept redialing. On about the sixth call, I was connected to a very helpful travel agent who did his job beautifully. I imagine, though, that he has to spend a fair amount of his time apologizing to people for the technologies that got in the way of his ability to help them.

How can this still be the situation? How can it still be the case, in 2010, that really well-understood technologies (telephony, voice prompts, etc.) are still detracting from customer service, rather than improving it, at some of the largest companies in the world?

I can think of three possibilities here, none of which makes a lot of sense. The first is that Amex’s leaders aren’t aware of these kinds of service breakdowns. But how can they not be? All they have to do is dial the number themselves, or hire someone to do it and report regularly, and they’d know. But maybe they don’t make their own travel plans by calling up the Amex 800 number, and the kinds of problems I experienced don’t get adequately summarized in any report that they read.

I did respond to their misplaced customer phone survey, though (I had no choice), I did give them lousy ratings, and I have to believe that those ratings are summarized and reported somewhere. So the second possibility is that Amex’s leaders are aware of their customer service issues, but not terribly bothered by them. But again, how could they not be? They run a customer service business –   it’s all they do — and they just released a study showing that, as their headline put it, “AMERICANS WILL SPEND 9% MORE WITH COMPANIES THAT PROVIDE EXCELLENT SERVICE.” Even if you take a pretty cynical view of large corporations and believe that they don’t care that much about their employees, you have to admit that they probably care a lot about their customers, especially in industries like travel with lots of competition and low switching costs.

The third possibility I came up with is that Amex’s leaders know about their tech problems and are concerned about them, but aren’t going to do anything about them. Maybe they don’t feel like they have the budget, the expertise, or the managerial bandwidth to take on a tech-heavy project now. Maybe the issues I experienced only crop up in the particular segment of Amex Travel I was dealing with, or when call volumes are particularly heavy, and so the company is willing to live with them for the time being. But I’m a heavy traveler, the kind of customer they probably want to attract and retain, and I’m sufficiently struck by this lousy tech leading to lousy customer service that I’m sitting around blogging about it. So informed inaction doesn’t make much sense either.

Of the three possibilities, the first seems the most likely to me. In large organizations it’s easy for senior people to become divorced from day-to-day reality, and to see only what they expect to see, or what their subordinates want them to see. One of the great promises of today’s technology, though, is that it can provide a view of a company’s situation that is current and comprehensive at any level of detail, from highly granular to widely aggregated.

Terminated / dropped calls can be tabulated. Call volumes can be monitored. Survey results can be summarized. Employees can be polled. Customer sentiment can be inferred from blog posts, tweets, status updates, and other contributions to the real-time social Web. And all this information can be presented to decision makers at any level, at any time.

Not too long ago it was hard know how well knowledge work was being done, or to clearly hear the voice of the customer. But not any more. A consumer-facing company like Amex Travel can obtain and track its digital vital signs, and do so at higher levels of accuracy and lower price points than has ever previously been possible.

So why does it appear as if they’re not? I’m not asking rhetorically; I’m really interested in other people’s insights and experiences on this topic. Why don’t companies take stronger action to fix the technologies that are impeding customer service? Why aren’t they more acutely aware when things are not going well? Why hasn’t competition driven out lousy customer service, especially in contexts where switching costs are low? What have you seen firsthand in this area, or learned or read that made a lot of sense to you? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

… but sometimes it feels that way.

A set of prominent, smart, and thoughtful analysts of technology have adopted a fretful or pessimistic tone in recent books about the Net. Jonathan Zittrain‘s The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It came out in April of 2008. In August of that year Andrew Keen‘s The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values appeared. Its title tells you much about its content.

Jaron Lanier‘s anti-Web 2.0 manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, was published this past January. Nick Carr‘s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains came out last month; it was based on an article he wrote for The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

And still to come is Sherry Turkle‘s Alone Together, which examines the Net’s impact on adolescents — how they interact with family and friends, learn to think, and form their identities. I heard Turkle talk about the book a while back; a pretty representative quote from her (from a Frontline interview) is “Do we want children to have social skills, to be able to just look at each other face to face and negotiate and have a conversation and be comfortable in groups?… Well, if so, a little less Net time, s’il vous plait.”

Most of these authors state that there is much that is good and beneficial about the Net. But their books heavily emphasize what’s bad and/or worrying about it. A person who woke up today after a 20-year nap and set about educating herself on the unfamiliar “World Wide Web” by reading these books would probably start panicking, and wondering why it hadn’t yet been shut down. They read like amicus briefs filed in a lawsuit against modern technology.

So as a counter to these books and the cumulative impression they leave, I’m going to do something that’s frowned upon in in many bien-pensant circles: I’m going to cheerlead for technology. Let’s look at where we are at present:

• In developed economies that are free of totalitarianismm, it is economically feasible and technically trivial for most people to express themselves, as much as they like, in any form or media that can be digitally transmitted – words, music, pictures, video, code, etc.. Whatever they create can be made available, almost instantly and freely, around the world, to everyone else in a similar society.
• It’s easy for these people to instantly access a huge amount of free information on almost any topic imaginable, and to sort through this information with some level of precision.
• It’s also easy for them to find old friends and colleagues and meet new ones, connect with these people, and stay in contact with them over time, even as their circumstances change.
• Huge numbers of the planet’s poorest people have finally ended the information and communication vacuum that has hampered their progress and increased misery. There are over 4.5 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world today. One of the globalization pundit’s favorite lines used to be that over half of the world’s population had never placed a phone call. Anyone think that’s still the case?
• The Web’s novel technologies and approaches are changing the world of work, making organizations more multi-voiced and egalitarian.
• Intense, Schumpeterian competition in the tech sector is yielding unprecedented levels of innovation in devices, applications, and services. And much of this innovation is concerned with making tools that are powerful, yet easy and fun to use.  Technology is now expected to delight us, not frustrate us.

None of this was the case twenty years ago — not even close. And isn’t all of it really good news, on balance? Turkle says that “I see part of my role in this conversation as giving nostalgia a good name.” Well, I see part of my role here as restoring progress’s good name, making it once again something to celebrate rather than disparage.

Carr and Turkle are particularly worried about the bad habits that result from ‘always on, always on you’ technologies. And I see their point; there certainly seem to be more ways for me to distract myself now. But the neuroscientist Steven Pinker got it exactly right in a great New York Times opinion piece: “… distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life.”

Pinker courageously outs himself as a techno-enthusiast:

Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

I’m one, too. I’m not a techno-utopian, believing that technology alone will solve all our problems, or that it’s an unalloyed good. But when I see the benefits information technology has brought us over the past twenty years I get deeply appreciative and enthusiastic, and I remain so after I read some books that have come out recently.

A while back, I quoted a prediction from Julian Simon:  “The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely.” Here’s a technology-specific variant on it; let’s call it “McAfee’s Elaboration:” Information and communication technologies will, for the foreseeable future, contribute positively to the material, psychological, and cognitive well-being of the great majority of people who use them, regardless of their age or circumstances. I wonder if Zittrain, Keen, Lanier, Carr, and Turkle would agree with this statement?

Do you agree with McAfee’s Elaboration? Am I overinflating the virtues of the current era of technological progress, or being too naive about or dismissive of its discontents? Are the good things not as good as I’m portraying them, or the bad things worse? Or are you, like me and Pinker, a cheerleader for tech? Leave a comment, please, and let us know your thoughts.

My last post about the iPad, intellectual property, and the right to exclude was spurred by a Cory Doctorow post. I’ve been looking around at some other recent writing about the iPad, iPhone, iTunes, App Store, and other elements of what I’ll call the iCosystem: the hardware, software, and content delivery networks overseen by Apple. And while a lot of what I’ve read has been favorable to the company, some of the writing by some prominent folk has not. In fact, I came across a mix of vitriol, hyperbole, contempt, and alarmism that I at first found bizarre.

Here’s vitriol and hyperbole, in a post by Tim Bray about going to work for Google:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

Here’s contempt from the Doctorow post:

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

And here’s alarmism (and some more hyberbole), from a  Financial Times editorial by Jonathan Zittrain

Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out. We should focus on preserving our freedoms, even as the devices we acquire become more attractive and easier to use.

Seriously, isn’t all this a bit over the top? The iCosystem puts our freedom at risk because applications have to go through Apple’s review process before they can be loaded onto devices? Or because I can’t use my iPad to endlessly copy and forward books I buy from Amazon and comics I buy from Marvel (in other words, I can’t participate in the theft of intellectual property?)?

As I and many others have pointed out, the iCosystem’s devices all come equipped with fully-functional Web browsers (albeit without Flash support), and so make all the Web’s content available. Users also have access to browsers made by other organizations. So it’s very hard for me to see how Apple is trying to cut its users off from the Web, or drive a wedge between the Web and the iCosystem.

It’s true that the App approval process is a black box, and that some decisions seem a bit silly. For example, Apple recently required graphic artists to remove images of topless women from a comic version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’d prefer the iCosystem to include content that goes beyond a PG-13 rating. But I also strongly prefer it to be free of viruses, Trojan Horses, and other forms of malware. It is, thanks to its stringent review policies. So on balance, I’m glad they’re in place. They make the device more useful to me overall, not less.

The best reason I can come up with for the over-the-top reactions to the iCosystem is that it violates important parts of the modern geek ethos. Here’s my inelegant attempt to summarize this ethos without caricaturing it:

We like to hack things –  to take them apart to understand how they work, recombine their elements, improve them, and add new ones, some of which we’ve built from scratch. We hack all kinds of things — computers, cars, food, networks, governments, music, and so on.

We hack some things that we don’t own (like open-source software) and many things we do. Once we buy something we consider it ours to hack, and we don’t need or seek anyone’s permission to do so. Nobody can dictate where, how, or what we hack, particularly when we’re not breaking any laws.

Our work is profoundly beneficial; it’s a big source of creative destruction in the economy and society. We turn out innovations much better and faster than big sleepy incumbents do, and we also keep them on their feet. They might not like us, but they can’t stop us; we’ll either hack their wares or turn out better ones. So we don’t need to play nice with them, and don’t have any interest in doing so.

Entities that welcome us are, in the not-too-long-run, going to outperform those that don’t, because we bring so much energy and generate so much innovation.

The sustained and rampant success of the iCosystem directly challenges core aspects of this ethos. It calls into question the idea that maximum innovation results from maximum autonomy, which has become almost an article of faith in some quarters.

Millions of users and the iCosystem are teaming up to behave in ways that upset some geeks’ ideas about the way the world works, or how it should. Hyperbole, vitriol, contempt, and alarmism are all-to-common reactions when this happens. We’d be better served by thoughtful reconsideration of how technology-based innovation occurs, and how it can best be encouraged.

I hope the vitriol and alarmism around the iCosystem dies down, because it’s not doing much good. Maybe Barry Goldwater was right that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. But crying wolf surely is.

What do you think? Am I missing something important and nefarious about the iCosystem? Or are you with me in thinking that it fosters innovation rather than stifling it? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I got an iPad as a birthday present a little while back (thanks again, Mom!), and am loving it. So when I heard that Cory Doctorow, the science fiction author and editor of geek candy blog Boing Boing, was not enamored of the device I was eager to learn why. I checked out his post expecting to read a review, but instead found a diatribe. And one that cries out for a response.

“Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)” is Doctorow’s accurate and self-explanatory title. He concedes that the iPad’s design reflects “a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts,” but is still not going anywhere near one and wants everyone else to stay away, too. In other words, he likes the device just fine; he just hates what it stands for. Like property rights and the clearly expressed desires and preferences of millions of people.

Doctorow is a well-known advocate of openness, sharing, and tinkering with gear. He writes “I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” He rails against the fact that it’s hard to physically take apart the device, but he seems even more angry at the “technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.” This infrastructure includes:

• Prohibitions on swapping, sharing, reselling, and forwarding many kinds of content once they’re downloaded to the device. Comics from Marvel, ebooks from Amazon, and many other digital wares can’t be easily copied and endlessly passed on.
• Gatekeeping by Apple with the App Store. Only Apple-approved apps can be easily installed on iPads, and the company works to keep out porn, malware, and other stuff it deems inappropriate. Doctorow writes that the iPad’s “universe of apps [is] constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. As a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.”

Neither do I, which is why I’m really glad for the one-two punch of the 1st Amendment and the Web. Doctorow, I and everyone else with Internet access in America are free to create almost anything we want with astonishingly few restrictions (the Supreme Court recently decided that even appalling depictions of animal cruelty are protected speech), and to distribute our digital content via the Web. And the iPad provides Politburo-free access to all this Web content.

Doctorow dislikes that in addition to providing Web access, Apple has also created the walled garden of the App Store and allowed companies like Marvel and Amazon to place restrictions on replicating some content delivered to the iPad. And even though I like free stuff, too, I’m really happy Apple put this infrastructure in place. Let me explain why.

Marvel’s comics are the company’s property, and the App Store is Apple’s. Every first year law student learns to think about property rights as a bundle of sticks, with each stick corresponding to a different right. As law professor Jerry Anderson writes, these include “the right to convey, the right to devise, the right to use, and, at the top of the pile, the right to exclude,” or to keep others from doing certain things with the property.

Anderson is not alone in putting exclusion at the top of the pile. A 1982 Supreme Court ruling emphasized that the right to exclude is “one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property.” It’s the right at the heart of the patent system (a patent gives you the right to keep others from using your innovation without your permission) as well as the concepts of copyright, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property (IP).

So Marvel, Apple, and the other players in the iPad ecosystem aren’t doing anything new, weird, Orwellian, or unAmerican. In fact, quite the opposite. They’re thinking about how to take care of and gain value from their property, two activities that have been at the heart of our legal, economic, social, and technical infrastructure for a LONG time. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress a set of powers, including “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The Framers realized, as did their predecessors in English common law, that strong and clear intellectual  property rights generate innovation.

Technology changes lead to important clarifications and extensions of the IP infrastructure, but they certainly don’t invalidate it. The fact that digital property can be perfectly, endless, and near-costlessly copied and replicated does not in any way imply that it always should be. The fact that digital platforms can be opened to all comers doesn’t mean that all of them must be.

Doctorow wants to give others the right to share and alter his own IP, and has taken advantage of legal innovations like Creative Commons licenses to permit this on terms he finds acceptable. Which is great. What’s not great is the insistence that other terms are harmful to society and worthy of contempt. Such a stance is wrong in both theory and practice.

The theory I hear him espousing in the iPad post and elsewhere is that the right to exclude with should be curtailed (if not eliminated) when it comes to IP –  that digital goods should become something like communal property. If this argument were being made about physical property we’d recognize it immediately as an argument for communism, wouldn’t we? And once we did, wouldn’t we stop taking it seriously, and place it somewhere on the kooky-to-dangerous spectrum?

I am honestly puzzled why this argument gets any other reception when it’s made about IP. We all agree that intellectual property is becoming more and more important. But how many of us think a digital Bolshevik Revolution is the way forward, or a cure for what ails our economy and society at present? How many of us think the Framers of the US Constitution just got it dead flat wrong in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8? Or that the appearance of the Web invalidates their insights?

If the ‘information wants to be free’ argument were right in practice, the iPad, Apps Store, and other elements of non-communal digital infrastructures would be failures; people would recognize them as big corporate cons, and stay away. Neither IP producers nor consumers would abide their restrictions, especially when totally open hardware+software+content ecosystems are available (Doctorow, for example, uses a Thinkpad running Ubuntu to surf the Web).

Well, more than 2 million iPads were sold within sixty days, and developers have created more than 5,000 apps for it (in addition to the more than 200,000 available for iPhones). It’s been welcomed by large and enthusiastic crowds around the world. It seems that many, many people have been waiting for something like the iPad –  a reliable, easy to use, malware-free device that serves up many kinds of content, some of them free, some not.

Since these folk have very different beliefs and preferences than Doctorow’s around IP, they’re clearly worthy of his contempt. I realize that ‘contempt’ is a strong word, but it’s the right one. He writes that

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

(I want to point out that this is not necessarily Gibson‘s own view of consumers. These are words spoken by a character in his novel Idoru)

Got that, my 2 million+ fellow iPad owners? Never mind that we can use the device to surf the entire Web, not just access Apple-approved content. Never mind that we can use it to compose and play music, write, draw, and do other creative tasks. Never mind that we can develop apps for it and give them away if we choose via the App Store. We’re still fat, pale, infantile trailer trash because we buy into its model of interaction with IP.

I lose track of the number of ways in which that attitude is snotty, offensive, and dumb. It’s almost not worth taking seriously or paying attention to at all, except that lots of people do take Doctorow and his ideas seriously. So it’s important to engage with them, and to provide a different perspective on the situation.

I want to be clear about a few things: I like Creative Commons licenses, Wikipedia and Linux, the Maker Faire, and so on. I think the ethos they embody of tinkering, volunteering, and sharing is wonderful. And while I’m not a code-slinging professional geek, I learn a lot from them and like hanging out with them. I’m a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, got invited to Tim O’Reilly’s 2010 FOO Camp East, and presented at SXSWi.

But I’ve also been teaching and researching at business schools for the past 15 years, and I’m an ardent capitalist. I feel about it the way Winston Churchill felt about democracy, which is that it’s the worst system for organizing economic activity except for all those other forms that have been tried. I believe that America’s extraordinary track record of innovation and creativity exists not despite its IP laws, but at least in part because of them. I applaud the fact that IP creators and owners have strong rights to exclude, even when these creators and owners are big, powerful corporations. And I really like the bundle of sticks contained in my iPad.

What do you think of all this? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

The title of this post is the title of a talk I gave a little while back at the DC offices of Palantir Technologies. The talk grew out of a post I did for my HBR.org blog about the comparative chess-playing abilities of humans and computers, which was in turn spurred by a great article on the subject by Garry Kasparov.

Palantir invited me to come as part of their evening Palantir Night Live series to discuss human and computer strengths more generally, as well as how the two can be productively combined.

The video of the talk is now up on YouTube. It’s been broken down into seven segments. I start talking about 5:09 into the first segment.

As I tried to organize my thoughts for this event, I found them ranging far and wide over such subjects as:

• The early triumphs of the Artificial Intelligence movement, and its later disappointments
• Moravec’s Paradox
• The astonishing advances over time in computing power per $
• What will happen if computers ever do get smart (I illustrated my most likely scenarios with images from Terminator, I, Robot, Battlestar Galactica, and The Matrix)
• The State of the Art with machine translation and machine chess
• Human intuition vs. algorithmic prediction`
• How human creativity can be buttressed by machine support
• Quotes from Isaac Asimov, Steven Pinker, Norbert Weiner, and others.

All of these are covered in the talk, which was a huge amount of fun to prepare and give.

I hope you’ll take a look at the videos (1st one is below), and let us know what you think. Do you agree with my arguments and conclusions? Is there anything important that I’m getting wrong, or leaving out? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

A little while back, an Enterprise 2.0 evangelist from a huge multinational tech company came to see me. He showed me their tools for social networking, blogging, group formation, tagging, & etc. They all looked pretty good; if they’d made any mistakes in designing the user interface or experience, I couldn’t spot them.

I asked him how the rollout was going. As best I can remember, he said something like “Progress is slower than I’d like. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing more. I think part of it is that we have a huge Intranet, and these tools can be hard to find. I think a lot of our people aren’t even sure they exist.”

That meshed with a lot of what I’ve observed at big organizations. Enterprise 2.0 is sometimes a too-well-kept secret, despite the best efforts of the executives, trainers, curators, and others who want it to succeed.

Most of today’s knowledge workers are somewhere between busy and harried, and they certainly feel that they have better things to do than poke around the Intranet looking for cool new social tools. So in addition to evangelizing, training, leading by example, moving E2.0 technologies into the flow of work, and engaging all the other classic strategies and tactics, I believe that interested organizations need to make their emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) blatantly obvious to their people and encourage usage and experimentation.

So what’s the most straightforward way to do this? To reuse wiki inventor’s Ward Cunningham’s wonderful question: “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work” to spur Enterprise 2.0?

A couple posts back I suggested a simple, six-step E2.0 rollout plan. Its first step was “Deploy tools that deliver a novel capability, like microblogging, social network formation, or prediction markets. Tools that deliver something novel — that aren’t trying to displace an incumbent — avoid the 9X effect.”

And the simplest way to deploy such tools so that everyone quickly becomes aware of them, I think, is to put one of them on every single page of the Intranet / community site / etc.  Here’s a mockup of what that might look like:

This box would be in the upper left corner of all pages. Its first text box is for site-wide search, reflecting the realization that search is now the dominant navigation paradigm for online content.

The second box encourages people to ask a question via the microblogging tool. The third encourages them to use it to share interesting stuff with others.

Explanations and details of all of this are available by clicking on “What’s this?,” as are any and all necessary guidelines and policy statements. In this implementation each person’s questions and all answers to them are separately viewable by clicking on “Answers to your questions.” Standard views of microblog content are available by clicking on “See what others are sharing and asking.” The rest of the E2.0 toolkit would be available from “Other similar resources.”

This approach would accomplish a few things. It would make one E2.0 tool immediately and universally visible. It would put social verbs like ask and share in front of everyone. It might well pique people’s curiosity about how these activities were being facilitated by technology. It might also cause them to ask around, to click to learn more, and to experiment. And it might start putting people in touch with information, answers, and colleagues that they didn’t have previously.

I think that all of these would be desirable, and they might form a groundswell for more of the same –  more ESSPs and greater usage of them. At a minimum, it would be a cheap and easy experiment to run.

Do you agree? Would putting this kind of content in a corner of every page be a good way to jumpstart Enterprise 2.0, or would it flounder or backfire somehow? Have you seen something similar attempted? If so, how did it work out? What did the organization learn from it? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.