I think we are doing some ground breaking work with Cdling, coming up with our “seeds” monetary system.
I have been doing some related reading this evening.
When I read this post by Alistair Croll, it prompted me to get off my duff and actually post something here again, so I think that is a huge endorsement.
Check it out:
Greg Satell has a blog called Digital Tonto that I recommend.
Here is a sample post that caught my attention:
How Social Network Analysis Solves Real World Problems.
I hope that everyone had an awesome summer.
I am working hard on cdling.com, which I think of an application of Social Capital Value Add. And we definitely believe that SNA will deliver great insights to the investor and start-up communities that we serve.
Thank you to the organisers of the Social Media for Government Conference in Toronto this week for inviting me to kick things off by leading a three hour workshop. Thanks also to the folks who attended. Here are my slides:
It was an interesting challenge to lead an “Introduction” to Social Media. Two years ago when I led a similar workshop in Ottawa, 90% of the room would have had mostly fear and virtually no personal exposure in using social media. This morning, only 10% of the room would have fit this description, yet feedback was that the definitions and strategic frameworks that we went through together were still useful in helping participants process their experiences and adjust their traditional notions of brand and communications for the network era.
For the last 30 minutes we went through this “map” that was developed by Jody Radzik at the Institute for the Future. I did not set out to deliver a full understanding of each of the 13 trends in Government 2.0 that are highlighted during this time (impossible) but this piece is the best that I have seen that encapsulates the overall context of changes shaping up. I asked participants to share a project that they are envisioning or initiative that they have read about that prompted them to decide to come to a conference like this. While this map is a projection out to 2020, we were able to quickly establish that in all of these areas, the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.
Entertaining video here and their Booktracker campaign is an interesting memetic approach.
Thank you to Social Capital Blog and @peterwmcmahon for bringing Frank Koller’s first book to our attention. I am looking forward to giving a read.
Here is the Wall Street Journal’s review of Spark. How Old-Fashioned Values Drive a Twenty-First Century Corporation:Lessons from Lincoln Electric’s Unique Guaranteed Employment Program.
The Social Capital Blog and WSJ reviews focus on the issue of guaranteed employment because that is the tack that Koller has taken with the book. But guaranteed employment is just one of James Lincoln’s four organizational pillars that remain in place to this day.
The others were a management advisory board made up of employee representatives; wages based on piecework, so that the quality and quantity of individual workers’ output can be monitored; and annual performance-based bonuses.
Here is the quote from Lincoln that inspired Koller to explore this story:
“The only way we’ll have any kind of widespread job security in today’s business environment is if we change our thinking as to what makes good management.
Instead of praising corporations that downsize, we need to look at their actions as admissions of failure.
We don’t need layoffs - we need creativity.”
It is easy enough to see why Koller has headed in the direction of job security and guaranteed employment, but I wonder if he zeros in on the wrong point.
It seems to me that Lincoln took his strategy to develop trust with workers. The most important elements of the quote in my opinion are not the reference to job security but the call for a “change in thinking” and recognition that trust is a critical prerequisite to the organizational creativity needed to maintain sustainable competitive success.
In other words …
I am not interested in reading Koller out of nostalgia for “Old Fashion Values”. I find it easier to relate to James Lincoln as a visionary, ahead of his time … which explains why so few have followed his example.
My interest in reading Koller’s Spark comes from the opportunity to learn more about experiments in maximizing corporate social capital.
On the other hand, if we need to look at Lincoln as a throw back to mystic better times to sell entrenched aging management, I am all in.
Thanks to Walter Derzko for inviting me to join yesterday’s 2020 Media Futures Workshop at the s-Lab (Strategic Innovation Lab) at OCAD. Suzanne Stein and Greg Van Alstyne did a great job of moderating and facilitating a fairly free wheeling group of thinkers.
It looks like I was the only one using twitter during the workshop or maybe I had the wrong tag? Here are a few thoughts that emerged that could each be turned into a blog post:
The principals of Social Capital Value Add have wide application and I think that the health care sector, due to a combination of necessity and opportunity, is going to experience some remarkable changes.
As many close to me know, I dedicated as much time as possible last year to support my Mother (and my Dad) through her losing battle with lung cancer.
It was an eye opening experience.
(Side note: It was also the reason why blogging here was scarce & my personal investment in the development of SCVA has been put on the back burner.)
How little we really know.
How, despite noble intentions, the health care system we experienced ultimately leaves the patient and family responsible for managing care or at least they need to be their own champions in the positioning for limited resources and attention to detail.
I am sure that you can imagine how I felt about the inefficiencies of simple information sharing across nursing shifts. Now consider this against the backdrop of governments banning use of social media in the workplace and more critically, the possibility of having real time, universal authorized access to all patient information across several hospitals, doctors’ offices, diagnostic and treatment centres.
In truth, outcomes for my Mother would not likely have been dramatically different. We do not have a cure for cancer. Through a lot of old fashioned community support, everyone pulled together and I feel she received excellent treatment. For that I am very grateful to everyone involved.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that as the we try to attend to more people with limited resources there are going to be completely new methods or increasingly gaping failures of our health care system.
I would encourage everyone to take time out to watch this video of Canada’s perennial tech talk master, Don Tapscott. It was my Mom who way back when gave me Don’s first book, Paradigm Shift as a Christmas gift and in a way turned me on to all this “junk”. It is the first time that he presented the key ideas from his forthcoming book, “MacroWikinomics“.
In particular, I suggest that those of you who are interested in learning more about the change unfolding within the health care sector pick up Don’s talk at the 52:00 mark. He opens by describing the health care system as the number three killer in the United States. He then goes on to describe a collaborative health care system. He finishes with health care at 59:50.
It is an eight minute vision of how health care is going to change. Must change.
Key elements:
1. Patients get to engage in rich communities related to their health. Isolation is a risk factor.
For more insight on this you should check out Dr. Nicholas Christakis’ 2010 TedTalk on how social networks shape our lives or his book Connected.
2. Idea whose time has come: When you are born the system opens up a web page for you that is sort of like a Facebook for healthcare … half healthcare file and half social network.
3. These health care networks will generate massive amounts of new data to aid the advancement of science and treatment.
4. Healthcare workers (doctors & nurses) engage in communities in a new way. Less parochial. To enable this you would need to solve the threat of litigation. Patients become active and accountable for their health care and they will be very willing to do so. Being involved is part of getting better.
The example that Don gives: http://www.patientslikeme.com.
The example that I have mentioned while teaching classes or leading workshops is Upopolis at Sick Kids Hospital.
Intel Fellow Eric Dishman has another great health care TedTalk that is well worth watching here.
Thanks to Fabio Sabatini who is himself a social capital gateway.
I have not found the time to manage to even read the abstracts below, but I have lifted the titles from Fabio’s newletter below that I would love to read and write about. Maybe you have a few cycles to cover one?
| Edited by: | Fabio Sabatini |
| University of Siena | |
| Issue date: | 2010-04-24 |
| Papers: | 10 |
| Date: | 2010 |
| By: | Luigi Guiso |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2010/07&r=soc |
| The financial crisis has brought to light diffuse opportunistic behaviour and some serious frauds.Because of this trust towards banks, bankers, brokers and the stock market has collapsed to unprecedented levels and there are so far no signs of recovery. This paper uses survey-based information to document the collapse of trust, show its link to the emergence of frauds in the financial industry and discuss its consequences for the demand of financial instruments, investors portfolios and more generally investors reliance on financial markets. It argues that unless serious changes happen in the behaviour of the financial industry, the move towards safer portfolios and away from ambiguous securities that lack of trust entails, will have adverse effects on the availability and cost of equity financing. Accordingly a number of proposals to restore trust are discussed. Their common feature is to restore trust – a belief – by limiting the scope for opportunistic behaviour through a transfer of power from financial intermediaries to investors. | |
| Date: | 2010 |
| By: | Luigi Guiso Paola Sapienza Luigi Zingales |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2010/08&r=soc |
| This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs that help cooperation—which for clarity we label civic capital. We argue that this definition differentiates social capital from human capital and satisfies the properties of the standard notion of capital. We then argue that civic capital can explain why differences in economic performance persist over centuries and discuss how the effect of civic capital can be distinguished empirically from other variables that affect economic performance and its persistence, including institutions and geography. | |
| Date: | 2010-04 |
| By: | Matthew Gentzkow Jesse M. Shapiro |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15916&r=soc |
| We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time. | |
| JEL: | D83 |
| Date: | 2010-04 |
| By: | Mariani, Fabio (Université Catholique de Louvain) |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4875&r=soc |
| Virtue is modeled as an asset that women can use in the marriage market: since men value virginity in prospective mates, preserving her virtue increases a woman’s chances of marrying a high-status husband, and therefore allows for upward social mobility. Consistent with some historical and anthropological evidence, we find that the prevalence (and the value) of virginity, across societies and over time, can be influenced by socio-economic factors such as male income inequality, gender differences, social status and stratification, and overall economic development. | |
| Keywords: | mating, marriage, cultural values, social classes, gender |
| JEL: | D1 |
| Date: | 2010-03-25 |
| By: | Bin Dong (QUT) Benno Torgler (QUT) |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qut:dpaper:257&r=soc |
| In this study we explore in detail the causes of corruption in China using two different sets of data at the regional level (provinces and cities). We observe that regions with more anti-corruption efforts, histories of British rule, higher openness, more access to media and relatively higher wages of government employees are markedly less corrupt; while social heterogeneity, regulation, abundance of resource and state-owned enterprises substantially breed regional corruption. Moreover, fiscal decentralization is discovered to depress corruption significantly, while administrative decentralization fosters local corruption. We also find that there is currently a positive relationship between corruption and economic development in China that is mainly driven by the transition to a market economy. | |
| Keywords: | Corruption; China; Government; Decentralization; Deterrence; Social Heterogenity |
| JEL: | D73 |
| Date: | 2010-04 |
| By: | Leslie N. Graham Arjen van Witteloostuijn |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:use:tkiwps:1008&r=soc |
| In a field study of 128 middle-managers in similar roles but in different organizations within the UK public sector, we find that the quality of their leadermember exchange (LMX) relationship with their immediate supervisor is negatively related to the three dimensions of burnout. As hypothesized, LMX and communication frequency are found to interact in the prediction of emotional exhaustion. For low-quality LMX, the relationship between communication frequency and emotional exhaustion is positive with an increasingly steep upward slope as communication frequency increases. For high-quality LMX, the relationship is not as expected, but is curvilinear with an inverted U-shape. The findings support the importance of the social context of the workplace for the development and persistence of burnout. The results indicate that the quality of the relationship between employees and their manager in combination with the nature and the frequency of their interpersonal interactions are important factors for employee wellbeing. Furthermore, the study contributes to the literature on LMX by providing further support for the importance of LMX being dependent on how frequently employees and managers interact for a new and very important outcome of emotional exhaustion. | |
| Keywords: | Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Communication Frequency, Burnout |
| Date: | 2010-04-17 |
| By: | Choi, Jong-Seo Kwak, Young-Min Choe, Chongwoo |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:22159&r=soc |
| This paper studies the empirical relation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance in Korea using a sample of 1122 firm-years during 2002-2008. We measure corporate social responsibility by both an equal-weighted CSR index and a stakeholder-weighted CSR index suggested by Akpinar et al. (2008). Corporate financial performance is measured by ROE, ROA and Tobin’s Q. We find a positive and significant relation between corporate financial performance and the stakeholder-weighted CSR index, but not the equal-weighted CSR index. This finding is robust to alternative model specifications and several additional tests, providing evidence in support of instrumental stakeholder theory. | |
| Keywords: | corporate social responsibility; corporate financial performance; KEJI index; instrumental stakeholder theory |
| JEL: | M14 |
Yvette Dubel has made a permanent disciple out of me with this amazing video about the shift in value that I describe as Social Capital Value Add. Take 4:20 and watch this video. Then share it. It could be the most valuable 4:20 minutes of business advice that you will ever give to someone.
Yvette does not hammer on the relationship between shared perception, social capital and margins in my crass way and there is more of a media focus in the video than underscoring the social network as a primary factor of production. But the video is spot on highlighting the connection between attention, social values and sustainable profits.
Yvette will invade your thinking with this video that has a wisp of everything that I have tried to relate at this blog, in the ebook and over at www.memeticbrand.com.
Wow Yvette! I love it!
