New Ways of Knowing 2.0: Social Media and the Future of Intelligence
We’re so excited about this upcoming SCIP meeting, I need to repost the entire meeting description:
It’s January 28th in Washington DC. You should come and be part of this discussion!
New Ways of Knowing 2.0: Social Media and the Future of Intelligence and Decision-Making
Intelligence is at a watershed moment. After decades of developing a profession to collect information and provide early warning, we find ourselves in a broad-reaching financial catastrophe that was unknown or ignored by decision makers. Despite a collection and analysis of economic information, most businesses walked unknowingly into a ruined banking sector, retail distribution on the brink of bankruptcy, housing grotesquely overvalued, American automobiles at the point of extinction - all while most leaders continued to view change as incremental.
This unprecedented current economic crisis seems to represent a failure of intelligence. After all, if intelligence cannot motivate leaders to action, then as professionals we must ask - what good is it? Many analyst voices in the desert warned about the risks in real estate, derivate markets and reliance on leverage, but it’s not clear that this led to action. Are we in our current mess because the leaders in business and government simply didn’t listen? If so, how can intelligence professionals deliver analysis that drives appropriate action?
The next generation of intelligence might solve the inherent weaknesses of Intelligence 1.0 by relying on a broad range of information, focusing on relationships over hierarchy and replacing official dogma with a continuous dialogue. Technology will be a major driver in this evolution: Web 2.0 and social media tools are moving into the mainstream– not just in the consumer space but also in business. 2008 has seen the year of “Enterprise 2.0.” Web 2.0 has gone to work to enable collaboration, smash silos and change business processes. Intelligence analysts have new tools and methods at their disposal for primary research, secondary discovery, collaborative analysis and communicating actionable insight.
“New Ways of Knowing 2.0″ will be an interactive educational event in which we will examine the potential of social media to improve the intelligent organization of the future. Participants can expect to teach as much as they learn and see connections among diverse concepts, tools, intelligence practices and business processes. Our panelists will include:
- Suki Fuller, social media maven and CI consultant
- Eric Garland, strategic forecaster, intelligence thought leader, author of Future Inc: How Businesses Can Anticipate and Profit from What’s NEXT, and principal of Competitive Futures, Inc.
- August Jackson, market and competitor intelligence analyst and Enterprise 2.0 evangelist at Verizon Business.
You will come away with this program with immediate and actionable advice about how you can incorporate Enterprise 2.0 tools into your intelligence processes to improve your ability to adapt to our ever-changing world. Discussions and highlights from the program will be posted to the new SCIP DC chapter blog at http://scipdc.wordpress.com.
How to do new things effectively in 2009
The theme of 2009 and beyond is “Doing New Things.” After all, it’s not enough to describe which institutions (banking, media, governance, etc.) are breaking down - we’ve actually got to build new insitutions in their place. This is exciting - this is scary, too.
While you’re thinking about doing new things well, watch this great video from Tim Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Workweek,” on how showing up and working hard is not enough when trying new things - there are special tricks involved. These are the kinds of skills we’ll need to master if we are to navigate so many changes in the years to come.
2009: The Status Quo versus The Long Emergency
Again, stop whatever elese you were doing, like reading things I wrote about 2009, and read Jim Kunstler’s forecasts about 2009. The author of The Long Emergency is experiencing the unenviable task of seeing dire structural change ahead, change that won’t be mollified by new gadgets, and being right about its consequences.
Some highlights:
He’s not a fan of techno-solutions. (not unlike yours truly)
The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another.
He sees Dow 4000:
A consensus in the blogoshpere says that the stock markets will rebound strongly during the first Obama months. This is possible just on the basis of pure “animal spirits,” but the Obama Bounce will occur against a background of continued dismal business and financial news. It will appear to defy that news. By May of 2009, the stock markets will resume crashing with the ultimate destination of a Dow 4000 before the end of the year.
He believes that you’ll actually need positive cash flow to make a business run (old-fashioned, but radical!):
We’ll turn around early in 2009 and discover that we are a much poorer nation than we thought because from now on credit will be extremely hard to get for anyone for anything. The businesses that survive will have to keep going on the basis of accounts receivable…Giant enterprises requiring giant loans to get from quarter to quarter will tend to not make it. Borrowing from the future will become a practical impossibility as past bad debts from previous borrowings continue to unwind, cease performing, and get written off.
Real change. Not new technologies for old philosophies. Nobody will save the day. We’ll need to make workable solutions for many different types of people.
And still - people will need things. Goods and services will be required, perhaps just different types.
Business development will need to be on its toes! Are you ready?
Bailouts make us ask: what is the future of the corporation?
Next up on the bailout list: car companies, cities, healthcare, schools. I guess nobody’s business model is 
working very well, and now everybody needs money from the U.S. federal government, which of course is half a trillion in the red this year. Companies losing billions want loans from a government that’s losing billions.
I think that a lot of things are going to need a redesign in the next few years, to put it mildly.
Regardless, yesterday’s stars were the automotive CEOs who flew into to Washington DC to plead for the U.S. government to provide aid to its most important companies.
But wait, are they American companies? Chris Kelly at the Huffington Post provides an excellent bit of polemic, reminding us that Chrysler is actually owned by a $60 billion hedge fund called Cerberus Capital which owns, in addition to Chrysler:
A Japanese bank called Aozora
A Japanese real estate company called Showa Jisho
A Japanese golf course company called Kokusai Kogyo
An Israeli bank called Bank Leumi
A German bank called Handel und Kredit Bankhaus
A reinsurance company called Scottish Re, with headquarters in Bermuda
A British TV rental chain called Boxclever…etc.
This is a great point - we’ve spent decades making global capital so fungible, so fluid that it readily cros
s borders, ignores nationality, changes hands without making news. So can a corporation possibly be a national entity for which a certain government (and its taxpayers!) might claim responsibility?
If Chrysler isn’t a potent enough example, how about Citibank, which is getting “trouble asset relief” from the U.S. Treasury but is now is owned to an even greater extent by Saudi princes?
This begs HUGE questions. What is a corporation? To whom does it belong? What is the relationship between a corporation and the nation-states of the world?
If you’re in business today, and plan on staying in business through 2009 and beyond, these aren’t just philosophical discussions. This is your future. Give it some thought.
“Nobody could see it coming,” schadenfreude edition
One of the most outrageous things I heard about this current financial crisis was that “Nobody could see it coming.” Early warning was written all over this systemic collapse - and people actively made fun of this view.
Watch this video of economist Peter Schiff and the ridicule he must endure for accurately predicting the systemic weaknesses in the economy.
Think about this kind of dynamic the next time you need to spread news of a systemic disruption in your organization.
Next Generation Leadership: Jingoism Vs. Kool-Aid-ism
At Competitive Futures, we’re thinking long and hard these days about what the next generation of leadership will need to look like. 2009 will feature a variety of new events, services, and dialogues around what we need to do to thrive in the face of all of these crises.
Just found a great way to describe the leadership mindsets of the different generations via Jessica Margolis, a futures-oriented thinker on this subject, and wanted to post her insights in their entirety. Go check out the whole thing.
As we transition to a kind of leadership that is equal to our challenges, we will need to enter into many such deep philosophical discussions.
KOOL-AID-ISM
Baby Boomers had Jingoism, and Generation X has Kool-Aid-ism. For the Boomers, Viet Nam was the question: Would you go? Would you NOT go? If you didn’t go, would you protest? Leave the country? What is a hero? Where are your national duties? You may have relatives who served or even died during World War II; how can you oppose your government’s call to duty?
Generation X has had a similar pivotal issue: Will you go to work in corporation? Will you refuse? If you don’t go, will you start your own business? How should you support yourself; what role should your livelihood play in your life? What about your family? Where are your obligations? How should you effect change?
“Drinking the Corporate Kool-Aid” is an expression often used to mean the degree to which an employee buys into the goals and objectives as stated by the executives in the firm they work.
The degree to which (US-raised) Generation Xers bought into to the framework of unfettered capitalism is as much a litmus test as the degree to which Boomers bought into the framework of unfettered nationalism. It even has the same polarizing issues: If you’re going to do it, do it right! (Be much more aggressive in Viet Nam; make a LOT of money in the corporate world.) If you object to the powerful treating you badly, then you’d better not do the same thing yourself (“Make love not war”; “First, do no evil”).
Check your assumptions - it appears to be the hot new style
How funny that the tools and principles of foresight are coming into vogue, this time without even the mention of a flying car or a rocket pack.
Take my friend Jim Cramer for example, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, textbook definition of an extroverted personality, and one of the greatest fund managers in history. Even he’s doing it. Last night’s show was entitled “Don’t Assume - You Know They Say,” and in it he spent the entire half hour inciting his audience to challenge all of their assumptions about the global economy.
You know, CRAZY intellectual exercises like challenging your assumptions about the price of oil around the global (under $60!), asking if America will have an automotive industry, wondering if the United States will keep taking cues from Evo Morales’ socialist administration in Bolivia. To play with the different possibilities that come out of each tweaked assumption - it’s a good practice for everybody.
Wait, if all the television hosts start thinking this way, what will we do for a living at Competitive Futures? I suppose I’ll go back to playing Latin music and enjoying our new intellectual Golden Age. For the moment, I think I’ll keep showing up at work.
Business Week: The long-term future is the last refuge of a wrecked economy
For sometime I have been saying that we’re on the cusp of a wave of interest in the long-term future that is not driven by economic bubble or apocalypse per se. The normal cycle is that people are interested in the future when we’re inventing new technologies and profiting, or when we think we’re going to nuke each other. This time, perhaps for the first time, we’ve got a mix of both: technologies will likely be influential, the economy’s a mess, the world is largely peaceful, the climate is changing, etc. People are finally interested in the future not as a gimmick, but as the only way to wise management of public institutions.
Pretty cool.
The most recent edition of Business Week has a great example of this emerging mindset. Michael Porter, the intellectual godfather of competitive analysis, has written an article that is desperately needed today: “Why America Needs an Economic Strategy.”
You should read this in its entirety, but to sum up, Porter says that America has a lot of valuable assets, and no plan whatsoever for long-term prosperity. The United States has a great science and technology engine, the best technology transfer in the world, and a still-vibrant culture of entrepreneurialism. However, we are hobbled by our lacking social net, a mess of a public health system, decaying infrastructure, and creeping neo-mercantilism in the form of giant corporations that distort markets. The only way out is to think long-term, from small businesses up to national policy makers.
We couldn’t agree more! Too bad the economy had to be smashed into flints before we could notice it, but better late than never.
Executives must re-establish their strategic radar
Tim Powell, a colleague and expert in competitive intelligence, sees the financial crisis as a complete failure of scientific management. We use numbers all the time because measurement is better than superstition. Numbers aren’t perfect. but if we don’t restore confidence in these techniques, the whole economy will suffer.
When people—and I include institutions here, they’re run by people—can’t trust the numbers, they can’t trust the capital markets. When they can’t trust the markets, they will not invest in those markets. If they don’t invest in the markets, the markets will freeze up. When the markets freeze, business can’t operate and will itself freeze—and that is exactly what is happening.
Without honest, quantifiable management techniques, our economy will look like the Soviet block - based on raw power, cult-of-personality warlord leadership.
Metrics can get onerous, but without them, we’re in the Stone Age.
Early warning: credit card debt shows fundamentals of the economy changing
We speak often about the need for early warning when it comes to business intelligence. Usually, after something really bad has happened, leaders say “Oh, if only we had known sooner. Let’s get more interested in early warning.” This is also accompanied by observations like, “This was a failure of imagination” and “we’ve got to think out of the box.”
I submit that most times, people don’t want to see the most important changes. Such tectonic shifts mean that precious institutions (and assumptions) might be shaken to their foundations.
For example, have you ever seen this chart of American credit card debt?
It matches housing prices perfectly, matching real economic growth for twenty years, then skyrocketing after 2001.
But these together, and you can clearly see the fundamentals of the American economy changing in a radical fashion. Something about the largest economy in human history changed dramatically, and nobody really stopped to make a comment.
If we want a prosperous sane economy and functioning government institutions, leaders have got to get serious about the deep philosophical and analytical dialogues that need to accompany these kinds of changes.
The last thing we want is to watch an even bigger catastrophe than the past month, followed by the all-too-typical chorus of “we should be interested in early warning,” and “nobody could have seen it coming.”
You can see it coming as long as you are willing to watch what’s really happening.
It’s time.
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