I had dinner last night with a couple of people writing a report on the future of leadership for a Very Large Company. I argued once again against the importance of leadership, at least in its traditional sense. I believe less and less that there is some masterable set of skills that constitute leadership, especially as the organization gets larger. Further, I think it’s almost always useful to replace the question “What skills does a leader need?” with “How should the group be organized to best achieve its goals?” Sometimes the answer to that latter question will be, “It needs as strong leader,” but more often the traditional tasks of leadership will be distributed among members of the group, or will become a property of the group itself. (For example, in a collaborative or emergent group, decision-making is a property of the group.) (Tony Burgess of Company Command mentions this line of thought in an article at the Harvard Business Review site. In a hallway of mirrors, he mentions my interviewing him for an article of mine that HBR is considering running.)
Last night, I gave the usual examples of Web leadership: Linux, Wikipedia, and Open Source more generally. These projects would not have been possible in a traditional leader-led organization. But, in addition to looking at large-scale collaborative projects as case studies of Web leadership, suppose we look at what we’re replacing traditional institutions with. YouTube is replacing traditional broadcast TV — not removing broadcast, but eating into its TV-watching share — and file sharing is doing the same to the recording industry. Yet these epochal changes were accomplished without traditional leaders. And these are not merely illustrative examples. Most Web users don’t have any experience of contributing to Linux, Wikipedia, or Open Source projects, but we do routinely encounter YouTube and music sharing. Most Web users therefore have direct experience of the power, success, and utility of leaderless change and leaderless institutions. In fact, anyone using the Web has that experience, because the Web only succeeded because it is leaderless. That experience of organizing without organizations (a la Shirky), leaderlessly, is defining the upcoming workforce (as the young love to be referred to as).
There are still domains and circumstances in which leadership matters. But we are losing — have lost — the assumption that groups require leaders to accomplish their mission. Increasingly, the need for a strong leader is a sign of a defect in the group structure.
The Extraordinaries a couple of weeks ago completed a second round of funding and now has over $1M in venture money to build their business on. The backers include Mitch Kapor and Esther Dyson.
The site is like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: you can sign up to do some fairly mechanical task that some organization has advertised. Unlike the Turk, though, you don’t get paid, because you’re doing it for a non-profit like the Library of Congress or Smithsonian.
The Extraordinaries only takes non-profits as their clients, but it does charge them. (Or it will charge them in the future. I’m not sure of the current status.) If that makes the service sustainable, then why not?
According to an AP article, Panera Bread is trying out a pay-what-you-want store. Its run by a non-profit, and you are asked to pay what you can. The motto: “Take what you need, leave your fair share.”
Panera was already high up on my list — the sort of place where I find myself saying, “For a chain store, its really not bad.” It just rose a little higher.
In chapter 4 I need to bring the book back down to earth for the reader. The previous chapter left the reader thinking that there’s no bottom to the worldwide disagreements the worldwide web is making apparent. There’s too much difference. So, I’m beginning Chapter 4 with some rules of thumb for scoping diversity — that is, getting the right amount that a group can work together and make itself smarter, as opposed to either falling into groupthink or falling apart because people just disagree too fundamentally. I seem to have four heuristics, although, as always with such sets, that there are four and not three or fifteen is more arbitrary than any of us would like to believe.
1. Get the right type of diversity. I make heavy use of Scott Page’s The Difference here. What counts is a diversity of ways of thinking and skills, not races or ages (unless race or age are markers for the relevant differences). (BTW, Scott and I have the same editor.)
2. Have just enough in common. In order for people to even carry on a conversation, they have to have almost everything in common, starting with a shared language. It’s important to get the amount of variance just right.
3. Just right? That doesn’t help at all! But there is no fixed amount. That’s why the third rule of thumb is: Use human moderators both to find the commonality in overheated differences, but also to add differences when the conversation becomes complacent.
4. Fork it! Forking is a powerful tool.
If you have other rules of thumb for getting the right amount of diversity into a group or a conversation, please let me know.
By the way, I do realize that three of the four pare down what we deal with, which is what I said was the old way of dealing with knowledge, not the new way. I plan on facing that issue in the second section of the chapter.
Mark Zuckerberg forms a company and develops the Web as a commercial enterprise.
MZ owns and controls the HTML standard. Nothing changes in it unless MZ thinks it’s a good idea.
MZ owns and controls the client — MZ Explorer — that uses that standard. While other apps are permitted API access, the browser is whatever MZ decides to give us.
Users can only create pages on MZ’s server, subject to MZ’s content policies.
MZ decides how much about the author of each page is automatically disclosed, and he changes his mind every few months.
There is no “View Source” so users can easily figure out how to become developers.
Innovators’ creations are limited to the API access that MZ allows and are subject to the changes in policy and pricing structures that MZ decides on.
Users have no systematic, assured way of transferring out of the Web all of the pages they’ve created within it. Do they even own the pages they’ve created?
If the right deal is struck, the Web could be sold to a media company at any moment.
This alternative history writes its own ending: The Web would be a boring, small, and of little consequence. The real Web unleashed a world-changing renaissance because a modest researcher at a physics lab gave it to us as a gift — open and free.
The Web knows how pages are connected. Social networking sites know how people are connected. Both are obviously crucial. But, Facebook, for all its success, is not living up to the potential for social networking sites, not by a long shot. The social networking site that will do for the connections among people what the Web has done for the connections among sites is awaiting its own Tim Berners-Lee — a person or group that understands that control constrains, but gifts liberate.
Yes, this may be a terrible idea and may have awful unintended consequences, but I’d still love to see someone try providing users with just two buttons to press after every comment on a blog that has considerable traffic: and Comments that have lots of people who hae pressed both buttons would be treated as especially valuable…
I love my Mac, even though it doesn’t really love me: Its beautiful edges cut into my wrists, and twenty years into the era of windowed computing, you still have to go to the bottom right corner of the buggers to resize them. Still, it runs so nice.
But, the AppStore? Puhlease. Child-safe and Apple fresh. Android’s version of the AppStore — the Market — sorta sucks, but because it’s an open device, there’s already a superior replacement for it
Categories: misc Tagged with: apple • google Date: May 13th, 2010 dw
Search engines have traditionally focused on building lists. Increasingly, they’re turning to the rectangular display of information: Boxes and tables. Boxes require extracting the relevant information and presenting it four-square in front of the user. While lists sort in a single dimension, tables show at least two dimensions. Boxes and rectangles are useful filters.
Google today announced the further boxing and tabling of data, in response (one supposes) to Bing.com. The Google Blog recommends trying searching for dog breeds, broadway shows, catherine zeta-jones date of birth, or zebra. (Look for the “something different” list in the left margin when you do the zebra search.) I especially like the summary of sources Google gives when it flat-out answers a question.
Elliot Maxwell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Openness: How increasing accessibility and responsiveness can transform processes and systems.” H3e says he came to the question by observing the spread and importance of the Net and its effect on institutions. He sees openness as a lens for understanding processes and systems.
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
Openness is a continuum, Elliot says. For example, open source software benefits from openness, but because decisions are made by assigned individuals, it is not itself fully open. Things are open if they’re accessible and can be modified, repurposed, and redistributed. Openness is in part an attitude, he says. E.g., a doctor is more open if s/he is more willing to listen to the patient and to take her/his time. “Openness is not necessarily a product of IT.”
Also, openness isn’t always the right answer. E.g., an electronic health record should be open enough that doctors can see it and so it can be immediately updated as lab results come in. But, it shouldn’t necessarily be open to other people, insurance companies, or the gov’t. Also, openness can make more haystacks, hiding the needles we need to find.
Elliot began thinking about this when Napster was at its high point. Traditional IP sees control as essential to creating an environment that encourages creation. But, we also want to encourage follow-on creators. There’s not a lot of research about how much incentive first creators need. (And, of course, first creators are themselves follow on creators.) Control is expensive and imperfect. (Think DRM). Open source, on the other hand, thinks value comes by distributing and sharing. But, it can be hard to evaluate all the contributions that come in.
Elliot lists some examples of increased openness, and spends some time talking about the attenmpts to open up clinical trials. (ClinicalTrials.gov and the Journal of Failed Clinical Trials.)
Elliot is also especially interested in higher education, which has been relatively unaffected by openness, although he expects that to change. (It’s easier for Harvard and other research institutions to support open access, he says, than, say, community colleges that have different goals and constraints. ) Elliot sees a rise in open educational resources, which will affect teaching institutions. OER will be increasingly driven by customers, rather than being course materials put up on the Web by a teacher. We will know more about how OERs are being used, they will become more interoperable, and there will be incentives for participation and use.
At CMU and other places, there’s work on harvesting what happens to and around digital educational materials. We need better data on student progress, educational outcomes, and the factors that affect student success. He says we also need research on the cmparative effectiveness of digital edu materials, and best practices. Also, it’d be great to extend fab labs digitally.
Elliot sees progress in opening up research. The Human Genome Project was the seminal event that changed the basic model of research, at least in the bio sciences. Open access journals are growing. But, too many institutions still only count publication in closed journals as a scholarly achievement. We don’t yet have good models for how to reward research that is immediately published.
Intellectual property rules need to be recalibrated to recognize the importance of follow-on innovators, and to enable more use by educators. Bayh-Dole should be modified to enable more open licensing. He would also like to see some “orphan work” legislation.
We should change the default of campus events so that they’re open, unless they’re specifically closed. “We should take advantage of greater openness to improve support services.” The government should fund open access to financial aid materials. NIH-funded research should be open to the public within 12 months should be extended to all non-classified research funded by the 11 fed agencies that spende over $100M in research. And the embargo time should be reudced to 6 months. The government ought to include funds for open access publishing when making grants, Elliot says.
Then there’s openness and transparency about academic degrees. We don’t know what it means to get a degree in something. We need more compatibility, comparability and portability of degrees. The government should encourage accrediting agencies to increase their focus on learning outcomes. (Currently only 19% of accrediting bodies say anything more than that a school is accredited or not.)
Q: [ethanz] You’re conflating openness and judging inputs and outputs. Evaluating schools by outcomes is one thing, but that’s different from openness.
A: Openness has to do with the access to the information.
Q: US News and World Report makes a closed evaluation based on open info. When you go more open, you can get unintended consequences. E.g., no one has done an open search engine, because it’s too game-able. What are the unintended consequences of opening up campus events, for example? E.g., Facebook opening up more and more private data. I was hoping you’d tell us more about where openness is inappropriate.
A: Yes. I’ve been talking about openness because that’s where it’s going.
Q: I agree with your framing of first and follow on innovators and with your general direction. But, the limits are important.
Q: As a historian, your directional arrow seems too one-dimensional. Historically, open and closed have worked hand in glove. E.g., the patent system closes paths but forces innovators to reveal what they have. E.g., the closedness of some medical processes.
A: Changing the default for university events would only be for events that were public anyway. And if I sound like I’m giving a litany of open
Q: [me] Is data more open if it’s been cleaned up and put into standardized formats. It’s more reusable, but it may also mean decisions have been made about it that anticipate some uses and not others?
A: It’s situational. In the long run it’s probably likely that all the slicing and dicing would evolve to a smaller way of using this info, because people would be able to build on that info — that’s just a guess. But, when people are unlikely to agree, getting it out quickly would be more usefl. Standardization has some benefits, but if it’s rigid it’s probably wrong.
Elliot concludes about talking about new means of certification. We’re going to find new ways of certifying people in a global environment. There aren’t educational institutions everywhere, and we have a new generation of self-directed learners. That will allow many more people to be certified.
Q: [wendy] What’s the most effective lever for openness? Is it giving credit for being open?
A: We need to recognize that the closed path is not the only way to build value.
Q: Transparency, openness, and open source are each different.
A: OS is a way of building code. Transparency lets us see, but not by itself affect…
Q: At the level of international relations, we can maybe get transparency, but openness will only come from individual administrations…
A: Transparency would let us see what’s happening. But I want us to be able to act on the info we see.
Dan Gillmor got an offer from a publisher for his “Mediactive” book (“a user’s guide to democratized media”), but the publisher wouldn’t agree to publish it under a Creative Commons license. So, he’s self-publishing it at Lulu. He’s doing this on principle, but also for pragmatic reasons:
… the main reason I’m still getting royalty checks for We the Media is that the book has been available as a free download since the day it went into bookstores. Had we not published it that way, given the indifference (at best) shown by American newspapers and magazines, the book would have sunk without a trace.
Of course, Dan’s motive is not primarily financial:
…this isn’t just a book, at least not way traditional publishers understand books even as they dabble online.
To publishers, books are items they manufacture and send out in trucks. Or else they’re computer files to be rented to publishers’ customers, or customers of Amazon, Apple and other companies that use proprietary e-reading software to lock the work down in every possible way. In both cases, publishers crave being the gatekeepers.
Mediactive aims to be a multi-faceted project. Over the next few years, I hope to experiment in lots of media formats and styles with the ideas here. And — this is key — I also plan to experiment with it in the broader context of the emerging ecosystem of ideas.
Dan reports that the folks at Lulu.com (where — product placement alert — you can get a copy of my young adult book, My $100 Million Secret — are being helpful and creative about supporting books in the new ecosystem. Plus, it’ll be available at Lulu this summer, instead of the year it would have taken to get it onto shelves via the traditional route.
Since Dan is one of the most admirable people around, It would be fun as a community to make his book a success in every way, from spreading its ideas to selling a whole bunch of copies…
