Welcome to the Serendipity Economy

At Enterprise 2.0 in Santa Clara, I was honored with giving the closing keynote the first day of the conference. In that talk, I revealed a new paper which is designed to drive dialog about the evolution of the economy, most particularly, the movement away from Industrial Age thinking.

In Welcome to the Serendipity Economy, I offer six observations that Industrial Age economic models, like productivity, fail to account for. By measuring work through the lens of productivity, efficiency and optimization, we miss much of what takes place in our organizations because we often focus only on the things that we can measure.

Here are the six observations:

The process of creation is distinct from value realization.
Value realization is displaced in time from the act that initiated the value.
The measure of value requires external validation.
Value is not fixed, and cannot be forecasted.
Looking at a network in the present cannot anticipate either its potential for value or any actual value it may produce.
Serendipity may enter at any point in the value web, and it may change the configuration of the value web at any time.

I encourage you to read the paper and enter the dialog. For those of you trying to justify horizontal technology investments like social media using traditional ROI, this paper may help you define why you can't do that--and if you have managed to create a traditional ROI, why the process orientation of that justification may set you up to miss many of the ancillary benefits you could reap if only you were looking for them.

Regards,

Daniel W. Rasmus

http://danielwrasmus.com

dwrasmus@danielwrasmus.com

425.868-0271

To engage Dan for consulting or advisory work please contact:

Fred H. Abbott

Valley View Ventures, Inc.

978-254-1639

See my Enterprise 2.0 Keynote

Watch my Enterprise 2.0 Keynote here.

Management by Design Tip of the Month: Balance
From Management by Design:

The word 'happiness' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

-C.G. Jung

A workplace is not a fixed space. It may not exist in the physical sense at all. Some parts of the work experience are designed: processes and products for example. But from the holistic point of view, the workplace evolves around the constraints and opportunities presented by the products it makes, the services it delivers and the people it hires-and the processes and policies that they develop, as well as the practices they honor. There is no sense of designing a workplace balance. But there should be.

The work day is a great example. It cannot be divided up evenly; task work and creative work cannot claim equal time. As much as we may attempt to design balance into the workplace, most of the things that affect people prove more about proportion than balance. The two concepts are related, but clearly not equal.

...

The Jung quote that starts this chapter suggests that balance is about things being in opposition to each other. And that is a useful way of thinking of balance because balance would mean nothing without imbalance. The job of the manager in creating a good workplace experience is to expose the forces that attempt to swing the experience out of balance, or already have it out of balance.

Management by Design: Applying Design Principles to the Work Experience

by Daniel W. Rasmus
Wiley

Hardcover

List Price: $29.95

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