#cltrshck weekly ammo 4

Here’s a round up of Culture Shock inspired bits and pieces:

New Models of Leadership? by John Wenger. About as good a piece on the challenge of progressive leadership as I’ve read. Absolutely in line with Culture Shock thinking. Lots to chew on. Probably needs a few reads.

Love the opening quote:

“Many people live in the hallucination that they can truly lead other people without being able to lead themselves and this is pure fantasy. It is much easier to try to change other people and not being willing to change ourselves. This exercise of authenticity is very much needed if we truly want to inspire, touch and move the brains and the souls of those around us.”

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Digital Disruption Is A Bigger Deal Than You Think from Forrester. Worth bookmarking if only for these two comparative stats from Forrester’s presumably rigorous research:

89% of executives believe that digital will disrupt their industry

39% of executives we surveyed believe that their companies have the policies and practices necessary to adapt to digital

Doesn’t that just capture the challenge beautifully? The Cluetrain happened. The business world sees what is happening, finally, but hasn’t made the changes. I really believe that all successful businesses in the 21st century have to have Tech DNA. This is the day job we do at NixonMcInnes helping orgs make the shift to better thrive in a world of digital disruption, so I’m looking forward to using these stats!

Thanks to @neilperkin (I think) for the link to this piece.

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LiquidFeedback – really interesting looking ‘interactive democracy’ platform

At our conference Meaning 2012 a few weeks back, Stowe Boyd talked about LiquidFeedback as a viable platform to unlock a micro-participation and a new age of democracy. I need to do more research, but as I understand it, this open source software project provides a viable approach for groups – be they political or corporate – to raise issues and vote on them digitally.

Could be a huge part of the future, and would love to see if we could use this at NM. Please share in the comments if you know more about this.

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‘We’re In a Slow Motion Collapse, TAKE Advantage of the Time Available’ by John Robb. This guy has been about as big an influence on me as anyone in recent times. I found the OODA loop, which led me to think about and then eventually write the chapter on Change Velocity, through John’s writing.

This here isn’t a substantial or particularly informative blog post – but if you let it, if you properly pause and open up, it can make you stop and take stock about the time we’re in and what to do about it.

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The state we’re in and the call for a new economy by Tom Nixon. Building on the above post on the need for systemic change, here’s an interesting and passionate plea by Tom about the role that co-operatives and employee-owned organisations can contribute to a better future.

Tom’s blog is essential reading, and this lovely datapoint stood out for me:

“Cooperatives world-wide have 1BN members and the largest three manage assets in excess of 1.6TN (and guess what, they have been extremely resilient through the recent economic turmoil because they did not engage in the insane activities like shareholder-owned banks.)”

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Kickstarter launches in the UK. In Culture Shock there’s stuff, as you’d expect, about how crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are changing the nature of business and the relationships between service providers and ‘consumers’ as they’ve been traditionally thought of.  And in particular the fairly straightforward idea that increasingly customers are more like collaborators and investors, citizens are sensors etc. So it’s great to see the most mainstream and successful crowdfunding platform Kickstarter (itself, VC-funded – ah, the lovely irony) now available to list projects in the UK. Whoop!

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Cor, that was a nice haul eh? 🙂 Bit of something for everyone in there.

Do share your links with me on Twitter, and keep spreading these ideas.