I remember reading a story from Paolo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” that essentially gave the message – don’t rip people off, because that is somewhat like stealing. I don’t have the book at hand because I gave all of my copies away, but I remember the moral to the story. Essentially, it was a story about doing fair deals, and making sure you are creating enough value from trade for both parties to profit.
For some companies, I think it eludes them that their core objective – create value; and that driver of growth is creating value for their customer. More benefit, lower cost.
There is one sure fire way of making sure that the equilibrium of the cost to the benefit is found, balancing the price and the value to a prospective customer – that is by using auctions. I’ve always believed that this was a way to find economic justice, but until now it hasn’t necessarily always been practical.
However, Google is showing us the way, as is evident in this article from Stephen Levy @ Wired.
As we move to a more efficient future (since that is where the quick wins are) - expect this trend to continue
del.icio.us Tags: googlenomics
I recently had an interesting discussion with Darren following his cry “Collaboration is a myth” as he tried to find real world examples of collaboration. he framed the question in an interesting way, “What motivates people on Wikipedia to do stuff in concert like that. What is the essence of what we call collaboration?”
At first I thought it came down to two things, user stake in the objective, and user effort required for contribution. These must be balanced against each other. the lower the effort for contribution, the less that needs to be at stake for collaboration participation.
Darren then mused if you could achieve collaboration for business processes, where the user stake in a larger company can be exceptionally minimal.
“Can the gap be bridged purely by technology? - a technology which truly brought collaboration to the workplace”
At first, I thought no, if effort is required and user stake largely removed, can technology bridge the gap to achieve any kind of collaborative work. But then I remembered a great talk from TED,
that showed us that in fact there are times when we will very willingly do something for nothing. that is when we are at play.
there are actually already examples of this type of collaboration in the real world – here are two:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
and
Play Pumps
del.icio.us Tags:
play,
design
This speech by Barry Schawrtz about our loss of wisdom and the importance of virtue emphasises a lot of what I ranted about in this extraordinarily long post (for those who were bold enough not to bounce).
It is nice to hear this espoused so elegantly.
Interestingly, with the advent of social media, it is becoming apparent that the rewards of virtue are becoming greater, as is authenticity.
As awareness continually increases about other people, and ourselves, the best parts of society are being magnified as social solutions put an end to our anti-social past. Corparations are learning this and are beginning to behave more like the “persons” that they are legally defined as. Oddly, people are beginning to behave more like corporations too…
