This is a post recommending that you buy a particular book. Now I’ve written many book reviews in the past, recommended that you read many books in the past. So what’s so different about this particular book? What makes it special?

Well, first off, I haven’t actually read the book.

There’s a good reason for that.

It hasn’t been published as yet.

It may not quite be written as yet.

In which case….

What am I doing reviewing and recommending a book that may not have been written yet?

Simple.

I love the idea of the book, and want to promote it.

[Incidentally, my thanks to @cyberdoyle for bringing it to my attention. I’d noticed mention of it on my radar screen, but hadn’t had the time to check it out. @cyberdoyle, a fascinating person, someone you should all follow, made sure I did.]

So what’s the book?

Quakebook.

As the blog says:

A Twitter-sourced charity book about how the Great Kanto Pacific Earthquake at 2:46 on March 11, 2011 affected us all. All proceeds from the QuakeBook Book go to the Japan Red Cross.

Interesting in finding out more about the book’s origins? Then check out #quakebook on Twitter.

Want to keep in touch with what’s happening with the book? Then follow @quakebook on twitter.

Want to donate now, rather than wait for the book? (Yes, I know you’ve already donated, this is to encourage you to donate more).  Then buy the poster.

Not really a twitter kind of person, more of a LinkedIn type? Then check this out.

Or maybe you’re more mainstream, so facebook is more your thing? Then go here.

Want to know more here and now? Then here’s @cyberdoyle’s wordle of the book:

Why wait? Why not just go and put your name down to buy the book as soon as it is out?

Then just go here. Do it now.

Blog it. Tweet it. Like it. Share it.

Do it.

Now.

A coda. Why? Because somehow the #quakebook phenomenon seemed to go well with the understated stoicness of the people of Japan, particularly at this time. Time for us to stand with the people of Japan. The people who gave us bonsai. The haiku. Origami. Chanoyu. Netsuke. Sashimi. The list is endless. A way of life, styles and habits, an entire culture steeped in dignity and consideration and respect and patience.

I spent much of my childhood and youth in an unusual household, on the 4th floor of a block of flats in central/south Calcutta. Surrounded by books, and by people who’d actually read the books. Full of life, from about 5am to around 1am, and sometimes in between. Populated by around 10 “residents” (including me, my 4 siblings and my parents), and on average another half-dozen “guests” (who sometimes spent more time there than some of the residents). It was not unusual to have two dozen people there of an evening, in what was meant to be 1500 square foot of 2-bedroomed flat.

Wonderful times.

There’d always be something going on. Duplicate bridge in this corner; chess there; carroms in the next room; an intense game of scrabble; a guitar being strummed pensively; late 60s-early 70s music playing in the background, the odd game of cards. Even table-tennis, played on an amalgam of wooden desks with a line of books serving as the net.

If you didn’t feel like “playing” something, then you could just join in the conversation. Or conversations. Usually covering the simple stuff: religion, politics, sport, food and relationships. A classic adda. [Incidentally, I was delighted to find out that the OED now has an entry for adda]. And if you didn’t fancy that, then you could just kibitz, or stay in the corner where trivia questions were being lobbed across the room like water balloons.

In such surroundings you would expect a few odd things to be taken as normal. Doing the Times crossword was one of them; for most of my childhood, we took two copies of the Statesman; for a short period, we took three. My father would not countenance waking up without the day’s virgin Times crossword to complete.

It was a strange house, a literary house. People would wander about spouting poetry from Herrick to Coleridge, Burns to Ogden Nash, trade quotations from Shakespeare and Shaw, sayings from Wilde and PG Wodehouse, Churchill and Caryl Brahms.

Some managed to go placidly amidst the noise and haste, reading whatever took their fancy. Not just fiction and nonfiction, but reference books as well. Of which we had a goodly many. They included, amongst others,  Chambers’ 20th Century Dictionary. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Hobson-Jobson.

And Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a personal favourite. (My thanks to Skoob Books for discovering and sharing the rare photo of Henry Watson Fowler).

Which brings me to the point of this post.

One of my favourite sections of Modern English Usage, Fowler’s magnum opus, reads as follows:

respective(ly). Delight in these words is a wide-spread but depraved taste; like soldiers and policemen, they have work to do, but, when the work is not there, the less we see of them the better; of ten sentences in which they occur, nine would be improved by their removal. The evil is considerable enough to justify an examination at some length; examples may be sorted into six groups: A, in which the words give information needed by sensible readers; B, in which they give information that may be needed by fools; C, in which they say again what is said elsewhere; D, in which they say nothing intelligible; E, in which they are used wrongly for some other word; & F, in which they give a positively wrong sense.

The article then goes on to detail each of these six “uses”. Here’s what Fowler has to say about type B, “foolproof uses”:

The particular fool for whose benefit each respective(ly) is inserted will be defined in brackets. Final statements are expected to be made today by Mr Bonar Law & Mr Millerand in the House of Commons & the Chamber of Deputies respectively (r. takes care of the reader who does not know which gentleman or which Parliament is British, or who may imagine both gentlemen talking in both Parliaments). /The Socialist aim in forcing a debate was to compel the different groups to define their respective attitudes (the reader who may expect a group to define another group’s attitude). /It is very far from certain that any of the names now canvassed in Wall Street will secure the nomination at the respective Republican and Democratic Conventions (the reader who may think that Republicans and Democrats hold several united conventions)./ We have not the smallest doubt that this is what will actually happen, & we may discuss the situation on the footing that the respective fates of these two Bills will be as predicted (the reader who has read the prediction without sufficient attention to remember that it is double).

Foolproof uses. What a delightful turn of phrase.

You know something? I wish someone would write something similar on topics like shared, public and open, particularly when it comes to analysing costs.

How many degrees in rocket science does it take to be able to figure out that something shared will cost the sharers less than if each had that something in a not-shared state?

How clever does one have to be in order to figure out that building walls and doors and locks is more expensive than not building them?

What level of IQ does a person need to assess that something available to all is likely to be cheaper than something exclusive?

Making things private and closed and exclusive comes at a cost.

A cost that is considerably higher than that associated with making things public and open and shared.

There will always be reasons to make things private. But that is not the default.

There will always be reasons to make things closed. But that is not the default.

There will always be reasons to make things exclusive. But that is not the default.

People need to understand the waste involved in making things private, closed, exclusive when they don’t need to be so. More on this later.

Prologue

Given the depth and nature of conversations on this subject, I think I’d better let this one run for a while. Many of you have commented in different ways, by writing in, by talking to me, by commenting on this blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, or even by writing blog posts and pointing me towards them. Thank you everyone, I really appreciate it. It helps me learn, it is one of the reasons I write here.

[For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, this is now the third post in an emergent series on Social Objects In The Enterprise. The first two can be found here and here.]

Foundations

Amongst the links, tweets and comments there were some posts and documents worth sharing with all.

For example, Todd Barnard pointed me towards the original post by Jyri Engestrom on Social Objects; I realised that while I referred to him repeatedly, I didn’t actually share the link, an absolute must-read. So thank you Todd. Similarly, while the terms “systems of engagement” and “systems of record” may be quite common now, Geoff Moore wrote extensively about them a month or so ago, in a paper entitled Systems Of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT. My thanks to John Mancini of AIIM for alerting me to this.

There are many influences for the rest of this post, key amongst them being Esther Dyson (who’s often mentored me without always knowing she’s doing it), Hugh Macleod (who introduced me to the work of Jyri Engestrom), John Seely Brown (for making me think about how information flows and how organisations really learn), Steven Johnson (for bringing “emergence” into my understanding), Howard Rheingold, Stewart Brand and Amy Jo Kim (for helping me gain some perspective on virtual communities), John Hagel (who, with JSB and with Lang Davison, continues to influence me about flow, non-linearity and patterns) and Clay Shirky (who keeps making sure I think hard about what’s happening in the firm, and in the world at large, by foisting “rules” upon me that give me a fresh and worthwhile insight. I am still working through the implications of cognitive surplus in the enterprise).

The ideas I’ve inherited as a result of spending time with many of the people named above, and by reading what they’ve written, have all tended to be absorbed in a framework whose foundation was laid by The Cluetrain Four: Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Chris Locke and Rick Levine. Tom Malone’s The Future of Work and Ricardo Semler’s Maverick were early influences as well; Sean Park, an erstwhile colleague at Dresdner Kleinwort, helped me enormously as well, particularly with the discussions we’ve had over the years about Carlota Perez’s work.

Why am I sharing all this and making this post sound a bit like an introduction to a book? Because I think people learn by “getting inside other people’s heads”. Because I think that in future, quite a lot of organisational learning will take place this way, as the cost of discovering roots and catalysts and influences, of sharing them and of being able to augment them, reduces sharply.

Some more links

This is almost a bibliography in reverse; what I’m doing here is linking to a few earlier posts of mine you may find useful in making sense of the rest of this post:

• Building society for the 21st century
• About this blog
• Twitter: A submarine in the ocean of the web
• Facebook: the new new telco
• The Maker Generation in the enterprise
• The Facebookisation of the Enterprise
• Of Push and Pull
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 1
• Why we share: A sideways look

Some of them date back over five years; none of them is essential reading for you to absorb the rest of this post; but for those of you who’re interested, I believe it will help you.

The role of social objects in the enterprise

(a) Assumptions

There are some core assumptions underlying my writing all this, I think it’s worth laying them out. First, that what passes for work in most enterprises is knowledge work. Second, that there is a war for talent when it comes to hiring knowledge workers. Third, that enterprises are changing from being hierarchies of customers and products to networks of relationships and capabilities, that human and social capital are gaining in prominence. Fourth, that the way we work is also changing, from stocks to flows, from the static to the dynamic, from the linear to the non-linear. Fifth, that there’s a new generation in the workplace, with newer still to come, born after the internet, trained in the web, equipped with always-on ubiquitous tools that can read and write text and sound and image and film.

And finally, we’re in a global social, political and economic environment that we’ve never really experienced before, where the pace of change is vast, and where knowing what to do isn’t a simple thing. An environment where the spectrum and continuum of enterprise is undergoing radical change, with some heading towards the hyperglobal low-touch model, some towards the hyperlocal high-touch variant, and where the in-betweeners, the “nationals”, don’t know what to do: they’re stuck in the same place countries and governments are, seeking to figure out their role in the new global structures.

(b) Rationale

Against the backdrop of those assumptions, it is not difficult to put forward an argument about the need to move from process-based thinking to to pattern–based thinking, with greater reliance on immediate information, with more emphasis on data-driven and event-driven activity.

In this context, it’s worth taking a look at this post by Thierry de Baillon on Moving Beyond Work as Usual in A Complex World, along with a post he refers to, Venessa Miemis’s Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part 1: Pattern Recognition. [My thanks to John Hagel for bringing the de Baillon post to my attention, and for reminding me of the Pattern Recognition post by Venessa Miemis].

We have to start thinking about social objects in the enterprise as having two primary purposes: to collect patterns, via the metadata generated around the social object; and to collect pattern recognisers, via the communities built around the social object.

Chris Locke, when I first met him over a decade ago, spent time explaining to me the importance of “organic gardening”, a catchall for the role played by interests other than work in building community amongst the people at work. What he said resonated with me, particularly with what I’d learnt from phenomena like the WELL.

People who congregate electronically around digital social objects form relationships with each other as a result of that congregation; there are birds-of-a-feather-like effects, the bringing together of people with similar interests, though not necessarily similar views on those interests.

These people who are brought together tend to avoid the herd-instinct problem primarily because of this, the tendency to congregate around interests rather than views on the interests. Politics rather than the red-or-blue of party politics. Football rather than the red-or-blue of Manchester or Liverpool. Religion rather than the red-or-blue of Catholic or Protestant. Technology rather than the red-or-blue of Google or Microsoft.

Because they come together with a commonality of interest but a diversity of views, the likelihood of Linus’s Law increases: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. So when such people collaborate, the quality of collaboration tends to be high.

Then, when you bring in the Clay Shirky concept of “cognitive surplus”, the potential for radical change in the enterprise emerges. People working together to correct the raw data and information bases that underpin the technical infrastructure of the firm, the extended enterprise, the market, the economy.

Social objects will also themselves become repositories of metadata related to relationships and information flows and collaborative activity, increasing the amount of information available about the actors and activities, and thereby reducing the likelihood of friction and tension between collaborators a la Gregory Benford’s Law :  passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

My next post will be about examples of social objects in the enterprise. In the meantime, please keep the comments coming.

 

Note: This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post.

A quick recap of what I said yesterday.

Businesses are morphing from customer-product hierarchies to relationship-capability networks. This is placing intense pressure on enterprise systems bases, which have traditionally kept the Fort Knox-like “systems of record” distinct and separate from the somewhat more promiscuous “systems of engagement”.

Systems of record often dealt with private objects, hard to access, secure, confidential: unpublished trading figures from an accounting system, for example. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, often dealt with public objects, usually accessed via the web: a link to a blog post recommended by someone in your network, for example.

Systems of record were perceived to be secure and confidential in comparison to systems of engagement; however, as extracts from systems of record were usually embedded in documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and then sent as e-mail attachments, the true level of security is questionable. Witness what Bradley Manning did.

Systems of engagement are perceived to be open and “insecure”; yet, learning from the facebook model, it can be argued that the granular nature of the security of access is actually of a far higher order than that afforded to the systems-of-engagement-information-accessed-via-email-attachments.

So that was yesterday, in a tenth of the space. Today I thought I’d spend more time actually thinking about the social objects themselves rather than the systems environment inhabited by them. First, some principles:

• An object becomes social only when it is shared; it is the sharing that makes the object social, not the object per se.
• A social object creates value not for itself but for the community in which it is shared.
• The process by which value is created is by the community interacting with the object, leaving comments, classifications, tags, notes, notations, corrections, observations, links, questions and even answers.
• If a social object falls in a forest and there’s no one to record and comment on its passage, it doesn’t make a sound.
• Social objects get cocooned in metadata, the who-what-when-how-much that describes frequency of access, the population doing the accessing, number of edits, when and how carried out and by whom, relative popularity, links, tags and so on.
• By inspecting the metadata we learn about ourselves and about the organisation(s)

While we’ve spoken about collaboration and teamwork for decades, the truth is that most corporate cultures are still not really about sharing. Which makes the very concept of an enterprise social object had to imagine. This is exacerbated by the continuing existence of blame cultures, which contribute to the fear of transparency and the pushback against sharing. It goes against human nature to help arm those who would attack you.

The tools we’ve had in the past have also militated against sharing; if e-mail, attachments and repositories are all we could come up with, we should all pack up and go home.

One of the benefits of consumerisation is that the enterprise can watch and learn from the actions, behaviours and tools of the consumer prior to implementing equivalent systems in the enterprise.

Which is why we should keep looking at facebook, at twitter, at the iPhone, at iTunes, at YouTube, at Flickr, every time we want to learn about what to do in the enterprise.

If we do that, we will learn more about the nature of social objects in the enterprise than we would any other way.

Next post, I shall look at social object metadata, information flows and a little more closely at the objects themselves, all in an enterprise context.

In the meantime, please keep the comments coming; I hope you find what I write useful in return.