Defragging Transformation

I had my first real experience of a " Mosaic moment" a little over six years ago when my many months of frustration with trying to explain the virtues and even necessities of an intranet to one of my company's executives had come to a head (I was working for a management consulting comany at the time). I then heard Gary Hamel talking to a bunch of supermarket CIOs about how tech guys had discovered that putting an executive in front of a computer with a web browser for 15 minutes did more than all of their explaining and educating executives over months and years. So I spent two weeks learning html and creating a sample website . And then I sat my guy down in front of his computer and asked him to click on the link in the e-mail I had just sent him. Sure enough, 15 minutes later, he was the executive sponsor of my intranet initiative (and asking, "how did you do this?"). This phenomenon is often called a " Mosaic moment", referring to when all of a...

At Digital ID World , Kim Cameron proposed the Laws of Identity , which quite frankly are on the edge of what I'm able to understand about digital identity (which is part of what fascinates me about hearing Kim talk about them). There are, however, three things that I clearly understood: Kim is not stating these as the sole authority, but rather as someone whose expertise arises out of his conversations with others, and using the "laws" to "provide a way for people new to the identity discussion to understand its central issues. This lets them actively join in, rather than everyone having to restart the whole discussion from scratch." A comparison to the laws of physics... that while not everybody understands the laws of gravity, the laws of gravity still apply to everyone, even if they don't understand them. The laws of digital identity are a bit like that. While the laws of physics have a long, rich history of development, the laws of identity in the digit...

Many people try to avoid jargon and catch phrases, but then some people know how to have some fun with the whole trend of buzz phrases... check out Buzzphraser . "Buzzphraser is this thing I [ Doc Searls ] wrote along with Charles Roth ... about 15 years ago when I was in the PR business, and we could randomly generate bullshit for customers...".

If you're exploring the potential of blogs, this Reuters piece is a good indicator that you are not alone. Of course you could just browse soome of the blogs on Blogbrity's "The List" to see what the A, B and C list bloggers are doing.

There were a number of things that I had been trying to say for the conference that were most easily said using a variety of digital media, rather than words. But that was in the relative flatland of reality... Now I'm at work figuring out how to get those same ideas expressed in the hyperlinked virtual world, using what it makes possible. As a first step, I returned to some brilliant thinking from a few years ago - revisitng The Cluetrain Manifesto which I had read and signed onto back in 1999. (Also check out The Hughtrain ) The 95 theses are now even more on point than they were back then, with statements like: Markets are conversations. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. People recognize each other as such from the sound...

For those of you who've asked about Fred, who I spoke about in my presentation, it was actually a story from the book "Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future" , told by one of the authors, Peter Senge (the others were C. Otto Schwarmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers). Using my dramatic license, I changed the wording a bit, but the story remained the same. How it was actually told by Peter Senge was: Several years ago in one of our leadership workshops, a Jamaican man from the World Bank named Fred told a story that moved people very deeply. A few years earlier he had been diagnosed with a terminal diease. After consulting a number of doctors, who all confirmed the diagnoses, he went through what everyone does in that situation. For weeks he denied it. But gradually, with the help of friends, he came to grips with the fact that he was only going to live a few more months. 'Then something amazing happened,' he said. 'I simply stopped doing ...

What are people saying after my presentation at the Conference for Global Transformation ? Just read an e-mail from Annie Sherwood - who said "...we are the rock stars and we can move mountains just by who we have conversations with... the MDG's [Millennium Development Goals] are not so much about saving the dying or ...saving ourselves from dying but having us live while we're living !" Rock on Annie!!

One of the organizations that I've been involved with, and that I mentioned in my presentation at the CGT is The One Campaign . The Washington Post did an article on Monday (5/23) that shows how a conversation is being spread, pretty much without regard to political lines... With Pat Robertson and Sean "P. Diddy Combs" appearing right next to one another in One's TV ad. And in case you're wondering, the Post's description of what Bono does during U2 concerts was quite accurate (at least for the concert that I attended). He does say something like, "The first time I heard about America... it was because a man had landed on the moon. But now I want to talk about my generation's challenge -- not putting a man on the moon but bringing mankind back down to Earth by addressing extreme poverty." And cell phones rather than lighters are the torch of the day. What's left out is that they also have part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights s...

Keith Kegley talked about this video (click on "Watch this Movie") - It's a video of Gary doing the "Numa Numa Dance", and as he says: Holy crap!!! 1 million views!!! You people are crazy! Just to let you all know, yes, this is the original location of the Numa Numa Dance... right here on NG. The internet sent it around like crazy, and it's wound up on over 80 websites that I could find, with an appearance on CNN, and just now on VH1's Best Week Ever. I've recieved tons of e-mail's and hits to my website, and I just want to thank you for all the feedback that you've given me. For people who still don't know, yes that is me in the video, and the song is entitled "Dragostea Din Tea" by the Romanian pop band "O-Zone". What does it take to get your message out this way?

There's a great conversation between Adam Curry and Ron Bloom about the origins and strategy of Podcasting. You can hear it here See what a Podcasting studio looks like: Strategy cast (this is Adam and Ron creating the above podcast.)

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