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"The traditional guardians of our democracy, such as the Fourth Estate and our legislators, are in the thrall of the new platform monopolists. Interconnected and engaged citizens are our hope for a better future. We need to learn how to navigate the emerging network era. People have to take control of their learning: being connected, mobile, and global while conversely contractual, part-time, and local."

Democracy in the Workplace "Leadership will emerge in the network era, and history will likely remember those who were able to hold the space so that a new way of work could be co-created. So far, those numbers are few. Like the earliest democracy, democratizing the workplace requires intelligent and aggressively engaged people. This is where we can find our leaders."

"Being educated is not enough. Effective citizens in a post-job, creative economy will also have to be connected. As objects get connected, the platform owners will aggregate more power and control.  Smart cities without smart citizens will result in the tyranny of the platform capitalists."

"As we learn to think for ourselves, we must also connect with others. We are only as smart as our knowledge networks. But we do not need someone to manage our connections. The simple guideline of self-direction, often enabled by network technologies, can create beautifully complex relationships amongst interconnected people. "

"Networks enable organizations to deal with complexity by empowering people to connect with whom they need to, without permission. Network thinking means that anyone can connect to another colleague, and the default permission to get access to information is public. Networks are in a state of perpetual Beta. Unlike hierarchies, they can continuously change shape, size, and composition, without the need for a formal reorganization. Our thinking needs to continuously change as well. Hierarchies were essentially a solution to a communications problem. They are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and hard to share, and when connections with others were difficult to make. That time is over. Markets, competitors, customers, and suppliers are already highly connected. The Internet has done this. It is why a Triple-A enterprise needs to be organized more like the Internet, and less like a tightly controlled machine. Continue to next post: the trinity model"

""The fiction at the heart of neoliberalism is that everybody can enjoy the consumer lifestyle without wages rising," Mason writes. "You can go on creating money forever but if a declining share of it flows to workers, and yet a growing part of profits is generated out of their mortgages and credit cards, you are eventually going to hit a wall. At some point, the expansion of financial profit through providing loans to stressed consumers will break, and snap back.""

"In the process of applying technology, we can't forget that workforce engagement, the measure of whether an employee merely does the minimum required of them, versus proactively driving innovation and new value for the organization, is the ultimate objective here. Thus, engagement can only ever be partially accounted for by deploying the latest new collaborative technology, and probably significantly less than many of its proponents would have you believe."

"We believe technology is changing culture everywhere in the world, leading to the emergence of a new model of leadership. Employees are now more confident, more mobile, more demanding, more idealistic in some cases, and less willing to be company people. Employees, more than ever, are individualists"

Good Why social business is needed... "Democratization of information: User-generated content is ubiquitous and much of it is very useful. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity will change traditional power structures, though the full effects of this are not yet visible."

So much to do, so little time...I'm posting on this article by Jarche...for sure. "For the past century, the job was the way we redistributed wealth and protected workers from the negative aspects of early capitalism. As the knowledge economy disappears, we need to re-think our concepts of work, income, employment, and most importantly education. If we do not find ways to help citizens lead productive lives, our society will face increasing destabilization. This is a challenge for government, as our institutions are premised on many assumptions that are no longer valid. Changing the worldview of politicians, public servants, and citizens will be a key part of addressing the issue of wealth redistribution. Old mental models will not help us much."