Group items tagged

The framework itself has five levels

The first level—related to the satisfaction level—is called "immediate value" and it assesses what just happened, for example, in a webinar

The second level is called "potential value," and I like to think of this as the new knowledge or understanding that is lying latent but ready to be put to use in the future

This level looks at change

The third level does this, and it is called "applied value" and this is where the model starts to become interesting to CEOs and others

hard metrics like reduced development time, improved efficiencies, or financial returns. The fourth level in the framework provides this, and the level is called "realized value."

he fifth level is where the community changes as a result of the activity occurring in the first four levels. At this highest level, the framework examines changes in the community—norms, standards, practices, and thought leadership—that has occurred as a result of activity within the community

Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.

humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.

The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human

Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system

Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.

Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.

Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas

It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt

Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.

The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.

The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.

Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action

Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.

five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing

Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,

shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.

What if government is not involved in the shaming?

Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?

Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant

vertical agitation

Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely

But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.

corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success

shame and reputation interact

in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand

Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?

why we learned to speak.1

Language

The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be

allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.

in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.

Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.

Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.

What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?

We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.

what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:

Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.

Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves

Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high

In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,

which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.

Today's world allows for amorphous identities

It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring

Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.

Some people have no shame

shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative

a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly

if the payoff is high enough

There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame

shame is not enough to catalyze major social change

This is why punishment remains imperative.

Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.

Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.

the bell curve described the wealth and income distribution of American society

As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.

America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.

For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.

an alarming trend

What is the role of technology in these developments?

a sweeping look at the relationship between innovation and productivity

New Economy of Personal Information

Power-Curve Society

the future of jobs

the report covers the social, policy and leadership implications of the “Power-Curve Society,”

World Wide Web

as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.

the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.

the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy

Economic and social insecurity is widespread.

major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.

Why are winner-take-all dynamics so powerful?

appear to be eroding the economic security of the middle class

A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.

How is the power-curve economy opening up opportunities or shutting them down?

Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?

many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored

what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?

The Innovation Economy

Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation

What drives innovation are new tools and then the use of those new tools in new ways.”

at least 50 percent of the acceleration of productivity over these years has been due to ICT

economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.

Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.

Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.

Others scholars

see innovation as going in cycles, not steady trajectories.

A conventional approach is to see innovation as a linear, exponential phenomenon

leads to gross errors

Atkinson

believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.

innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”

costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas

innovation costs are plummeting

Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.

we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”

what is meant by “innovation,”

“invention plus implementation.”

A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.

90 percent of innovation costs involve organizational capital,”

there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.

This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”

The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”

Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.

Institutions and social practice cannot keep up with the constant waves of new technologies

“We are moving into an era of constant instability,”

“and the half-life of a skill today is about five years.”

Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.

The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”

pace of innovation is a major story in our economy today.

The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform

tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices

standard

The App Economy illustrates the rapid, fluid speed of innovation in a networked environment

crowdsourcing model

winning submissions are

globally distributed in an absolute sense

problem-solving is a global, Long Tail phenomenon

As a technical matter, then, many of the legacy barriers to innovation are falling.

small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.

Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,

“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”

This notion of “permissionless innovation” is crucial,

“In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite