SXSW 2012 - The connected company: an inventory of the possible
I am happy to say that the SxSWi panel that Dave Gray asked me to join is available for your reveiw (and vote!) on the SxSW PanelPicker here.
I think the panel is phenomenal. I’ve known Dave only a few years, but he is a big picture thinker, now at Dachis but the founder of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Thomas is an old dear friend, the man who concocted ‘folksonomy’. I’ve known JP Rangaswami for at least seven years, since a great Supernova panel session. He’s now the chief scientist at Salesforce.com. The conversation I had in the trade show at Enterprise 2.0 this summer was the high point of the conference for me. And it also led to me speaking at the Social Intranet Summit in September, that Gordon is organizing. And then there’s me. If you are reading this you probably know about me.
Event Interactive 2012
Format Panel
Organizer Dave Gray – Dachis Group
Speakers
- Thomas Vander Wal ‐ InfoCloud Solutions
- Gordon Ross ‐ ThoughtFarmer
- Stowe Boyd ‐ Stowe Boyd
- JP Ragaswami ‐ Salesforce.com
Description
French historian Fernand Braudel once said that a great city is an inventory of the possible. For thousands of years, cities have perfected the art of enabling complex social interactions at scale. A city is a social network, and so is a company. But there is a difference. As companies grow in size and complexity, they become less productive per capita. But as cities grow, they become more productive, by almost every measure. Why? It’s getting more and more difficult for companies to handle complexity: increasing customer demands for more customization, more convenience, lower costs and faster innovation. At some point the machine breaks down and companies just can’t handle it. The 21st-century company will have the same kinds of dense, dynamic, and complex properties of well-designed cities: fast pace, high energy, rapid innovation and high productivity. And some companies are doing this today. In our panel we will talk about who those companies are, what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it works. We will show you how you can use the same principles to organize your company for a complex, networked, rapidly-changing global marketplace.
Questions Answered
- What can companies learn from successful cities?
- How can companies be more successful by operating as social networks?
- What is a connected company?
- What are some examples of successful connected companies?
- What makes these companies successful?
Level Intermediate
Supporting Material
The Connected Company is an upcoming book from O’Reilly by Dave Gray, with Thomas Vander Wal. The connected company blog can be found at http://connectedco.com There is also an upcoming book by Stowe Boyd entitled “A city not a machine; a liquid not a solid.”
Correction: the work is entitled ‘A Liquid, Not A Solid: A City, Not A Machine’, but I may have said the opposite. I was experimenting for a few weeks, going back and forth. The shorthand for the book is ‘Liquid City’.
(You’ll see more about the book after I get back from the beach in a few weeks.)
His blog can be found at http://stoweboyd.com Gordon Ross blogs at http://thoughtfarmer.com/blog Thomas Vander Wal blogs at http://www.vanderwal.net/random/
Category Social Media / Social Networks
Tags enterprise 2.0, social business, Social Networks
