corporation

People Are Corporations Too

by Dan Robles on August 13, 2011

Wow what a week. I though that I heard it all until Mitt Romney said “Corporations Are people”. Actually, I admire Mr. Romney but I do struggle with this interpretation for his sake and those who he represents – and possibly an opportunity lost to rise above the noise.

In a way, Mitt provides us with a looking glass into the fundamental differences between the rich and the poor. The rich see themselves as the proxy for the prosperity of the poor. Meanwhile, the poor see themselves as the proxy for the prosperity of the rich. Neither side admits that they need each other, but I won’t pretend that I can solve this argument any time soon.  However, allow me to suggest that the winner of the debate will be the one that can evolve above the paradox.

The following video discusses how many components of a corporation – and government – are being duplicated in Social Media. The beauty of is that this great social innovation is available to anyone including the rich, the poor, the corporations, and the government. Oh, but wait – if the UK shuts down social media, they will effectively shut themselves out of the paradox, not evolve from it…Ooops. Be careful, Mitt.

So here is a video I made last year which, in a way, validates much of what we see playing out before us in politics, business, and social media.

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Virtual Hub And Spoke System

by Dan Robles on July 26, 2011

The Hub and Spoke system is a time honored formation of commercial aviation. People accept hub and spoke as the most rational way to organize people and planes much like they accept the corporation as the best way to organize production of goods and service.

Meanwhile, social media is challenging every assumption that we hold dear to our hearts as new applications role out which steadily increase the ability for people to organize their selves.

The newest applications such as Google + show us that people are the hub and their various forms of social networks are their spokes. A person has a group for their family, one for their friends, their colleagues, their schoolmates, etc.  While G+ fatigue may wear in as people get tired of classifying their casual contacts, the real value of G+ may arise in the intentional Organization of people for social and financial efficiency.

The similarity between the airport and G+ Hub and Spoke is not a casual coincidence.  There is a very real and physical connection between the way people organize themselves in social media and the way they organize themselves in corporate production and the way their organize themselves in air transportation systems.

Suppose we make the analogy that the person in the center is the customer, the circle that they belong to is the market, and the person in the market is a client.  The analogy hold when we try to “preserve college friendships”.  College is the social market and the friend is the mutual client relationship where the currency is a social currency.

The analogy is still very young, but it is truly profound.  This way of thinking will drive a form of social organization that may rival corporations, government, and even international boundaries.  It is also no coincidence that Social Flights has been modeling this analogy for the 2 years since we first started developing our business plan.

Today, Social Flights is working on some important concepts for defining Travel Tribe Leader functions.  The objective is to duplicate the function of a “concrete” hub and spoke system denominated in dollars with a virtual hub and spoke system denominated in social currency.

Network Characteristics of Travel Tribe leaders:

  • Each Travel Tribe Leader is responsible for 10-20 city pairs from their own location.
  • Two travel tribe leaders for each city pair (one located at each point)
  • Travel Tribe Leader creates revenue by matching people and places
  • Builds tribal/shared knowledge
  • Redundant, opportunistic, and fault tolerant
  • Ideally suited for Twitter, Google + and Facebook Distribution Channels

Conclusion:  The organization of people it figuratively (with G+) and literally (with corporations) is the exact same thing.  This will become obvious when people discover the necessity to organize their selves into productive communities in the absence of corporations and government.  But why wait – we can, and we will use social media to form a new system of social organization.

Citationhttp://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

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The Invisible Hand of Social Capitalism

November 12, 2010
Thumbnail image for The Invisible Hand of Social Capitalism

Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand of Market Capitalism, the Invisible Hands of Social Capitalism will reward people for organizing themselves to make what they enjoy most and are naturally talented in producing.

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How Knowledge Assets Live In Community

September 17, 2010

Communities, people, social networks, and their integrated knowledge assets are the mis-allocated asset being squandered by losing management teams, not land, labor or capital.

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What’s Your Cut of the $5 Trillion Knowledge Economy?

September 3, 2010

Your knowledge and experience also helps others predict what preferences you may have and what decisions you may make. Corporations, advertisers, banks, insurance companies, and politicians all want to know this and they will go to extreme and expensive measures to get it – why not just sell it to them?

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Is Anonymity an Asset or a Liability?

April 7, 2010

If Facebook is not careful, a huge opportunity awaits a competitor to disrupt the Facebook parade with high value, high segmentation, and high anonymity – and still monetize.

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Engineers Are Money

April 3, 2010

China and India are producing millions of engineers as part of their global economic dominance strategy. Engineers increase productivity and productivity creates wealth. Why? Because money is only a means for storage and exchange of value and engineers create the value.

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The Social Caterpillar Award Goes To Home Depot

March 18, 2010

Corporations may be getting social “online” but how are they doing offline? Anti-social behavior on the ground is the genesis of our not-so-coveted Social Caterpillar Award.

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Social Media as a Vetting Mechanism

February 9, 2010

Where the vetting mechanism fails, the system fails. This has happened in countless instances from the current financial crisis to nearly every product, market, environmental calamity, or political failure in recorded history – the referees who were supposed to keep their eye on the ball, did not. Likewise, where a vetting mechanism is effective, the system is efficient.

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Predictions for 2010 and Beyond – Nothing is Sacred

December 21, 2009

The interest coming due on our national debt will consume increasingly more of the money that institutions need to provide basic services. As these institutions weaken, they will increasingly be replaced by social media enterprise. These structurally weakened institutions will drive social media innovation more than any other factor.

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Diversity in Innovation

December 19, 2009

Most literature on the subject of Innovation cites diversity as an important component of the innovation enterprise. Unfortunately diversity rides a political narrative rather than practical applications. Polarization is the death of diversity and the political narrative that plagues our country also plagues our ability to innovate.

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Dark Net and the Economics of Mutual Anonymity

December 14, 2009

The phenomenon to consider is that people with mutual anonymity are able to share more freely. Ironically, anonymity improves the quality of a conversation by eliminating the irrelevant data that often constrains conversation. Conversely, efforts to constrain anonymity destroys freedom of the web.

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Deep Web Search

December 13, 2009

Deep Web Search Engine is here. This represents a new economic paradigm since increasing the available information increases the rate of change of knowledge across diverse communities. Keep your eyes on this one – it’s a big one.

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The Power of Social Taxonomy

December 4, 2009

Likewise, corporations arising from the industrial revolution communicate internal structure and processes through the use of a well protected internal taxonomy. This serves as both a means of storing knowledge across generations of workers, and as a means of encrypting the knowledge from those who would pillage the enterprise.

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Community Currency; Ithaca Hours

November 6, 2009

Many communities are giving up waiting on large corporations or government to invest or provide jobs, and are instead building on their own strengths and resources.

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Humility R Us

July 28, 2009

To understand why humility works in social media, we need to understand what humility is. If “Nice guys finish last,” is the mantra of the old world, then “The last will be first,” is the motto of the new.

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The 2.3 Trillion Dollar Mentor Market

June 29, 2009

Suppose that mentorship could be monetized like financial instruments. Within the structure of an innovation economy specified by The Ingenesist Project, the mentor would take an equity position in the protégé, not unlike taking a stock in a corporation.

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The Competition is Competition Itself

June 7, 2009

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, as an analogy, suggests that the more we know about competition, the less we may know about cooperation. The more we know about cooperation, the less we know about competition.

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Follow The Leader

May 12, 2009

There are two types of Leaders in the World. The first type elevates themselves by standing on the shoulders of others. The second type elevates themselves by elevating the people around them. The next paradigm of economic development will be an innovation economy characterized by social aggregation and search devices that identify both types of leaders in a community.

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The New Economic Paradigm: Part 7; Monetization of Knowledge Assets

April 20, 2009

We have specified a structure for a new economic paradigm by simply integrating the the knowledge economy into the same structure as the financial system. The result is a completely new way for entrepreneurs to create wealth.

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The New Economic Paradigm; Part 5: The Entrepreneurs

April 9, 2009

There is no shortage of entrepreneurs in this world. 6 Billion of them wander the Earth looking for assets that exists at a low state of productivity waiting to be elevated to a higher state of productivity.

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The Next Economic Paradigm; Part 4: Institutions

April 7, 2009

In this module, we will discuss the institutions in social media that could keep an Innovation Economy, free, fair, and equitable.

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The Next Economic Paradigm; Part 3: Knowledge Inventory

April 6, 2009

Most companies have an inventory of every nut, bolt, rivet, or panel that they need to build something tangible. In innovation economy, we will need to have an inventory to assemble knowledge assets so that we can build something tangible

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The Next Economic Paradigm; Part 2, Currency

April 5, 2009

Everywhere people are trading information and ideas with each other at an incredible rate. All of this information adds up to something because obviously things get built and stuff rolls off the assembly lines. People act on information obtained from each other to produce things.

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