Posts Tagged ‘information’

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.

My new favorite speaker is Dr. Nick Bontis. He is smart, funny, dynamic and he has the intellectual horsepower to back it up. I found his work while trolling academic journals for intellectual capital and the allocation of knowledge assets. Cool, huh.

I don’t care what the “definitions” by the Experts, the Patent System, Production Systems, Money, corporate bonds, marketing, advertising, or all the rest of that stuff. In the next economic paradigm, knowledge is an asset, knowledge is the only asset that matters because the transformation of knowledge into solutions will become the next currency. If not human knowledge, then what else?

In fact, the cards are stacked in favor of the corporation over the employee; unless, of course, you are both. We teach our kids to be good employees, not to become good corporations. How do we expect social priorities to compete with Wall Street Priorities?

Making human knowledge and intentions tangible in a market place opens up the possibility of a whole new class of business plans. We call this Social Power by the Hour.

The solution to any problem is entirely dependent on how the problem is defined. Likewise, redefining the problem, exposes huge opportunities for new solutions.

The idea that a mentor may take an equity position in a protege is not new – it happens in families and extended families as elders are fully aware that the children will provide for the family in the future. The connection is not to hard to grasp that it’s in everyone’s best interest to help the kids – all of the kids. This is the social contract.

The problem is that risk can never be negative, therefore interest rates can never be negative – that is called “breaking he buck”. Risk is a measure of volatility, or, “deviations from what is considered normal”. While there is certainly good deviations and bad deviations, there can never be a “negative” deviation from normal – it is a mathematical impossibility, a glitch.

Together with the financial banking, these two system engage in the dance of the virtuous circle of innovation enterprise. Apart, they collapse into the swirling cesspool of eternal debt and infinite interest (pun intended).

If we consider the structure of conversations and compare that to both the structure of social networks AND the structure of our financial system, we see a huge opportunity to develop an alternate financial system that can capitalize and securitize knowledge assets in social media.