Here is some of what I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

The Internet: “The private interests of all have to be subsumed to the public good.” – by @robpatrob

@Euan “We depersonalise business so it doesn’t get messy. Instead it gets dysfunctional.”

Leadership Freak: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less” ~ General Shinseki – via @KoreenOlbrish

@AronSolomon – “Insiders who claim a desire to change the status quo are sheep in wolf’s clothing.”

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The advantages of social learning propelled incipient human groups along a different evolutionary path from chimpanzees – via @c4lpt

The new data on early human social structure furnishes the context in which two distinctive human behaviors emerged, those of cooperation and social learning, Dr. Hill said. A male chimp may know in his lifetime just 12 other males, all from his own group. But a hunter-gatherer, because of cooperation between bands, may interact with a thousand individuals in his tribe. Because humans are unusually adept at social learning, including copying useful activities from others, a large social network is particularly effective at spreading and accumulating knowledge.

The Return of the Barbarian –  “Civilization is the process of taking intelligence out of human minds and putting it into institutions.” – via @sebpaquet

In the short term this works brilliantly. The ideas of the smartest people (usually embedded higher barbarians) are externalized and encoded into the design of institutions, which can then make far stupider people vastly more effective than their raw capabilities would allow (this is the reason why the modern economic notion of “productivity” is so misleading).

But in the long term this fails. The smart people die, and their ideas become obsolete and ritualized. Initially, more intelligence is being externalized into institutions than is being taken away through ritualization, but at some point, you get a peak, and the decline begins. As entropy accumulates, it becomes a simple matter for another wave of lower barbarians on the periphery to take down the civilization.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: A Time of Institutional Recomposition – via @raesmaa

When companies are no longer competitive, they go out of business and their clients take their business elsewhere.  But, the invisible hand, creative destruction and other powerful free market forces that impose rigorous disciplines on business have not applied to government.  There is a huge difference between failed companies and failed communities, cities or countries.  Clients can easily find other companies to do business with in place of the ones no longer around.  This is not the case with citizens.

Systemic vs. Silo Thinking & Social Media – by @JDeragon

Social media are an influence on markets. The market of conversations can be used to improve an organizations system and its ability to serve a market. That is of course if we understand the “system and all the interrelated parts”.

Most organizations are failing at social media because:

It is being used in silos
The current measures are not relevant to systemic improvements
It is disconnected from the organizations people, processes and systemic improvements
Use is isolated in marketing and advertising processes
It is not designed around people’s intents or relational objectives

The advancement and improvement of any organization starts and ends with alignment of people, processes and communications. Not leveraging social technology systemically means the organization will be out of alignment.

Here are some of the things I found via Twitter this past week.

QUOTE: “How to squelch human potential – Step 1) Create assembly-line schools, 2) Distract w/ pop culture, 3) Build corporate cube-farms. Mix well” by @Richard_Florida

Dyer: Why the Arabs can handle democracy via @ewellburn

A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand years, the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.

The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.

Fast forward ten thousand years, and give these societies mass communications. You don’t have to wait for Facebook; just invent the printing press. Wait a couple of hundred years while literacy spreads, and presto! We can all talk to one another again, after a fashion, and the democratic revolutions begin. We didn’t invent the principle of equality among human beings; we just reclaimed it.

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.

The Arabs need no instruction in democracy from anybody else. They own it, too.

RWW How Recent Changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service Might Hurt Academic Research via @jonhusband

Twitter’s recent announcement that it was no longer granting whitelisting requests and that it would no longer allow redistribution of content will have huge consequences on scholars’ ability to conduct their research, as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.

We all know that our bosses legally spy on us. But what do they do with the info? by @jessebrown [read through to the conclusion]

“Almost everybody monitors—close to 100 per cent,” says Avner Levin, a business law professor at Ryerson University and director of the school’s Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute. “It’s become a fact of corporate life. There’s hardly a discussion about it anymore.” While British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec have legislation guaranteeing some level of employee privacy, Ontario offers none. Many companies ask you to sign away every possible claim on your own data. You may have agreed to be spied on when you signed your employment contract.

Why the weak students end up as educators CS Monitor via @pgsimoes

We also need to develop our future teachers’ own minds, by holding them to the same intellectual standards as other college students. Their so-called methods courses would be much richer if we asked them to read and write about the key dilemmas in their fields. And they should also take more classes outside of the ed-school, where intellectual requirements are already higher.

Would that make them “better” teachers? I’d like to say yes. Surely, though, it would make them more complex, curious, and contemplative human beings. There is nothing in the world more inherently fascinating than education. But ed schools have made it boring, by stripping it of its intellectual edge – and by letting our students slide along.

The students know it, too. That’s why weaker ones flock to the subject – and the more able ones stay away. In each of the past four decades, as my colleague Sean Corcoran has shown, a declining fraction of America’s top college students have chosen to become educators. If we want to reverse that trend, we’ll have to make teacher-preparation programs challenging enough to lure these students back in.

PEG: Knowledge Workers in the British Raj – by @pevansgreenwood [excellent series]

The future of our business – post Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business Design – is not in applying a new human-resources paradigm to our existing workforce. Much like the British Raj in provincial India, our businesses need to adapt to an environment where we don’t have the time or resources to micromanage every task. The workforce which staffed our bureaucracy in the past is not the same workforce we need in the future. The future of our business is with a smaller, more dynamic workforce of self-starters, built around flat organizational structures and more general skills which devolve responsibility for operational problems to the front line and empower them to work together and solve these problems under their own direction, while freeing the executive team to focus on steering the organization through the challenging environment we operate in today.