Mopsos

In Business Week, a harsh article with a tough title:"Wall Street's Crime Against Humanity"

The point made in this great article is that greed created a system in which

we see that just about everyone accepted a reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility for the consequences of those transactions.

True, but I also think that putting the blame on Wall Street is too easy. I think that the main problem in this financial crisis is that information systems and mathematical models used in the finance industry have become so sophisticated that eventually nobody really understands how they work. People use them without any critical thinking on the assumptions behind the underlying models, especially with respect to risk management. It has something to do with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where basic students started behaving like demons because they were placed in a system that called for this kind of behavior, and because they did not find the courage within themselves to apply critical thinking to what they were doing.Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a whole book on this: "The Black Swan"
So one word of wisdom for our knowledge economy could be: use with extreme cautious any computer-based application that you don't fully understand inside out. This holds for sophisticated trading software as well as for Facebook or Twitter. I am sometimes appalled by the carelessness of many clueless users of those tools who put themselves at risk as well as others because they don't spend enough time to try and understand.

Great post form Melanie McBride explaining why her twitter posts are protected. At last someone who raises the privacy issue in a clever way.

[Thanks Guy]

My company just published a survey about the expectations of generation Y regarding work. To summarize:

1. Millennials expect to work overseas - Millennials expect job mobility and want the opportunity to experience overseas assignments.


2. Sustainability and climate change - Today's recruits will choose employers who have corporate social responsibility (CSR) values that reflect their own.


3. Technology and the ability to network - Millennials view technology as key to socializing and networking and believe it will change the way they work.


4. Work place flexibility - Only a small percentage of millennials expect flexibilities such as working at home and outside regular office hours.


5. Sharing personal information - Millennials are comfortable about giving employers greater access to their personal information in the interests of personal and business security.


6. Millennial views on portfolio careers - The idea of employees job hopping in a portfolio working arrangement is not likely to become a reality for millennials.


7. Employee loyalty - Millennials express loyalty to the organization they work for, but by no means are they willing to commit to blind loyalty.


8. Training and development - Training and development is the benefit the millennials value most highly--particularly coaching and mentoring.


9. Retirement - Millennials have accepted the idea that neither the state nor the employer will fund their retirement.


10. Thoughts on 2020 - Millennials envision a world where China, India and Russia will have more economic influence than the US and Europe and believe that companies will be more influential than governments by 2020.

Points 3 and 8 are encouraging. Points 4 and 6 are surprising. Points 5 and 9 are scary.

There has been a lot of bickering lately about authority on the web being or ot synonymous to the number of followers on Twitter. This discussion was triggered by an initial post of Loïc LeMeur. Stowe Boyd summarized the essentials of this discussion in another post written yesterday.
Surprisingly, nobody makes a clear distinction between popularity and authority. Loïc LeMeur or Robert Scoble managed to become some kind of pop stars of the web, meaning that they tend to be everywhere and connected to everyone. Does this mean they have authority? Yes and no. Yes because they have established their names as strong brands on the web, and that they have become valuable sources of information as amplifiers of faint signals. What they bring to our attention is most often very interesting , because they are connected to a lot of very interesting people. But it doesn't mean that their opinion as persons really matters. They are journalists and commentators in essence. But they cannot be compared to web gurus like David Weinberger ("Everything is miscellaneous"), Nassim-Nicholas Taleb ("The black Swan"), Don Tapscott ("Wikinomics") or Tom Friedman ("The Earth is Flat") to name a few, who have written widely acclaimed books on the economy of the web, and who are not all using Twitter as far as I know. Why would social behaviors on the web be so different than in real life?
Something I really worry about is the false idea of democracy that permeates the web like a new ideology. Depending on how you use it, the web as a tool that lowers the barriers to establish both democracy or dictatorship. Democracy in ancient Greece was limited in space (the Agora), and had little to do with equal rights. However, it was based on three principles:

• Your voice equals mine


• Your air time to voice your opinions will be the same as mine


• i will respect your privacy and you will respect mine.

The third point is particularly interesting. The ancient Greeks knew that the essence of democracy is your right to have an opinion and voice it to try and convince other people to act accordingly, not about seducing the people with dreams. That is why privacy was so important. Democracy is built on interconnected communities, whereas dictatorship is built on masses of indistinguishable individuals. So in that sense it can be argued that the world wide web is profoundly both democratic, when it encourages people to enter into conversations and discussions, and undemocratic when it encourages people to worship stars and gurus.
In the end, it really depends on what Loïc and Robert want to do with their fame. Is it just to use the web as an echo chamber to attract morons, thereby satisfying their ego and making money, or is it to bring important stuff to our attention, building their practice and making the world a better place? Nobody can answer that question but them.