I believe society is changing for the better and has been for ten years. The changes that social technologies bring are also having an impact at the workplace. Work is becoming more democratic and creative and though we are at the beginning of this process the prospects of young people leading rewarding lives look better than ever. And yes it is a recession! I think it is more than that - it is a profound change and it will be felt mostly in attitudes.

Hirsch’s book resonated strongly for some of us back then but the general hypothesis infuriated politicians such as Thatcher and Reagan. Why is it important now?

Because many of us are sitting at home today thinking: when will we come out of recession? Or: when will the economy grow again?

If you bought into Hirsch’s thesis then you’d be asking: Is this a real turning point when we stop seeing growth as the only measure of progress?

It’s important because in one of the few interesting articles in today’s Sunday Times Professor Kevin Anderson is quoted as saying::

“The target set for the climate talks (Pre-Kyoto) was to keep global temperature rises below 2C. At the moment however the level of emissions is rising so fast that we are heading for a world that is 4 - 5C warmer than now by 2100. That would be catastrophic for the environmenet and humanity.”

Hirsch argued that the pursuit of luxury in modern society was a self-defeating process - because as people distinguish themselves and their experiences by creating rarity value (the 7* hotel for example), the pressure is immediately on to mainstream that experience, with serious consequences for the resources that make exceptional experiences worth having.

Neither leaders nor followers ultimately benefit in this psycho-social system. The acceleration of desire is a key process in our modern economy though - but that Chateau Petrus never was worth the £3,000 that some bankers paid for it and the process of supporting lifestyles that can go the £3,000 for a bottle of wine is ultimately destructive.

So you can see how these ideas infuriated Thatcher and Reagan who wanted highly incentivised individuals rather than rational ones.

Which brings us back to today’s Sunday Times.The Sunday Times has been one of the key drivers of an avaricious and envious culture. Today it asks will recession be good for the environment. Answer: undoubtedly in many ways. But a bigger question would be: can we make the necessary adjustments to how we feel rewarded and satisfied? or: Can we turn the clock back 30 years and re-start the limits to growth debate?

Can the Sunday Times change?

a) a collarless white shirt I bought in Florida 12 years ago - it’s lasted really well, along with several other shirts I bought on that trip. When I look at these clothes I wonder why brand America does not include the word quality.

b) the three years I’ve spent gardening. I don’t go to the gym between March and November. Saves money and power. I don’t mean just the years I mean the garden, the cycles of growth I look at when I’m out there or when I drive into the front yard. And somehow I can see the effort.

c) the chance I’ve had to re-establish relationships with people from decades back, thanks to social networks. Weird thing about those contacts is even though we knew each other as children we are now separated by our successes and failures. I hope we get over that. And listen to me calling them contacts.

d) an Armani jacket I bought 15 years ago - still going strong.

When I think about this list I’m obviously brought up short by its brevity, I could go on and list a bunch of memories but the truth is if I look at all the objects I possess or am engaged with, it’s now their novelty that makes me think WOW - I have a troubled relationship with my iPhone but it is attractive. I doubt though it will be there in 15 years time and I doubt I can ever feel attached to it in any significant way.

And I feel these new objects pulling me in a direction I might feel even less attached to over the years. My twitter account - OK I work in social media and I know the value of twitter but will it feel like the BBC news did for decades, like a part of my family? I don’t think so.

Modern objects will increasingly have a large service element to them. That service element will be designed to separate me from money, preferably via a subscription that I might forget to cancel. yesterday I reclaimed 85 Euro of overcharges from my mobile operator - that’s the kind of service relationship I’m struggling with right now.

This is now meant to be a negative or sombre post. Quite the opposite. We’re entering a new phase of development, economically and socially, and where we attach value in this new age will drive that new economy. On first pass, I am having difficulty connecting what I value to what people want to sell to me.

In fact what I probably want to say is that right now I am beginning to sense the loss of objects that I’ve let go and relationships that somehow passed by without stopping long enough.

Services that can help me better manage my memories are going to be useful, services that can comprehend and help me convey identity, maybe stuff that manages my overall health, physical and mental, and that deepens relationships.

Are they likely to emerge? I interviewed Stefan marzano recently, CEO of Philips Design. Philips are struggling with some of this. they want to create service around people’s health. Right now their thinking there is measurement. Track people’s activities and then feedback to them their movement and calorie intake data.

On the other hand we know that relationships and a sense of self worth are key to good health. We know that the prusuit fo growth as we’ve seen it over the past 30 years is self-defeating and creates dissatisfaction. And yet we have a phenomenon where people are connecting more to each other than ever before. Right now that is often a numbers game BUT what if companies start to create products and services to deepen relationships, and to develop and validate worth?

I wonder if there will be a VC sharp enough to develop a portfolio around the emotional elements of the network?

The why is because when I asked Ivan - yes an Irish Ivan but the story is still true - how things were going, he whispered,

Yeah really well.

Really well?

Honest! Got some good programmes coming up, budget approved. Ready to roll. How about you?

Yeah, it’s good.

Really?

Good, Ivan, good. I dont want to talk too loud.

We didn’t know where to look.

So are we alone in thinking the western world is talking itself in to a bigger hole than it needs to be in?

Yes, we have to unravel all that poor credit and there’s a generation of pricing that the market has elevated artifically BUT we have been here before, just that, in the past, Governments were doing most of the credit stoking - as is G Brown right now.

In fact wasn’t that why the gold window was closed in the early 1970s - so we could stoke credit and devalue currencies more easily?

By the way, reading about this earlier today it seems Nixon tried to delay his speech to the American public to anounce his new economic policy. the reason? He didn’t want them feeling bad before watching Bonanza!

Here’s Greenspan on fiat currencies; “Greenspan famously argued the case for returning to a gold standard in his 1966 paper “Gold and Economic Freedom”, in which he described supporters of fiat currencies as “welfare statists” hell-bent on using monetary printing presses to finance deficit spending.”

I think the shifts that are taking place right now are very positive ones and they began a decade ago - a highly educated work force that wants to participate in the public arena, the death of monolithic media, a return to personal identity in commercial transactions, a kind of democracy where we can all learn, opine and pitch in.

I also have a sense that the gloom is old hat - if you look back to the 1970s the environment and the limits to growth were both hot issues - we avoided the debate then by guessing a macro-economic adjustment could be made - liberate markets, control public debt and growth can continue.

Now we are having to face those 30 year old issues and it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing in fact because there is plenty of public debate - debate over how social media, for example, will play out. In other words how society and business will become more participatory. It’s a debate that affects the quality of many people’s lives just like politics tries to.

Do people today remember Fred Hirsch’s the Social Limits To Growth? The analysis went something like: The levels of dissatisfaction that an acquisitive culture creates will constantly render growth itself dissatisfying. Progress solely through growth is not just a mirage but a contradiction. There has to be another way.

I do simplify greatly.

That theory and the environment lobby (remember the Limits To Growth 1) is what infuriated Reagan and Thatcher and created the conservative backlash against the voices of complex reason. You have to say the past 30 years could have been vastly more productive if more people had listened to voices like Hirsch’s. Now it’s happening.

Really?

It’s not just Obama.

Dave is a big advocate of communities of purpose (I don’t suppose many people got to read the late Bob Pestel’s work on CoP - Bob died before networks really got going so his work got no accelerator effect).

Sometimes a client doesn’t use the word social media but instead refers to eMarketing, a clue perhaps that they need a new vocabulary but a sign also that we need to retain some continuity in what we understand and recommend.

I think communities of purpose is a good term for describing those sometimes brief addictions people enjoy to a particular cause or indeed the longer more commited groups people form to address issues.

I’m trying to work out what value the concept has for deeper and more embedded processes, the type that exist when a client refers to eMarketing.

Some of the work I’m doing around social media is requiring me to think hard about how to transition companies by helping them create more communicative internal networks, so they can do things like “brand” a whole lot better. It’s a job I think a lot of us face so I wanted to share five thoughts and see where they fit with social media approaches.

Create the brand and the stand. - I see companies having brand strategies that lack any kind of stand on issues of the day. So what you might ask? Well I think in future it won’t wash. Not only are so many issues pressing in on us there’s also the fact that companies need to care about and communicate something more than themselves. Human networks need issues.

Create the deal/Call the customer to action (tactical) I don’t believe social media strategies can work without good old fashioned SEO and SEM. Far more companies think they can game Google than believe in paying for social media strategies so I see SEO/SEM as a must-have when talking with them.

Create community so that customers and employees advocate the deal This is the obvious one right. Community of interest and purpose that bring collective will onto a problem or a product or service, involve customers who then become advocates.

Use metrics to create personalisation and give users “ownership”. Another obvious requirement for social media. The more people can personalise and “own” the stronger the relationshp seems to be.

Create knowledge sharing environment across employee and user communities. Maybe also obvious but I think what it requiries is not at all so. Many, many companies are silo-ed - and IT has had a large part to play in that - big command and control ERP systems that isolate people at the customer edge of the business; multiple permissions before any action can take place; inadequate access to knowledge and poor knowledge flow.

To change behaviour in these companies requires a lot of rewiring of their systems and those in command do not want to lose control.

So I agree with Dave about communities of purpose but am looking for ways that those messages can break down not just behaviour but systems that companies have invseted in and believe in.

Why are these profound characteristics? For most of my adult life the main argument in the face of most crises we’ve faced, the main argument in the face of everyday Governance, has been create a market for it because the market knows best.

There are those among us who can remember when that argument surfaced with credibility back in the late 1970s and sort of saw the point. We’d been so bogged down in special interest groups through the 1970s that a philosophy that provided an alternative to forging every new policy to suit the objectives of as many of these groups as possible…. well not much was getting done.

But in the intervening 30 years we’ve witnessed “the market” replace intelligence and the intellect, reason in fact, as the predominant guide to how our societies should be run. I am so glad that seems to be over. I am glad the banks crashed and provided testimony to how poor markets can be at allocating resources and acting as a proxy for reason.

I would like to add to that the feeling I have that the era of markets was perfectly served by the computer revolution. Not only were we downsizing the intellect and reason, we were actually cooping people up behind these screens and barely permitting them an active role in life, and business - ERP systems, database systems and any old systems that allowed behaviour at work to be controlled, seem to me to be at least as culpable for the downsizing of reason. Web 2.0 and social media arose before the banks crashed and before the market was exposed. You might also say, looking at the importance of social networks online to Obama’s victory that the networked generation was waiting to break out of its prison.

Looking forward I would expect industry, companies and organisations in general are going to have to deal once more with reason, intelligence and the creativity of the people who form them. Not many managers and executives are trained to deal with that. It’s going to be interesting to see how the new battle lines within organisations shape up!

Some of the comment around the room seemed to me a little wide of the mark. It went something like - we know all about Web 2.0 so why aren’t companies coming to us for advice? Damien pointed out in London companies are spending vastly on social media - what we need to know is who they are spending it with.

There are some sharp shooters who have gone in their fast and secured client trust and contracts. My experience is still though that conventional PR firms are holding the reins. On the trip to Lisbon I mentioned earlier PR companies on a tidy 1500 Euro a day often end up doing the menial work, like serving folks like me coffee. But they have the client relationship. Yes it is sometimes menial and boring but it is 1500!

Now personally I want never to do that kind of work but what I think we’re still struggling for is the language that secures those client relationships in the face of companies that are entrenched and that make life easy for folks working at client companies, PR agencies whose first objective is to make client employees feel special.

You don’t do that by pitching. There does seem to be a long build up of trust needed. And somewhere in the mix you need to be so helpful that you cure an employees pain not just the company’s.

I’ve seen companies range from those that are highly intellectual and aware, ready even to transform to the new communications paradigm if only they can get the right advice, to those who still don’t know how to manage a website. So we need to know what language they are ready to listen to and how we can translate that into helpful messages.

I can see a marketer thinking about social media and saying: oh yeah all I need is something that goes viral. But what goes viral? It looks to the average marketer like a lucky strike and it makes the future look entirely unpredictable and unsafe for them. We need to start mapping out the safe routes, the small steps and the easy gains.

What we need - just a view point here - is to put resources out on the web that help those companies find themselves, find their position in a route map to a new way of doing business.

It’s taken some years for LinkedIn to get here! Do the new social applications make the critical difference?

The first things I’d say is that LinkedIn’s competitor Xing does less of the social online and more of it offline with tens of thousands of meet-ups organised by Xing groups each year. Real people, real business.

The second is that I’m fairly comfortable with Google’s online document and shared workspaces. I wonder will Google gets its act together on business networks - do somethig with Orkut and get really serious about this space? In any case I’m not so sure that these first LinkedIn apps are apps for me.

Third my biggest problem with LinkedIn is still getting to know people. I know this could be my fault but the difficulty in making a contact seems to defeat the object of what should be a huge referral network.

And finally there is the cost. $20 a month is twice the cost of Xing but without twice the bang.

I didn’t find huge enthusiasm for LinkedIn’s move - more of a sure, they had to do it sooner or later.

There’s still an innovation out there waiting to be found, one that will make the network effective and compelling rather than what it is now - an occasional visit when you have downtime.

Recently I opened a correspondence with Christine Lu of the China Business Network. is it just China’s broadly recognised importance, or is this how blogs were meant to evolve? Christine is a veritable publisher and TV show in one.

What’s great about Christine is not just the panache of the site she’s built but that she’s also great at responding to people, one of the features I expected to be more common in the world of blogs.

Take a look at what she’s achievig there.

It’s objectives are to create a digital platform that tracks and traces the changes taking place in our world, as well as igniting debate about the most important issues. There’s some determined and angry stuff there as well as some great art. I picked up this image from an important voice of the creative community in Singapore, Culturepush. Hope it’s ok to use it Michele.

It’s a really fun site, as well as serious, especially if you have a little patience with the flash navigation.