Feedback on Fast Company....

C21st business thrives on feedback.... Procter and Gamble have their website set-up for innovative feedback from consumers. Tupperware way back in the 1950s designed a business with consumer feedback loops built-in. Linux is a software development business that only exists because of feedback - it is being developed as we speak by users and developers who constantly use feedback loops to improve their core product/service. So it is with magazines and publishing too - feedback is a key asset today on Fast Company to help keep its articles relevant and remarkable.

So I was delighted that Fast Company printed my "feedback" in their May 2008 edition. I was pleased too, as you might expect, because this feedback is based on the core ideas in my forthcoming book 'chattering clusters'. BUT I was especially pleased because I was able to combine the ideas of two influential American thinkers whose ideas are often seen as presenting opposing views on our digital world. In fact Thomas Friedman and Richard Florida are talking about the same phenomena - Friedman is talking about it as he sees it working at the global level and Florida is talking about it as he sees it at the local level.

Creative clusters will form at both levels if and only if their members (in these clans and tribes) are able to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in their mind at the same time. Here is a comment about holding two seemingly opposite ideas as a continuum of ideas. It might make more sense if you read the Fast Company item 'In Praise of Spikes' March 2008....

Creative Clusters

Thomas Friedman is correct: The broadband Internet world is flat ( In Praise of Spikes, March). If you have an idea, then implement it for yourself before someone implements it against you. Richard Florida also is correct: The flat world is a network that links clusters of people who find solutions to local issues. Some of those solutions can scale but others cannot.

If we put Friedman and Florida together, we get a perfect description of what is happening in the world today. At the global level, it is becoming flat (networked), digital (machine to machine), and virtual (ideas based). This flat world is a networked economy that does not obey nation-state governments or regulations -- subprime networked debt was based on a set of financial ideas, not on a set of home mortgages. Clusters are local. They are people based, and they are increasingly wireless (24-7 connectivity), personal (providing a customized experience), and reliant on new revenue models (passive income streams). Our world is changing in remarkable ways, and there are no right or wrong descriptors for what is evolving.