Showing posts with label Hagel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hagel. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

John Hagel on Passion and Wisdom.

We have another excellent article written by John Hagel on the dynamic interaction between passion and wisdom. How these elements interactions increase organizational performance beyond what either can deliver in isolation. Hagel notes.

I want to challenge this belief.  In fact, passion and wisdom amplify each other – each one alone has far less impact than when the two are combined. Rather than opposites, these two are powerful complements.
It is my opinion, that the oil and gas industry has no passion; and is operated completely from the basis of wisdom. For that statement I would probably receive little argument and be perceived to not have insulted anyone. And I have not intentionally set out to insult anyone, its that the need to have a level of passion within the industry is something that is necessary, and that is what I and Hagel are arguing.
Wisdom in isolation falls prey to diminishing returns.  No matter how thoughtful and creative we might be, we ultimately run up against the limits of current capability.  The longer we work at it, the harder it becomes to find the next increment of value within current performance limits.
Today we have an economy that is in a major transition, that is redefining the players in all industries and in all marketplaces. We also have a set of technologies, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) redefining how business is conducted throughout all industries. These transition are also defining how the oil and gas industry is being conducted in fundamental ways.
In a world of mounting performance pressure where current limits become prisons that ultimately crush participants,effectively integrating wisdom and passion is not just an opportunity, it is an imperative.
From my perspective little to no passion exists in the oil and gas industry. The wisdom that Hagel notes that can imprison organizations appears to have asphyxiated oil and gas firms with an overdose of paper. Over the past decade firms have been rewarded with higher commodity prices. However at the same time costs have escalated at substantially the same or even higher factors. Since 2005 world oil production has stalled with no substantial increases seen in any region, and no increases seen in the foreseeable future. Regions such as Canada, and others, are seeing steep declines in their natural gas deliverability. The industry is ripe with wisdom and lacking in passion at a time when the challenges are the greatest the industry has ever faced. If only the industry were to adopt the Draft Specification and commence the development of the People, Ideas & Objects software applications. Passion could begin to be effectively integrated with the wisdom resident in the industry, and affect the performance of the industry in the manner that Hagel notes in this article.

For the industry to successfully provide for the consumers energy demands, it’s necessary to build the systems that identify and support the Joint Operating Committee. Building the Preliminary Specification is the focus of People, Ideas & Objects. Producers are encouraged to contact me in order to support our Revenue Model and begin their participation in these communities. Those individuals that are interested in joining People, Ideas & Objects can join me here and begin building the software necessary for the successful and innovative oil and gas industry.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Hagel & Brown on Leadership

John Hagel and John Seeley Brown are two authors that we follow closely here at People, Ideas & Objects. In a Forbes article entitled “Today You Can Only be a Leader by Creating Leaders” they bring up the topic of leadership and how it’s changing.

In a world where automation of transactions and business processes increases, and escalates, particularly with the development of the Draft Specification, leadership is one of the key human actions and skills that can not be automated. A short list of the types of work that people will be involved in in the future is as follows.

  • Leadership
  • Issue Identification
  • Issue Resolution
  • Decisions
  • Design
  • Ideas
  • Search

This is to name just a few of the key human activities that will be needed. When we talk about leadership, we note the size and scope of the task that People, Ideas & Objects is focused on. It is the enormity of this task that will require many leaders. Whether its a Product Owner who will work to capture the users demands in the software, or a member of the Community of Independent Service Providers leading a system integration at a producer firm, leadership will be a key skill that will be needed. Hagel & Brown note the somewhat simple process in which this starts.
Leaders can flip these perceptions of risk and reward if they can paint compelling long-term views of the future. This is completely against the grain for most business and political leaders today; they study quarterly numbers to carefully craft a short-term view of the road ahead. Leaders in the big shift will be those who can peer ahead and paint compelling views of opportunities--and not just opportunities for themselves or their institutions but for all kinds of people. If they can help us to make sense of the long-term future, they'll be able to inspire bold action and investment in support of their initiatives, while everyone else sits on the sidelines.
People interested in getting involved with People, Ideas & Objects should contact me here to begin the process of joining this project. People who are interested in building and providing the systems and services the innovative oil and gas producers will need to meet the market demand for energy. We should also take note of the following.
But there will be another even bigger change in leadership. In the past, leaders were measured by how many people followed them. In the era ahead, they will be measured by how many other leaders they can cultivate. We are moving from a world of push, where people are expected to follow detailed scripts to accomplish specified tasks, to a world of pull, where everyone must master the techniques of drawing out people and resources when needed to address unanticipated opportunities and challenges. In the world of push, followers were prized. In the world of pull, everyone must figure out how to become a leader in their own domain.
This makes intuitive sense. With the systems handling the majority of the business, the remaining tasks are not going to be distributed by some all knowing greater power. The more that can be initiated by the leader, the higher the value that is generated for the producers.
Rather than using persuasion to get others to follow predefined programs, the new generation of leaders will use persuasion to help people more effectively draw out their own individual potential. The really effective leader will be one who can persuade emerging leaders to join forces toward common goals and develop faster than they could on their own.
I can’t think of a more exciting place to work. People, Ideas & Objects, the Community of Independent Service Providers offers leaders a place where their skills are needed.
The bottom line: Leaders will no longer be defined by the number of followers they have, but rather by the number of other leaders they have cultivated and mobilized across institutional boundaries. That is a profound shift.
For the industry to successfully provide for the consumers energy demands, it’s necessary to build the systems that identify and support the Joint Operating Committee. Building the Preliminary Specification is the focus of People, Ideas & Objects. Producers are encouraged to contact me in order to support our Revenue Model and begin their participation in these communities. Those individuals that are interested in joining People, Ideas & Objects can join me here and begin building the software necessary for the successful and innovative oil and gas industry.

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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Chandler on Organizational Capabilities

In a 1992 paper entitled "Organizational Capabilities and the Economic History of the Industrial Enterprise" Professor Alfred D. Chandler's summaries his work. Through this blog's review of Chandler, it is hoped that we gain insight into the role of the organization in the economic development of Western based businesses. Chandler's paper certainly provides that understanding and I highly recommend reviewing it for your own benefit. There are two other references to note here today. Both are in direct contrast to the firms that are noted in Chandler's paper, and lastly we will reference Professor William Lazonick's conclusion in "The Chandlerian Corporation and the theory of innovative enterprise".

The first reference is that Fitch has revised it's outlook for Royal Dutch Shell to negative from stable. Putting their AA+ credit rating in doubt due to Shell's medium term cash flow projections. These projections assume that Shell will be able to increase their production by 600,000 barrels by 2014 and prices will average $60.00. If Shell were able to increase their production by 600,000 barrels per day and earn only $60.00 in terms of an oil price, why would Fitch put them on notice? To me there seems to be more to the story then what Fitch is stating. Possibly they don't see the 600,000 barrels per day as "possible". This downgrade of Royal Dutch Shell strikes me as odd, after all the firm is only carrying a 15.5% net debt to capital ratio. Are the analysts seeing more in terms of difficulty in the oil and gas industry?

The second article that I want to draw attention to is from John Hagel on his blog "Edge Perspectives". His commentary reflects how the future economic conditions will have fundamental changes in the ways that industries are organized. What is clearly stated as the competitive advantages of firms in the past 100 years are no longer present in his future perspective. A future perspective that is consistent with the Draft Specification's view of the oil and gas industry.

Although these three introductions appear at first to not have any relevance to one another, they are all saying the same thing. Chandler notes the past was developed at different times and with different technologies, today the oil and gas producers are having difficulty in times of robust commodity prices and the future as Hagel notes, is always uncertain.

While understandable, these efforts to read near-term indices also present very significant risks.  We continue to be seduced by near-term news, while losing any perspective on longer-term trends. These longer terms trends tell a very different story and suggest that we may be lulled into complacency by the short-term news of recovery.
and
There is absolutely no reason to believe that the long-term performance erosion will not continue.
Those two references of Hagel's are certainly in line with the long term perspective taken at People, Ideas & Objects. We have consistently highlighted the work of Professor Carlota Perez and the accuracy of her prescient analysis of the long wave economic developments. Hagel is stating clearly that today we are experiencing these forces and now is the time to shift our focus to them.
The Power of Pull suggests that we are going through a fundamental shift in the source of economic value creation.  In the past, economic value creation depended on proprietary knowledge stocks.  The challenge for any company was to acquire some proprietary knowledge, rigorously protect it to make sure no one else had access to it, and then as efficiently as possible extract the economic value from this proprietary knowledge stock for as long as possible.  As change accelerates and uncertainty grows, though, knowledge stocks depreciate at a more rapid rate.  In this kind of environment, the key to economic value creation shifts to the ability to participate in a growing number of diverse knowledge flows to more rapidly refresh our knowledge stocks.
The Community of Independent Service Providers (CISP) is exactly what he is talking about. Participation as an independent entrepreneur that develops and implements the "knowledge stocks" of the innovative oil and gas producer is what the CISP is about. These people will also be the ones that work closely with the People, Ideas & Objects developers to instill their knowledge into the tools they will use to define and support the innovative oil and gas producer.
The good news is that there is a pragmatic migration path that can move us from where we are today to where we need to be in a world of pull.  Small moves, smartly made, can in fact set big things in motion. To pursue this path, though, we will need a sense of direction, harness different forms of leverage and deploy platforms that can accelerate the pace of change.
These small moves could be made by following this process to join the CISP. In the past week we provided a comprehensive review of Professor William Lazonicks work on Chandler. I want to close this post with a reference from Lazonick's conclusion that shows these changes are inevitable. Inevitable to everyone but the bureaucracies that are resisting these changes.
In the 2000s, it can fairly be said that the Chandlerian corporation has ceased to exist. In historical retrospect, Alfred Chandler uncovered the dynamics of a historically-specific business model that drove the development of the world’s richest economy. The essence of capitalism is, however, as Schumpeter recognized, change. The work of Chandler has provided us with a deep understanding of the foundations of US economic power in the middle decades of the last century. His work does not provide us with a roadmap for understanding the business models that have become dominant in the first decades of the 21st century. There is a need for us, who seek to build on the Chandlerian legacy, to remain committed to the integration of theory and history. My claim is that, with its focus on strategic control, organizational integration, and financial commitment, “the theory of innovative enterprise” is a potent framework for analyzing the process of change. It is a framework that, through the integration of theory and history, can enable us to “catch up with history” so that we can analyze the present as an evolving reality before the present as history passes us by. p 29
Our appeal should be based on these eight "Focused on" priorities and values of how better the oil and gas industry and its operations could be handled. They may not initially be the right way to go, but we are committed to working with the various communities to discover and ensure the right ones are. If your an enlightened producer, an oil and gas director, investor or shareholder, who would be interested in funding these software developments and communities, please follow our Funding Policies & Procedures, and our Hardware Policies & Procedures. If your a government that collects royalties from oil and gas producers, and are concerned about the accuracy of your royalty income, please review our Royalty Policies & Procedures and email me. And if your a potential user of this software, and possibly as a member of the Community of Independent Service Providers, please join us here.

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Friday, February 12, 2010

Hagel - Networked Creator

One of the posts that is due is the top 20 compelling reasons that users and producers should participate in People, Ideas & Objects software developments. Within that list is the tremendous volume of top shelf academic research. As was indicated before, the shift in economic research from analysis of the 2008 - 2009 financial crisis. Has been replaced by a focus on organizational change, technology and the dynamics of those and other variables. Absolutely stunning.

One of those that we follow closely here on the innovation blog is John Hagel. In the Preliminary Research Report he was able to define the business aspects of Web Services and we have followed closely since. His blog post today has him hitting another ball out of the park. In our desire to list the reasons that we appeal to the potential users and the Community of Independent Service Providers, this research is ground-breaking.

In "Shifting Identities - From Consumer to Networked Creator" the user can see how their work-life balance will change and become far more productive and rewarding. It has been mentioned many times in the innovation in oil and gas blog that intellectual property has to make up some element of your future service offering. Either your own proprietary IP, or access to a community of IP such as People, Ideas & Objects. Adding this idea to those of Hagel's will provide you with a road map of how things will play out.

If your an enlightened producer, an oil and gas investor or shareholder, who would be interested in funding these software developments and communities, please follow our Funding Policies & Procedures, and our Hardware Policies & Procedures. If your a government that collects royalties from oil and gas producers, and are concerned about the accuracy of your royalty income, please review our Royalty Policies & Procedures and email me. And if your a potential user of this software, and possibly as a member of the Community of Independent Service Providers, please join us here.

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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Professor Wanda Orlikowski's Technology in Management

A recent post suggested that there was a hesitancy in detailing too much about the user interface to be used in the People, Ideas & Objects application modules. Firstly, this design process that we are undertaking in the Preliminary Specification is about the oil and gas business, not about the new(er) technologies that have been developed. And this post is not so much about the technologies but how the user will interact with the modules being developed here. The interface, as Apple & Google have shown us time and again, is the critical piece in how people use their technologies. [Please stay with me for the full post as this requires some reader faith.]

Back in the dot com bubble much was made of the "Exchanges" that were being built. The market cap for these companies were in the billions and they would prosper through building the technology to facilitate exchanges of documents etc. Thankfully that era ended and we never saw these technologies get picked up. However, today the concept of exchanges is developing again. And they will fail. That is why they do not appear anywhere in the Draft Specification. What does appear are Marketplaces. Places where the people and technology live together in perfect harmony. Creative license is a treasure.

The hesitancy in posting about this is due to the fact that I see the People, Ideas & Objects user interface being exactly like the World ofWarcraft (WoW) user interface. Now that the non-believers have left we can speak to the advantages of this. If you've never seen WoW ask a teenager, actually any teenager, to look at their version of the game. It's brilliant. Note how the environmental variables, and pretty much anything can be accessed through small groupings of control panels. Each provides the user with the control needed to operate the game.



and



Just search YouTube for World of Warcraft and you'll be able to see the analogy I am trying to make here. Professor Wanda Orlikowski defines a term in her paper "Synthetic Worlds". In the Draft Specification there are at least four "Synthetic Worlds" that I want to quickly mention.

  1. Any and all Joint Operating Committees oil and gas assets.
  2. Petroleum Lease Marketplace Module
  3. Financial Marketplace Module
  4. Resource Marketplace Module

Each of these are Synthetic Worlds populated with the User defined environment. Each facility or oil and gas property is populated with a virtual representation. If a rig was drilling a new well, then the Synthetic World would emulate the actual activities on the rig. [Look to the Technical Vision of this project to understand how that happens.] Importantly, the interactions between people and their avatars, and other avatars, are supported by the design elements that can negotiate a contract, and design a transaction to have a fracing company come in and double the number of horizontal fracs based on what was discovered down hole.

The Petroleum Lease Marketplace might appear like an old "exchange" [bad word] where people are buying and selling. But in this instance it's oil and gas leases. And maybe their not buying or selling but pooling their interests with their neighbors to ensure they get approved for the gas plant they want to build. A producer may be selling off it's none core assets. A young engineer is looking for support to fund his dream of turning the Basal Quartz into the most prolific zone ever. These, all being in real time with people in the marketplace.

The Financial Marketplace module will handle the financial resources of the producers. If you don't like the billing you received from the previously mentionedfracing company, engage them in a virtual private meeting regarding resolution. Interestingly so, since were emulating real life virtually, we are also recording it, making it easy for the producer to show why thefracing costs are incorrectly billed.

The Resource Marketplace module where an oil and gas producer can find any type of service operation from the Community of Independent Service Providers, the service sector vendors like the fracing company mentioned, the employees the firms want to hire. All provided in a Synthetic World. 

Now that I have provided full and complete certainty to my detractors, is this possible? Here we have Dr. Eric Schmidt who was the president of Sun Microsystems at one time, also CEO ofNovell at one time and has been the CEO of Google for the past 10 years has to say about Synthetic Worlds.
Everything in the future online is going to look like a multi-player game,” said Schmidt to this international audience. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I would be doing right now.
In answer to those questions is it possible? Please refer back to the videos earlier. That rich of an environment has been in the game players world for the past number of years. Critically here is where Professor WandaOrlikowski pick up her research. Note that her discussion is based on the Sun Microsystems "Java" (imagine that) environment known as Project Wonderland. An "Open Source" (imagine that) development framework for business' to implement these technologies. Please see the Sun research documents here, here and here. And watch this video of Project Wonderland.



Before we get to Professor Orlikowski research I want to put one more critical aspect of the Draft Specification into play. The Military Command & Control Metaphor is a critical aspect of the Compliance & Governance Module and how things can work in the appropriate business sense. To suggest that anyone and everyone have access to a game players type of situation is ridiculous. The need to implement a key part of the organizations compliance and governance needs to be available. When we add that the JOC is representative of many producers we add an element that makes this scenario of a Synthetic World impossible. Add the layering of the Security & Access Control Module and the Military Command & Control Module in the Draft Specification, the problem is solved. The only requirement that I think we need to add is a means to visually identify the appropriate role and rank of each individual in the Synthetic World. [I'm thinking Star Trek Shirts with different colors and badges, oops there's my detractors again.] So that the representative from the fracing company can see that the avatar of the individual he is negotiating the contract with does have the authority to execute on behalf of the producer and the JOC.

One more paragraph and were at Professor Orlikowski's research. John Hagel posted an entry on how relationships and dynamics in the work place. His comments add another perspective to the discussion.

Professor Orlikowski's Abstract states;
Drawing on a specific scenario from a contemporary workplace, I review some of the dominant ways that management scholars have addressed technology over the past five decades. I will demonstrate that while materiality is an integral aspect of organizational actively, it has either been ignored by management research or investigated through an ontology of separateness that cannot account for the multiple and dynamic ways in which the social and the material areconstitutively entangled in everyday life. I will end by pointing to some possible alternative perspectives that may have the potential to help management scholars take seriously the distributed and complexsociomaterial configurations that form and perform contemporary organizations.
Commenting on the scenario that is best represented in the last YouTube video above, Orlikowski states:
A normal day at the office for a software development team? Not quite. I have omitted an important detail. The Project Wonderland rooms, offices screens, and documents are part of an online, three-dimensional,immersive environment for workplace collaboration within Sun Microsystems, known as MPK 20. Within this graphically intensive virtual workplace, users interact in real time using audio, text and images, and they share applications and content from a variety of online sources.
In answer to the many of Professor Orlikowski's questions; people use marketplaces for everything. The marketplace is the boiling pot of research into the capitalist system. A system of organization and activity that everyone subscribes to.
The use of synthetic worlds for organizational activities such as distributed collaboration raises interesting questions for scholars --  how to make sense of a study of these in management research? What are some existing perspectives that might usefully be drawn on to do so? What new or alternative perspectives might be more relevant? What are the implications of choosing certain perspectives over others in accounting for and articulating particular issues and insights?
2. Established perspectives on technology in management research

Professor Anthony Giddens Structuration Theory was used in the preliminary research report. His theory identifies that People, Organizations and Society move in lock step with one another. If there is a difference in the pace of change of these three elements, a failure occurs. As I indicated in a recent post, ProfessorOrlikowski "Structurational Model of Technology" was used in the Preliminary Research Report to determine that society and technology are linked by "the duality of technology" and the "interpretive flexibility of technology". Please see the Preliminary Research Report for further application to the energy industry. The majority of Professor Orlikowski's work has been in these areas.
Three distinctive conceptual positions on technology are clearly evident in the management literature of the past few decades. In the first perspective, which I will characterize as absent presence, technology is essentially unacknowledged by organizational researchers and thus unaccounted for in their studies. In the second perspective, technology is posited to be an exogenous force -- a powerful driver of history having determinate impacts on organizational life. The third perspective, that of emergent process, technology is positioned as a product of ongoing human interpretations and interactions, and thus as contextually and historically contingent.
The value she has created with her ideas is in this fourth perspective of technology. What she in essence says is that dealing with organizations and technologies as separates, management research has to deal with them as one. This is the area of research that the Preliminary Research Report was able to determine that to change organizations, the technology or ERP system should be designed and built to identify and support the Joint Operating Committee. It is also the area where the management of the oil and gas companies, my detractors if you will, have used these ideas against themselves. Suggesting that they would not be challenged in their positions if the technology never changed. These ideas and their implication provide the support I need to appeal to the shareholders and investors in oil and gas to take thisperversion of Professor Orlikowski's work away from the management and eliminate them.
Recently, a fourth perspective of technology -- that of entanglement in practice -- has attracted interest within management research, largely influenced by longer-standing development in sociology and science and technology studies (Barad, 2003; Latour, 2005; Suchman, 2007). As I will describe below, this alternative perspective entails a commitment to a relational ontology that undercuts the dualism that has characterized but also limited much of the prior technology research in management studies. In particular, this perspective offers the potential to radically re-conceptualize our notions of technology and reconfigure our understandings of contemporary organizational life.
I believe it is very clear that the threat to management by technology has been significant and it is human nature for them to resist. I think the Project Wonderland, People, Ideas & Objects marketplace models and the many other supporting conditions prove that the technology will eliminate management. And it is the responsibility of people and society to ensure that organizations change to ensure they do not continue to hold everything back.

5. Conclusion

Professor Orlikowski sees the aberrant way in which management have approached technology. In her conclusion she intimates that management will continue to forestall the adoption of further research.
Confronted with synthetic worlds, these researchers will in all probability focus their attention elsewhere. And this choice has consequences for the value of organizational scholarship: "to the extent that the management literature continues to overlook the ways in which organizing is critically bound up with material forms and spaces, our understanding of organizational life will remain limited at best, and misleading at worst' (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008, p. 466).

Orlikowski shows us the way's and means to implement these technologies.
They will conclude, as I do here, by suggesting that the perspective of entanglement may be particularly useful for management research going forward. As contemporary forms of technology and organizing are increasingly understood to be multiple, fluid, temporary, interconnected and dispersed (Ciborra, 1996; Stark, 1999; Child and McGrath, 2001; Law and Urry, 2004), a perspective that renounces the categorical presumption of separateness is likely to offer a more useful conceptual lens with which to think about the temporally emergentsociomaterial realities that form and perform contemporary organizations.
Multiple, fluid, temporary, interconnected and dispersed. I wonder if this type of environment would make the average oil and gas worker more productive? I wonder if the producer would be more profitable here vs. say SAP or through Oracle Fusion? This is how I see the oil and gas industry being able to raise it's productivity to the level necessary to fuel the worlds demand for energy. If you are a producer that sees this as a reasonable way in which to proceed, then please support these software developments and the Community of Independent Service Providers here. And if you're a user that sees the benefits of logging into this environment as opposed to spending the two and a half hour ritual needed to get to work. Please, sell short the commercial real estate stocks you own and join us here.

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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Academics get on board.

A trend is forming in the academic community. There are no shortage of papers that address the types of opportunities that now exist in the technological, organizational and innovation areas of academic research. This is an extremely strong trend, one that is a follow-on to the massive effort that went into determining the causes and effects of the financial crisis. As we move away from the possibility of a meltdown, we can see the resources of the academic community moving forward in terms of where business should position itself to succeed in the future.

It started for People, Ideas & Objects with Professors Baldwin and von Hipple's paper. We took a detailed and comprehensive review of the paper due to its pertinence and value to the Community of Independent Service Providers and the producers that support People, Ideas & Objects. That review will soon be joined by one from Professor Giovanni Dosi entitled "On the nature of technologies: knowledge, procedures, artifacts and production inputs". Professor Dosi's work was the key or primary research component contained in the Preliminary Research Report. His work helped to define what an innovative oil and gas producer would need, and that the Joint Operating Committee (JOC) is indeed the means to achieve that innovativeness. This new paper resonates with the work that is being done here. I will be reviewing all these papers in this blog as soon as I can get to them.

An additional paper from Professors Wanda Orlikowski of MIT permits me to write about something that I was too reserved to write about. This paper will add a layer, or dimension, to our software developments that ties together many of the questions users have. Professor Orlikowski's work was used in the Preliminary Research Report as well. Her work had defined the Technological Model of Structuration based on Professor Anthony Giddens Structuration Theory. It was through this work we were able to define the cognitive and motivational paradox' of building these software modules. Her Model of Structuration was also used to determine that software defines the organization. Therefore to change the organization requires that we first change the software. Which led me to coin the phrase "SAP is the bureaucracy".

We also have two very good papers from Professor Carlota Perez of Cambridge University. She has been able to define for People, Ideas & Objects the economic environment we find ourselves in. Basing her theories on the research of economic events over the last 300 years. This has provided us with an understanding that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are creating significant economic changes. These changes are reflected in the dot com bubble and our recent financial driven bubbles. And now that these "events" have occurred, as she predicted, we can see the context of the current ICT Revolution is ready to be exploited. Recall what Ludwig von Mises said about the industry revolution. It was the solution to the problems at that time. We find ourselves in similarly challenged times and the ICT Revolution is the solution to those problems.

All of these works from Hagel, Baldwin, von Hipple, Dosi, Orlikowski, Perez and others show the time for the oil and gas industry to undertake the types of revisions prescribed by People, Ideas & Objects is now. It is important to highlight this development in this posting. People who contribute their time and energy to the developments of People, Ideas & Objects are compensated handsomely for their contributions. It is however not enough to start these developments until we can assure the producers and users that this project will be successful. That the people behind this development are taking the steps necessary to ensure success and that the super human effort of going beyond what is expected can be undertaken by every individual who participates. The point of this post to highlight some of the areas that we can show the producers and users that this success is closer to being attained. What we have so far is as follows:

1)    There is general and widespread understanding that the oil and gas industry has entered an era where the cheap energy is gone. What remains is politically, logistically, financially and technically much more difficult. An exponentially higher level of difficulty. It has been noted by Exxon and others this will require upwards of $20 trillion additional capital over the next 20 years.

2)    Professor Oliver Williamson's Nobel Prize in Economics being awarded for Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). This was a surprise event in that this relatively obscure area of the science. TCE has now been recognized for its importance on a go forward basis. Most importantly the Draft Specification incorporates the state of the art understanding of Transaction Cost Economics.

3)    Our competition, Oracle and SAP have used and abused the oil and gas industry for too long. Neither have products that are satisfactory for the upstream oil and gas industry. Importantly Oracle has taken themselves out of the game by spending $39 in research and acquisition costs to bring Oracle Fusion to the world. This level of capital expenditure will price Oracle out of most of the markets they operate in. In addition, the oil and gas industry will need to spend at least as much in customized development costs as People, Ideas & Objects blank slate approach would.

4)    The oil and gas producers are being called to fund our budget for 2010. At $10 million this is the amount of money that I think we can physically spend. It is being applied to the Preliminary Specification based on the Draft Specification and the agile development methodology. This is not to suggest that the entire design will be complete with this budget. It would be fool hardy to suggest that this project will be undertaken on the basis of $10 million in design costs. I hope that we will be able to develop the first iteration of the Draft, Preliminary, Detailed and Final Specification's within the scope of a $100 million commitment. People, Ideas & Objects Users, Developers, Account Managers and Project Managers all need to see the oil and gas industry commit these resources for this design. Success demands this.

5)    The academic community, through independent actions of the noted leadership in their disciplines, highlight this area as a key area of value accretion to all businesses. People need to be seeing the academic community rallying around these concepts. Providing help for our users and producers to foresee how success can be attained. I would also suggest that the academic community is raising a serious warning to those producers who do not heed this call. It has been convenient for the bureaucrats to belittle People, Ideas & Objects, they may now be doing so at their own expense.

Here are the five compelling reasons that users and producers should get behind in this project. What is possible and attainable in People, Ideas & Objects has never been done before. For this reason the up-front analysis and work to ensure this project is successful is necessary. We are very close to that point, and the people want to move-on from just thinking and reading about it. If you are a producer that wants to support this project, please follow our Funding Policies & Procedures. If you are user that would like to join us, please follow this procedure.

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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

John Hagel's Institutional Innovation

This blog follows the works of John Hagel very closely. His work has provided much insight and direction from the point of view of how Information Technology affects business. In the May 2004 Preliminary Research Report John Hagel and John Seely Brown were highlighted to provide a definition of the developing "web services". Today Hagel's research fall's mostly under the category of innovation and his most recent post on "Edge Perspectives with John Hagel" raises the term "Institutional Innovation" of which I had not heard of before, and accurately reflects the type of work that is being done on Innovation in oil and gas.

Institutional Innovation is such a logical name for the type of innovation that we are seeking to develop. Hagel wrote in October 2007 about his concept and obviously I missed it. Talking about the types of innovation that were developing in the far east, Institutional Innovation is different then product or organizational innovation that are generally focused on one company. The definition that Hagel provides is;

In these very diverse industries, we saw entrepreneurs re-thinking institutional arrangements across very large numbers of enterprises, offering all participants an opportunity to learn faster and innovate more effectively by working together. While Western companies were lured into various forms of financial leverage, these entrepreneurs were developing sophisticated approaches to capability leverage in scalable business networks that could generate not just one product innovation, but an accelerating stream of product and service innovations.
Use of the Joint Operating Committee (JOC) by definition is not just one company. (Exceptions to every rule, if a firm were the only producer in the JOC they would operate the assets in the same manner as if they had partners.) The JOC is an organizational construct that the oil and gas industry established in the very beginning to deal with the risks involved in the business, and / or, the merging of interests due to the aerial extent of the assets owned. Clearly to reduce your risk you brought on partners, and when assets grew progressively larger, building gas plants and facilities every mile was impractical.

The JOC is a form of organization that is recognized in every producer. Many "fields" may have up to 100 or more partners, each with disparate assets and percentages, each pursuing their own corporate strategy and being profitable in a multitude of ways. No two may be alike. The JOC has been the culture of the industry from the beginning, it is the legal and financial framework and all producers have operational decision making and communications that recognize the management of the asset. It is these five frameworks that are being enabled in People, Ideas & Objects and it is these five frameworks that are necessary for the producer to be able to decide and implement their best strategies. The hierarchy, in oil and gas, has relegated itself to the compliance and governance of the firm. These frameworks manage the royalty obligations, the tax obligations and the security obligations. It is the royalty, tax and security frameworks that Oracle and SAP have handled to date, ask them about a JOC and they look at you with a puzzled look and wonder why you don't want to get closer to your customers. ;)

 

Our purpose at People, Ideas & Objects is to move the tax, royalty and security frameworks over to the JOC in order align them with the cultural, financial, legal, communication and operational decision making frameworks. This re-alignment does at least two really big things.

  • First it enables accountability. When compliance and governance are separated from operational decision making no one is able to be held accountable. Who made the decisions that earned the 100% increase in profits? Why does this company seem to make the same mistakes over and over? These types of questions will be easily answered when the individuals who are responsible for the wins will be recognized, and those that are going through the motions will also be identified.
  • Secondly "Institutional Innovation" is enabled and the producer can iterate on the science and innovations in the business of oil and gas. Now oil and gas only involves chemistry, physics and biology at its core, and this is why Matthew Simmons says it is the second most complex industry to the space industry. Innovation on these sciences is what needs to take place for the industry to move quicker and provide the market with oil and gas. With the state of globalization, does anyone believe we are producing enough for the future? I am sure the political and logistical difficulties will only accelerate as well. Higher commodity prices are rewarding the producers that innovate the most. I can definitely see why a bureaucracy could be failing in these tasks.

Hagle notes why Institutional Innovation would be a good term to define People, Ideas & Objects.
Institutional innovation is different - it defines new ways of working together, ways that can scale much more effectively across large numbers of very diverse enterprises. It provides ways to flexibly reconfigure capability while at the same time building long-term trust based relationships that help participants to learn faster.
Our review of Professor Baldwin and von Hipples paper "Modelling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaboration Innovation" shows People, Ideas & Objects form of Open Collaborative Innovation provides real value for the User communities and the producers who subscribe to these developments. Hagel is on the same page with his "Institutional Innovations" and his recently published concept of the "Shift Index".
Institutional innovation has enormous power to disrupt and drive major new forms of economic value creation and capture. Much of its power stems from its ability to blindside incumbents who hold onto traditional mindsets. As I argued in the Shift Index, new digital infrastructures and related public policy shifts are increasingly rendering obsolete the assumptions that Western executives hold about what is required to create and capture economic value.

Until and unless Western executives begin to aggressively challenge these assumptions and awaken to the potential of institutional innovation, they will remain vulnerable to attack. They must begin to recognize that the most promising forms of innovation emerging in developing economies are not at the level of individual products or services but rather at a much deeper level – novel approaches to scalable peer learning shaped by institutional innovation.
Those last two paragraphs are golden. The bureaucracy has certainly fought long and hard to ignore People, Ideas & Objects. We sit at very lofty heights in our standard of living and economy. These bureaucracies are putting in jeopardy these advanced lifestyles we have become accustomed to. Falling from here could be painful. I am concerned that the bureaucracy will never support these development and have instead directed our appeal to the investors and shareholders, the real oil and gas men and women, to fund these developments as an alternative form of organization. If you are a producer that would like to support these developments please follow our funding policies and procedures and if you are someone with oil and gas experience that knows we can do better, please join me here

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Sunday, November 29, 2009

John Hagel on Pursuing Passion

Passion is something that is being discussed more and more in the business community these days. It's something that I feel fortunate to have discovered and have been able to focus my energies on this software development project. There is a comfort and peace afforded to those who find their passions, it is in many ways the reward for taking the risks and enduring the sacrifice. In terms of the discussion, passion is a difficult topic to define and describe what it is, and why it affects people in the way that it does. John Hagel has taken the time to define it from the point of view of a business necessity. I would highly recommend reading his document, I think he does the best job of it yet.

Hagel makes the point that with the economic conditions we find in the twenty first century, passion will be a necessity. As he states.
If we have not found a way to make our passion our profession or to discover passion in our profession, we will very quickly succumb to the growing economic and competitive pressures that are shaping our global business landscape.  The pressures will inexorably mount. Without passion, we will increasingly experience stress, our energy will be steadily drained and we will ultimately burn out under the mounting pressure. At best, we will be marginalized as we find ways to achieve “balance” and safety valves for the mounting pressure at work.
The definition of passion is broken into two distinct types. Hagel says there are "true believers" and "explorers." The true believer is described as "Their passion is enduring and it does focus, but it can also blind – leading the entrepreneur to reject critical input that does not match their preconceived views." Not a productive environment in my opinion. Collaboration is a major means of how ideas are developed today. To ignore the ideas of those that are involved is somewhat disrespectful. I'd like to think that this project would be defined as an "explorer" which Hagel describes as.
These are people who see a domain, but not the path. The fact that the paths are not clearly defined is what excites them and motivates them to move into the domain. It also makes them alert to a variety of inputs that can help them to better understand the domain and discover more promising paths through the unexplored terrain. They are constantly balancing the need to move forward with the need to be present in the moment and reflect on the experiences and inputs they are encountering.
I have prepared the supporting research that proves the Joint Operating Committee provides the innovative and organizational performance that the oil and gas producer must have. From this research I have been able to sketch out a vision of how a system based on the JOC would operate. The Draft Specification is the beginning of the involvement of the Community of Independent Service Providers. This is where the passions of many people will take the Draft Specification and build the software applications they will need in their day to day work in the oil and gas industry. Hagel notes;
Passion is also about pursuit. It is not passive. People with passion are driven to pursue and create. They may read books and observe others, but they are not content being bystanders. They feel an overwhelming urge to engage, to experience for themselves and to test their own capabilities. Passion compels us to act.
The heading of this blog calls to those with passion to act.
A global community of professionals dedicated to optimizing the performance and profitability of innovative oil and gas producers. We are focused on developing IT systems based on the Joint Operating Committee. The legal, financial, operational decision making, cultural and communication frameworks of all producers.
A community of people open to new ideas, who know that energy is the life blood of our global economy. People of action who demand more from IT, please join us.
I hope that I have designed a path for others with passion to follow. The comprehensive nature of John Hagel's article is best read in it's entirety, and please review his passion manifesto. The one comment that I would leave you with, if you are in oil and gas, is People, Ideas & Objects is the place where you can find your passion and act to make a difference in the industry. Please join me here.

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Tuesday, September 08, 2009

A call to action.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown are two authors who's work I reviewed in the Preliminary Research Report. They have consistently shown the direction that business should be moving towards. Their message has been somewhat controversial due to the focus on technologies impact. With the luxury of time we can see they are in tune with the needs of business and have added value to those that listen.

Finding those that will listen may be the difficult part. I see their message being broadcast over the heads of management to the people who are in the know, that things are not working quite right anymore. In a blog post, John Hagel has itemized a call to action for those people to deal with the situation they are in. I think they are on message and add some value to those that will listen.

It's important to remember that this situation is unique in terms of it's point in history. We have reviewed Professor Carlota Perez work that says the economy today is the result of a long term trend that has shown a consistency in each of the five previous events over the past 300 years. The old is being replaced by the new. The new is being facilitated by the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which enable new ways of organizing.

Professor Perez has documented the changes that have happened in the prior 300 years. In addition to the industrial revolution we saw affordable and abundant steel impacting the strength and capacity of ships. How the canal system in Europe provided an increase in trade. All disrupting technologies that brought prosperity to the world.

This blog post of Hagel & Brown intimates the future is ready, waiting and looking for the people who are needed to take it too the next level. I recommend you review this post closely, and if your involved in the oil and gas industry, please join us here.

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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Hagel & Brown, Shift Index.

Tonight I am in possession of an interesting paper that I'll evaluate in a future post. I felt it best that I point out this new paper so that others could get an early view of it as well. John Seely Brown and John Hagel are two authors that I covered in the Preliminary Research Report. There work is in the area of Web Services and its impact on business. 
The topic of the paper is the development of an index called the "Shift Index". I'll leave you with a quotation from Professor Scott Page who wrote the Forward.  
The Shift Index can be thought of as a new economy analog of the Composite Index of Leading Indicators, an old economy index that considers hours worked, unemployment applications, orders for capital goods, new building permits and the like. The Composite Index has its place, but its indicators don’t respond until months if not years into a shift. Walk through an innovation sequence: Bandwidth increases creating space for new social media. Entrepreneurs formulate ideas. Venture capitalists finance projects. Proposals prove viable. Finally, mezzanine funding spurs a ramp up in employment. Only then, in this last stage, does the Composite Index identify the shift. Using the Composite Index to track shifts is like driving a car by staring into the rear-view mirror. In contrast, the Shift Index lets us look out the front windshield. 
As important as the index may prove for strategic applications, it may have more impact in how it changes our conception of the economy. Interpreted through the lens of neoclassical economics, the Shift Index captures shifts in fundamentals, particularly on the cost side where technological changes allow firms to do more with less. But, the Shift Index, by name alone, calls into question the neoclassical mindset that focuses on re-equilibration.
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Sunday, February 25, 2007

Innovation and Talent in the Indian IT industry.

John Hagel III has written many good articles and topics on the effects of IT on organizations. Through his writtings he has also introduced us to many other good authors like Professor Richard Langlois'. Today Hagel has posted a great blog entry that accurately captures some of the technical risk that I anticipate we will experience here in the oil and gas industry. The conclusion he comes to at an Indian IT conference reinforces the division of labor theories of Adam Smith. I had noted the number of individuals that were involved in drilling a well, from the Chairman of the Joint Operating Committee to the billing clerk at the water trucking company would expand in their numbers to facilitate faster and more abundant and effective economic output. Hagel states the same thing for business in general and states that the Indian development community will need to address this problem. His conclusion is stated here;

These efforts in turn would expose the Indian IT service companies to the challenges of coordinating activities across large networks of partners given existing IT architectures. By gaining firsthand experience in the limitations of these architectures, Indian IT service companies would be well-positioned to drive another wave of innovation in IT architectures. In my talk on Web 2.0 at NASSCOM, I suggested that Indian IT service companies are natural candidates to define and deploy fundamentally new IT architectures that work from the “outside-in”.
In contrast to traditional IT architectures that emerged in the center of the firm and imperfectly extend their reach beyond the boundaries of individual enterprises, we are in desperate need of IT architectures that start with the assumption that the task is to coordinate activities across hundreds, if not thousands of firms. By starting with this perspective, we would need to re-think the nature of transactions and define roles and governance processes accordingly. In fact, we would likely move from today’s transactional architectures to much more helpful relational architectures designed to support enduring and deepening relationships across individuals and institutions.
I think in order to achieve this there needs to be a Military Styled Command and Control structure to replace the hierarchy. One that provides the flexibility of many firms working together to achieve common objectives. Flexibility to have staff of all the associated firms with the knowledge of who conducts what and at what level of authority. This intermixing can then, and only then achieve the types of results that we are all seeking here.

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Thursday, February 08, 2007

John Seeley Brown on MIT Video

John Seeley Brown talking about "Re-learning Learning - Applying the Long Tail to Learning" on MIT Video. The video is on the longish side at 1:43 minutes, however, it is time well spent. Along with John Hagel III, John Seely Brown was instrumental in defining the web services paradigm for business. I wrote about their thinking at the time on the subject.

Speaking in the context of change, Brown suggests the "speed of acceleration" of change means that little or no skills will be able to sustain their value over a moderate to long period of time. A new approach to learning requires people to adopt the attitude that an inventory be conducted to determine where new skills are needed, each year. In support of new skills Brown also suggests that we find successful learning models. Differentiating between "learning about" and "learning to be" with the latter being the more difficult of the two.

Dr. Brown notes that a good example of "learning to be" is the open source software development model. I have to agree with his comment as it is a strong model of organizational learning. Brown calls it a "distributed cognitive apprenticeship platform". The most popular culture in the digital generation has come back to a "building, tinkering and participatory culture". This last comment in line with Sun Microsystems and its CEO talking about the "Participation Age". In the future I will discuss in-depth the methods that software is developed under these open source models. It is what we will be using on this development and it is rather complex and interesting development model in terms of its methods and processes.

Brown comments that this "learning to be" is usually more amateur then professional with the point that passion is what drives the people in the open source model to build better systems. This passion leading to the rise of the Amateur Class. For almost no amount of money users can participate at high levels in science and business ideas. Professionals and amateurs are working together today. The tools by themselves are not sufficient. What is needed is the passion of the users to make things happen.

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Thursday, December 14, 2006

The attention economy.

John Hagel III has written a fascinating series of articles on what is being called the "Attention Economy". His comments are located here, here and here. I highly recommend my readers to view these articles thoroughly. Hagel picks up from the quotation of Professor Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureates quote,

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of the information sources that might consume it."
I think that Hagel is picking up where Simon's comment left off and introduces some current research that Michael Goldhaber is doing in this area. Goldhaber's best articles are here, here and here. Attention is not a commodity, in that it is fixed and Hagel discusses both the scope of your own attention and the attention that ideas can garner and sustain. I wanted to comment on the important impact of this thinking and relate the significance of what I think is being said.

For myself I find the demand to keep enhancing my information systems requires daily diligence of what, where and who I spend my attention on. If I am not vigilant I become satisfied with the status quo and that is a dangerous attitude to have these days. There is enough justification and supporting information to ignore and belittle the overall and global changes that are occurring today. Many prefer to refer to their BlackBerry's and consume their lives in the day to day grind of mindless activity. We need to focus our attention on what and where we are going with these technologies. If we loose sight of the road that we are travelling on we could be lost for a sizable amount of time.

An important point of view to maintain is the technology works for me to meet my needs, I do not respond in any way to the demands of the technology. Needless to say I have no BlackBerry and I ensure that at least 80% of my synchronous time is spent in person, with limited amount of time being spent on phone calls. I communicate asynchronously, or at my time, on my schedule and my agenda. Many things fall off the table as a result, and I am best able to prioritize what is necessary.

The other aspect that is important is the speed at which things are viewed. I like to spend as much time as I can per day on reviewing and writing what I am researching about. With three blogs and two major topics it is something that requires a focus that is difficult to sustain. So there are two modes, quick and summary where little is available for immediate recall, yet some of the more important aspects are recalled many days later, or as required. Here is where Google is an invaluable tool in that I am then able to re-find that reference almost immediately. And then there is the reading and reviewing at the pace that is necessary to take notes and assimilate the complex topics that demand my time and efforts. These can take a goodly amount of time, but that time is afforded to me as I know nothing otherwise will be lost.

I frequently look at it from the point of view that Google has provided me with at least 7,000 of the smartest people in the world, working to make my information better. Google also provides me with the supercomputing power necessary to index and make available that information that is the most important to me. Such power in the hands of every user will make the majority of the major issues in the world more solvable. The most surprising element of this tool is that Google is making a billion dollars a quarter doing this. The attention economy operates on a different premise.

So what is it that I am trying to do here. In a nutshell I am trying to create and sustain the necessary attention of my readers to ensure that their time is most effectively spent on reading, sharing and conversing through this blog. There ability to be fully informed through a high quality filter is what I am preparing and providing to them in this blog format. The recent changes that I have made to this blog are designed to increase the value and usability. And include;
  • Use of Labels, as well as Technorati tags, providing my readers with a variety of ways to aggregate items that I and others write about.
  • I installed three custom search engines;
    • Oil and gas custom search reviews the highest quality journals and sites that cover the global oil and gas business. As I find more high quality documents and sites I will add them to that search engine.
    • Innovation search engine reviews the quality documents and sites that I discover and use in my research regarding innovation.
    • Academic search engine that provides the best academic sites available. Oxford, Harvard, MIT, London School of Economics, University of Chicago, Berkely, Princeton, Yale and Stanford to name just a few. Other sites like DSpace and most of the universities that provide their course offerings and videos online.
  • I have installed not only the del.ico.us articles that I read and find of value, but now have included the tag cloud that these articles and tagging provides. Readers are encouraged to fully explore the referenced articles and tags, they are there for your reading enjoyment and to act as a filter to get to the quality stuff first. Please don't hesitate to join my del.ico.us network while visiting.
  • I have also provided 50 of the most recent blog posts and readings that I discover through my RSS reader, Google Reader. These url's can be seen by going to the website where these ideas are hosted. These provide my readers with the best of the best.
  • And finally a financial summary that caters to the oil and gas market activity. And a summary of the Sun Microsystem Aquarium which is where the J2EE server that we will be using is summarized.
If I am able to provide quality reading material and idea generation for my viewing public, focused on innovation in the oil and gas industry globally. With a strong focus of my writing regarding the revolutionary use of the joint operating committee, I think that I am spending my time as effectively as I can. I believe that this enables my readers to focus their attention a little clearer on the issues and opportunities we all face in the oil and gas industry.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. As I have mentioned here before, there is no better job in the world from my point of view. I will be writing more on the topic of the attention economy and work hard to focus my readers attention as finely as I can.

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Some books I like.

104 Titles of some of the best books that I found.

The Strategy of Conflict
Thomas C. Schelling

Classical and nonclassical logics : an introduction to the mathematics of propositions
Schechter, Eric, 1950-

Winning at collaboration commerce : the next competitive advantage
Collins, Heidi.; Gordon, Cindy.; Terra, Jose Claudio Cyrineu.
August 23, 2005

Computational Economics
David A. Kendrick, P. Ruben Mercado, Hans M. Amman
December 15, 2005

The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration
Anthony Giddens
January 11, 1986

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck
June 15, 2002

Extreme Competition: Innovation And the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
Peter Fingar
January 31, 2006

The fast forward MBA in project management
Verzuh, Eric.

Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Levitt, Steven D.; Dubner, Stephen J.

The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life
Thomas W. Malone
April 2, 2004

Genome
Matt Ridley
October 3, 2000

Happy Lives and the Highest Good : An Essay on Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics"
Gabriel Richardson Lear
January 5, 2004

Human accomplishment : the pursuit of excellence in the arts and sciences, 800 BC to 1950
Murray, Charles A.

Ideas Have Consequences
Richard M. Weaver
September 15, 1984

Income Distribution in Macroeconomic Models
Giuseppe Bertola, Reto Foellmi, Josef Zweimuller
December 1, 2005

Innovation, Organization and Economic Dynamics: Selected Essays
Giovanni Dosi
September 23, 2001

It's About Time : Understanding Einstein's Relativity
N. David Mermin
November 1, 2005

The Java programming language
Arnold, Ken, 1958-; Gosling, James.; Holmes, David (David Colin)

Java: An Eventful Approach
Kim Bruce, Andrea Danyluk, Thomas Murtagh
July 29, 2005

Leading with questions : how leaders find the right solutions by knowing what to ask
Marquardt, Michael J.

Learning the bash Shell
Newham, Cameron.; Rosenblatt, Bill.

Lecture Notes in Microeconomic Theory : The Economic Agent
Ariel Rubinstein
December 16, 2005

Max Plus at work : modeling and analysis of synchronized systems : a course on Max-Plus algebra and its applications
Heidergott, Bernd.; Olsder, Geert Jan.; Woude, J. W. van der.

On Adam Smith's Wealth of nations : a philosophical companion
Fleischacker, Samuel.

The only sustainable edge : why business strategy depends on productive friction and dynamic specialization
Hagel, John.; Brown, John Seely.

Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline
Bernard Williams, A. W. Moore
January 2, 2006

Politics and Vision : Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought
Sheldon S. Wolin
May 3, 2004

The Politics of Good Intentions : History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order
David Runciman
May 5, 2006

Producing security : multinational corporations, globalization, and the changing calculus of conflict
Brooks, Stephen G., 1971-

Radical evolution : the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies--and what it means to be human
Garreau, Joel.

The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology
Ray Kurzweil
September 22, 2005

The State of Democratic Theory
Ian Shapiro
August 18, 2003

The Strategy of Conflict
Thomas C. Schelling
June 26, 2003

The Success of Open Source
Steve Weber

Swarm creativity : competitive advantage through collaborative innovation networks
Gloor, Peter A. (Peter Andreas), 1961-

The Theory of Corporate Finance
Jean Tirole
December 15, 2005

Understanding institutional diversity
Ostrom, Elinor.

The West's last chance : will we win the clash of civilizations?
Blankley, Tony.

Wicked cool Java : code bits, open-source libraries, and project ideas
Eubanks, Brian D.

Winning at collaboration commerce : the next competitive advantage
Collins, Heidi.; Gordon, Cindy.; Terra, Jos©♭ Cl©Łudio Cyrineu.

Winning the Knowledge Transfer Race
Michael J. English, William H. Baker
October 25, 2005

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Thomas L. Friedman
April 5, 2005

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
Brian Hayes
September 26, 2005

It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do: How Following Through at Every Level Can Make or Break Your Company
Laurence Houghton, Laurence Haughton
December 28, 2004

Knowledge Accumulation and Industry Evolution : The Case of Pharma-Biotech
Mariana Mazzucato, Giovanni Dosi
March 9, 2006

The Nature and Dynamics of Organizational Capabilities
Giovanni Dosi, Richard R. Nelson, Sidney G. Winter
January 15, 2001

Technology, Organization, and Competitiveness : Perspectives on Industrial and Corporate Change
Giovanni Dosi, David J. Teece, Josef Chytry
May 21, 1998

Technology and Enterprise in Historical Perspective
Giovanni Dosi, Renato Giannetti, Pier Angelo Toninelli
August 1, 1992

The Economics of Technical Change and International Trade
Giovanni Dosi, Keith Pavitt, Luc Soete
March 23, 1991

Technical Change and Economic Theory (Ifias Research Series, Number 6)
Giovanni Dosi
October 23, 1990

Technical Change and Industrial Transformation
Giovanni Dosi
August 23, 1984

Technical change and survival: Europe's semiconductor industry (Industrial adjustment and policy)
Giovanni Dosi
February 23, 1981

Sisomo: The Future on Screen
Kevin Roberts
November 15, 2005

An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
Glenn Reynolds
March 7, 2006

The Prepared Mind of a Leader : Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems
Bill Welter, Jean Egmon
October 24, 2005

License to Harass : Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech (The Cultural Lives of Law)
Laura Beth Nielsen
August 30, 2004

Plato's Fable : On the Mortal Condition in Shadowy Times (New Forum Books)
Joshua Mitchell
March 3, 2006

China the Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know about the Emerging Superpower
Institute for International Economics, Center for Strategic & International Stu
April 10, 2006

A Machine to Make a Future : Biotech Chronicles
Paul Rabinow, Talia Dan-Cohen
April 7, 2006

Dynamic Models in Biology
Stephen P. Ellner, John Guckenheimer
March 31, 2006

Information Science
David G. Luenberger
February 15, 2006

Information Revolution : Using the Information Evolution Model to Grow Your Business
Jim Davis, Gloria E. Miller, Allan Russell
January 9, 2006

Managing in the Next Society
Peter F. Drucker
July 24, 2002

The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Chris Anderson
July 11, 2006

A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram
May 14, 2002

The Second Cycle: Winning the War Against Bureaucracy
Lars Kolind
April 24, 2006

Competing on the Edge : Strategy as Structured Chaos
Shona L. Brown, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
April 15, 1998

The Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine... And What Smart Companies Are Doing About It
Cynthia Barton Rabe
June 30, 2006

A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Daniel H. Pink
March 24, 2005

Schumpeter on the Economics of Innovation And the Development of Capitalism
Arnold Heertje, Jan Middendorp
March 24, 2006

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
Brian Hayes
September 18, 2006

Choice and Consequence
Thomas C. Schelling
April 4, 2006

Micromotives and Macrobehavior (Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis)
Thomas C. Schelling
October 23, 1978

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
Carlota Perez
April 23, 2003

Innovation, Organization and Economic Dynamics: Selected Essays
Giovanni Dosi
September 23, 2001

Evolutionary Economics and Creative Destruction (Graz Schumpeter Lectures, 1)
J. Metcalfe
January 28, 1998

Knowledge, Institutions and Evolution in Economics (The Graz Schumpeter Lectures)
Brian Loasby
September 23, 2002

Schumpeter and the Endogeneity of Technology : Some American Perspectives
N. Rosenberg
June 23, 2000

Joseph Alois Schumpeter
Wolfgang F. Stolper
August 8, 1994

Democracy, Education, and Equality: Graz-Schumpeter Lectures (Econometric Society Monographs)
John E. Roemer
January 9, 2006

Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries
David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu, Richard Schmalensee
October 1, 2006

Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
Matthew R. Simmons
June 10, 2005

iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith
September 25, 2006

Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win
William C. Taylor, Polly G. LaBarre
October 2, 2006

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
Mark Steyn
September 16, 2006

Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century
David P. Billington, David P. Billington Jr.
October 2, 2006

Painting outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art
David W. Galenson
January 18, 2002

Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity
David W. Galenson
December 27, 2005

Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition
Milton Friedman
November 15, 2002

The Road to Serfdom Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman
October 15, 1994

The Constitution of Liberty
F. A. Hayek
October 15, 1978

Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order
F. A. Hayek
February 15, 1978

Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice
F. A. Hayek
October 15, 1978

Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People
F. A. Hayek
March 15, 1981

Individualism and Economic Order
F. A. Hayek
June 1, 1996

Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition
Milton Friedman
November 15, 2002

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman
November 18, 1990

A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram
May 14, 2002

The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind
Marvin Minsky
November 7, 2006

Organizations,
James G. March
June 5, 1958

Lectures on Economic Growth
Robert E., Jr. Lucas
February 15, 2002

The Attention Economy : Understanding the New Currency of Business
Thomas H. Davenport, John C. Beck
June 6, 2001

Change or Die: How to Transform Your Organization from the Inside Out
M. David Dealy, Andrew R. Thomas
November 30, 2005

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