The measure will shape the e-commerce space, certainly affecting Ebay, Amazon, Etsy and others.  The bill still needs to pass the GOP-controlled House of Representatives and receive the signature of President Obama, a supporter, to become law. The legislation would require Web-based retailers with sales of at least $1M to collect sales taxes for the states where they ship goods and merchandise.

E-commerce accounted for $225B in revenues in 2012, according to the US Department of Commerce. To put this in practical terms using my state… California would experience between 15-20% of that volume, at 9.25% tax rate, so … well, it’s easy to do that math and know why this is a big deal. Amazon, which until recently was dead-set against a national online sales tax, now embraces it as it looks to expand its physical operations across the USA. eBay, Amazon’s rival, argues the tax would hinder its sellers who do more than $1 million in out-of-state sales annually. In a recent letter to eBay sellers, Chief Executive John Donahoe pushed the suggestion that the law should exempt any firms that have fewer than 50 employees or make less than $10 million annually on out-of-state sales. With no national way to establish the tax base, calculating taxes could become it’s own nightmare of a business problem (and I could imagine both Amazon and Intuit offerings to address the need).  As you might imagine, national and regional chains are tired of being showrooms for shoppers (hello Best Buy!) so they’ll be lobbying hard to pass this legislation and thus change the market dynamic. They are sick of having customers shop in their stores and then search on their smartphones for lower prices to buy it online. (That said, I think the regional chains are mostly deluding themselves to think this is the core issue of their problems.) According to a recent University of Tennessee study, states missed out on over $11 billion in uncollected taxes in 2012 from online purchases.

There are many times when being small, and Gazelle-like is an edge in the Social Era. But this legislative issue is one that benefits the Gorillas’ of the world. It means that small independent players *need* the efficiency and capabilities of a big platform like Amazon or Ebay to be able to do their business, ideally handling this tax payment issue on their behalf. That makes me think that this tax issue changes the relationship from an interdependence to a reliance. Power will jump to the platform players like Amazon.

And that sound you are hearing is the tide changing. Ecommerce used to be the cheapest way to buy, but no longer will be.  One to watch.

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Innovation is a fight; Why Apple is eventually doomed.
Oysters create pearls not because of the absence of bad stuff, but by the friction created by the foreign object. Pearls are the result of this biological process — the oyster’s way of protecting itself from foreign substances. I’m absolutely convinced that friction is necessary for innovation; without friction, the organization has nothing to respond to… here is RandsinRepose’s take:

“As someone who spends much of his time figuring out how to get teams to work together, the premium I’m placing on volatility might seem odd. I believe Apple benefits greatly from having a large, stable operational team that consistently and steadily gets shit done,  but I also believe that in order to maintain its edge Apple needs a group of disruptors.”

More here: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/11/11/innovation_is_a_fight.html

Learning to Love Volatility
Nassim Taleb, writer of the Black Swan thesis has a new book out and the WSJ did a preview of it. The thesis is that inn a world that constantly throws big, unexpected events our way, we must learn to benefit from disorder. And that the things we think will help us survive, will not. My favorite part was Rule 3: Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.

“Experts in business and government are always talking about economies of scale. They say that increasing the size of projects and institutions brings costs savings. But the “efficient,” when too large, isn’t so efficient. Size produces visible benefits but also hidden risks; it increases exposure to the probability of large losses. Projects of $100 million seem rational, but they tend to have much higher percentage overruns than projects of, say, $10 million. Great size in itself, when it exceeds a certain threshold, produces fragility and can eradicate all the gains from economies of scale. To see how large things can be fragile, consider the difference between an elephant and a mouse: The former breaks a leg at the slightest fall, while the latter is unharmed by a drop several multiples of its height. This explains why we have so many more mice than elephants.”

More here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324735104578120953311383448.html
The book: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Walmart Internal Compensation Reveals Systematic Limit on Advancement
When Sam Walmart started the company, he wanted to bring efficiency to commerce so that people who didn’t have the ability to feed their families or clothe their children could do so. Today, as the 2nd largest employer in the US (2nd only to the DOD), they are in a very different position. They are now, the world’s most successful retailer in history. I have long thought about their commitment to improve other people’s lives as noble, but that they appear to be missing an opportunity now that they are so successful. Today, as an industry titan they could do so much to improve the living conditions of people if they had health care and allowed people to earn a living wage. Sometimes organizations “how” get in the way of their “why”. Walmart’s original “why” was to serve its communities through improved economic conditions. At the time, their “how” was to do it through efficiency of the delivery. But today, I wonder if Walmart’s “how” is getting in the way of their original purpose of why they started this business: to help people lead better lives.

“The company website declares that “a job at Walmart opens the door to a better life” and “the chance to grow and build a career.” But interviews with 31 hourly workers and one former store manager reveal lives beset by paychecks too small to handle the bills, difficult to manage part-time schedules with hours subject to constant change, and little reason to hope for career advancement. Citing fear of losing their jobs, most spoke on the condition of anonymity.”

More here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/walmarts-internal-compensation-plan_n_2145086.html

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Solving the Personal Innovators’ Dilemma.
This essay is chock-full-of-insight. Breaks down what learning and innovating actually looks like vs. what we mythologize it as. There is a gap between deciding to pursue something new, and having mastery. For people who want to “already know”, this limits growth.

As we look to develop competence within a new domain of expertise, moving up a personal learning curve, initially progress is slow. But through deliberate practice, we gain traction, entering into a virtuous cycle that propels us into a sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence. Then, as we approach mastery, the vicious cycle commences: the more habitual what we are doing becomes, the less we enjoy the “feel good” effects of learning: these two cycles constitute the S-curve.

More here: http://blogs.hbr.org/johnson/2012/09/throw-your-life-a-curve.html

Being Real
We sometimes forget the impact we can have by just being our raw and very real selves in front of each other. The world doesn’t need to see more of our perfect selves, it needs to see our real selves.

But this is what moved me: We think we move through the world unseen. But sometimes (just inches away even) is someone who can hold the hard stuff with you. Our vulnerability creates a space for connection. A tender place where others are allowed to step in and offer what they naturally want to give — their comfort, their kindness, their presence.

More here:  http://www.superherojournal.com/2012/08/10/we-think-we-move-through-the-world-unseen/

Saying No.
I’m sure many of you have the same problem that I do; figuring out how to say no to all those requests that well meaning people ask of you. Here’s the list of the century of how to say no. I’m torn between which one rocks more. 33 and 38 are vying to be my favorite but #9 is actually closest to my reality. Use it well.

More here:  http://justinemusk.com/2012/08/26/76-easy-ways-to-say-no/

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Well, not quite off.  More like away.  I went to Scotland, and gave a talk at TEDGlobal on the topic of openness. I also finished a new book (my 2nd title) on the #SocialEra that Harvard Press releases next week. Yet, I also managed to sneak in a few weeks of fun with the family. Hope you managed to enjoy the season. Today, as I write this, there is thunder and rain here in Northern California. Clearly a sign, it’s time to get back to work.

Before I catch you up on new stuff, let me share with you the talk from the TED experience. (I’ll have to tell you what it’s like to do a TEDtalk at some point… but I’ll save that for another post… )

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There are two ways of holding an idea. One is with a closed fist, and one is with an open palm.

When you hold an idea like this — in a closed fist –  you control it. It is yours. And no one else can access it. Ideas held tightly– as if in a fist – can’t be seen. Sure, if you try really hard, you might be able to see the little bits between the cracks. But they’re hard to see, or share, or steal.

But an idea held in an open hand can evolve. It’s given space to grow bigger. Ideas are actually organic, living things. If they have room to expand, they can quite possibly spread, and be picked up by others and grow into something much, much bigger than what you imagined.

Openness – this – changes power. Openness is a stance – to share with, to collaborate, to distribute power to many.

Some would argue – myself amongst them – that openness is the ethos of the era we live in today – the Social Era. Instead of a competing through overpowering strength and scale by yourself, you create value in communities and by sharing power with one another.

It can be seen today on a societal, organizational, and personal level.

• On the world stage, we saw the Arab Spring. Many voices advocated for freedom, effecting the change of oppressive regimes, and thus advanced the condition of their country.
• We see it in organizations when we see global brands like TED decide to open up with TEDx. What was once limited to a few thousand people and two events has grown to be over 3000 events of people caring about ideas that matter – to them, in places as far away as Kibera (a slum in Nairobi Kenya), and as close as London.
• And at the individual level, we see it when people work together to collectively solve problems that are relevant to all of them individually.  For example, online forums allow anyone, everyone to contribute to solving problems. One such game, Fold It, which helps scientists advance their field by knowing how a protein should fold … a woman, an admin who has no bio science background ends up being the best protein folder in the world. This is something that wouldn’t have happened if she had to first be picked, or vetted or in any other way been  “allowed” to participate.

But many – perhaps even you – suggest that open is just a phase and philosophy of the young, naïve, and unaware… It something that people will grow out of when they accumulate power or want to be rich. Sort of like Harry Potter was dismissed when he was young.

And perhaps this is human nature.

Anytime we give birth to anything – kids, companies, ideas – the natural instinct is to hold that thing close, to protect it from the big, scary world and the bad things in it. This is understandable, especially with kids. But beyond the emotional desire to protect, should we apply this notion to companies and ideas?

In the Industrial Era, both money and power came from being bigger than the other guy, defending one’s turf, and controlling one’s own destiny. The person who owned the machine was the person who created capital wealth. The person who set the rules had an inside track to stay in power. And, protecting IP in a closed system has allowed many a company to keep its edge. It used to be possible to erect barriers to entry from competitors and to establish entirely new markets that could be all yours.

And that’s the key; it used to work when the rules of the Industrial Era were in place.

Not so much for the Social Era. In the Social Era, seemingly disparate individuals gathered together can form a powerful tribe that can do things that once only centralized organizations could do. To be sure, openness is a letting go. But there is also evidence that this is more than a fad, that it provides a new way to make money and create power – albeit differently.

Let’s look at the global mobile market as a source for how innovation happens differently today.

Perhaps the best example of this shift is Apple unlocking the SDK for the iPhone. From their earliest days, Apple always kept a tight rein on the experience–no third-party developers, no licensing of its OS. But does anyone think the iPhone would have been as successful–with over a billion apps downloaded–if it hadn’t moved to an open model its IP with the world? Anyone who doesn’t like the walled garden approach of Apple feels drawn to the open platform that is Google. And one could argue that the Android / Google entirely open strategy has lent success to that platform, now contributing to 50% of all the units in the world in a short 4 years. One can easily say that the openness of Android forced Apple to innovate faster and thus the whole market improved.

Openness fueled growth.

Yet – — and this is key: it’s not that everything is open — but that what needs to be, is. Each had to get clear what parts of their platform they would hold tightly, and what they would open up. The same could apply to democratic governments; it’s not that all things are open, participation has some rules to enable order, not chaos. The implications on personal privacy hold a similar form.

This also distributes wealth. Revenues used to flow to a few control points in the mobile world, the operators. With open, revenues flow to a wider base of developers.

So we’ve proven the point that openness can lead to market power and profits. But you can’t measure the impact of openness in that dimension alone. The implications must be understood systemically. Just like riding a bicycle builds muscles to help you to do more than ride a bicycle, openness creates strength beyond the direct impact.

While the Apple app store only contributes 6% of the profits of the firm, it also empowers a developer ecosystem that helps drive adoption. And the more those developers are rewarded and enjoy sufficient benefits of this ecosystem; they are not advancing another approach. They form a first wall of defense for the one that is being “open”.  This of course also shifts the competitive power. If people are part of your ecosystem, they are not part of someone elses’.

Also, openness allows people to move from wanting someone else to come fix their problem, to being able to solve their own. For this, we’ll move to a non-mobile story. A website called Patients Like Me was co-founded about 10 years ago by 3 MIT engineers. Their brother and friend had been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) at the age of 29. As they began searching the world over for ideas that would extend and improve Stephen’s life, they built a health data-sharing platform which allowed patients to manage their own conditions, change the way industry conducts research and improved care. Unlike most healthcare policies that worry about privacy, Patients Like Me focuses on openness. You see, they believe that sharing experiences and outcomes is good. Why? Because when patients share real-world data, collaboration on a global scale becomes possible. New treatments become possible. Most importantly, change becomes possible. And ultimately this leads to the greater purpose: speeding up the pace of research and fixing a broken healthcare system.

In this way, Patients Like me shows us another less about Openness. When you share, you can make something better for everyone. This is hallmark of openness: it strengthens not just the direct act, but the indirect acts – of community, of speed to create new solutions, and certainly new solutions to old problems. And, the real key is that an open approach can get to new and better ideas–and a lot more of them–faster, as a system opens up. Openness is about allowing for anyone, anywhere to contribute. Not the people you think can, or even the people that you think “should”, but from the abundance and diversity of many peoples experiences. As each person stands in a place only they see, they can bring their onlyness to solve whatever problem they see closest to them.  Those add up to the reasons why Openness is important.

Now I wasn’t always a believer in openness myself. I once ran right over other people, because I wanted to be “right” more than I wanted to build an idea that became real in the marketplace. And I personally liked being in charge and controlling and telling other people what to do. I came up through business with the old mentality. In my 20s, I ran a $200M unit at a Fortune 500 company. I remember one particular time when I was locked in a death match with a colleague over whose idea would win. I kept my idea in a closed fist, and fought tooth and nail to both prove it was best and I was the best. I won. The board adopted my plan. And  yet ultimately I lost. I was fired a month later because the team didn’t trust me. I also lost my best friend with whom I had once run a marathon. It was a spectacular failure that helped me move past the industrial era thinking I was trained in…. I started to understand, for any idea to win, I had to let them go, I had to let other people in… I’ve come to this understanding that the future is not created; the future is co-created…whenever we want something bigger and better and faster, we need to be able to let go of a tight grip and open up. Because openness is powerful, even catalytic.

Openness.

• On a personal level, it not only allows us to share, but to co-create with speed .
• On an organizational level, it allows for more than collaboration, it enables communities.
• At a societal level, it is more than distributing power, and allowing for the shift from what is to what will be. It also allow for shared responsibility. Making anyone able, and perhaps even everyone responsible for finding new solutions to old problems, and inventing the future.

Openness is a way to enable many people to connect and create in the Social Era. Sure, it feels like we are protecting things when we hold ideas tightly as if in a closed first [hand in a closed fist] – maybe we’re even hoping that if we do it tightly enough, we’ll create a diamond. But we must realize that this comes at a cost. If we embrace openness [ hand in an open gesture], we are banking on something else – the indomitable spirit of people’s ability to create. And in that move we unlock potential.

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The Pattern of Failing Organizations
Larger organizations follow a fairly predictable cycle when failing. It starts with denial. The proverbial “we’re so awesome and our CEO is a rockstar so we’re invincible” dynamic. Typically, this lasts some period of time (years, even decades) after having a lot of success.

Resistance typically follows. Even as the organization gets some indications — data, facts, patterns — that say things are changing, they resist the need to change themselves.

At some point, they start to accept that change was needed and start to talk about it at every strategy meeting and analyst call. That was Yahoo two-three years ago. Wall Street knows they aren’t serious (so did their employees, partners, customers) because they didn’t change anything in practice. If people don’t spend their money and time on the new, it’s clear they really aren’t committed to actually changing. So this stage is just about talking ‘n wishing, as if they wished someone else would come along and make those tough choices for them.

Here’s how that plays out in terms of stock price and earnings per share, comparing Yahoo’s performance with Apple’s when the situations were reversed. Last week, Apple beat the already upbeat market expectations, with record revenues of $46.3 billion and earnings of $13.87 per share. Yahoo’s results were, in comparison, limp, with Q4 revenues of $1.17 billion and earnings at $.24 / share.

One skyrocketed, and one struggles.

After working with dozens of complex companies and observing hundreds more, what I’ve learned is that the companies that create the next big thing are the ones who go beyond talking about doing things differently; they work through the denial, resistance and inaction, and truly shift and adapt. After all of the struggle, they finally both decide that they must, and they actually do.

This appears to be where Yahoo has just arrived. A shift. Some movement in saying that what’s worked in the past isn’t working anymore, and it’s time for a change. Bravo. Finally.

This shift could be called “feckless to fearless.”
Feckless is when a company doesn’t know its mission, is weak in its decision-making, and thus ineffective in its output. Fearless is seen in bold moves, created by people who trust one another, and backed up by accountability. This shift is the difference between freaking out at the possibility of an imperfect bold bet and making the worst of all choices: zero bold bets. In actually bringing in new talent and letting them lead you to new edges, instead of just saying it’s time for a new approach. It’s deciding to stop talking about the competitive threat, and instead asking what it will take to leapfrog those competitors. It is worrying less about getting it right, and more about getting started — now.

All of this comes down to confronting fear: the fear that reminds us, “that’s never been done before.” The fear that says “that’s not my department” or “I didn’t get that email.” Instead, we need to embrace fearlessness, turning people loose to create strategies, disruptive innovations, and next-gen business models. Here’s what that looks like:

• Makes bold (even if they are little) bets. Fearless organizations risk creating things that surprise, delight and that stand apart. They are willing to let go of nostalgia to try creating something new. They understand that the “play it safe” alternative won’t be enough to create the next big things.
• Become learning machines. They have the spirit of entrepreneurship (that Paul Graham has described as missing after Yahoo started to grow) — with people inventing and creating. They’d make some mistakes, and learn and do it better the next time.
• Make collaboration an imperative. When an organization knows the direction (the why of the organization), everyone can connect what they do to the big picture. And that kind of alignment doesn’t stop at the “walls” of an organization’s perimeter but allows those organizations to be permeable in working with communities. Much like Apple has done with its app platform, or TED does with its TEDxcommunity. Clear, shared purpose makes customers more than just transactions, and team-members more than just payroll recipients.

Fearlessness Gives Fighting Chance
None of this guarantees success; but it does give you the muscle to keep trying. And it’s this cultural difference that is the difference between RIM, Nokia, Bank of America, Gap, HP, Groupon, Kodak and so many others — and the Apples, Amazons, and IBMs. (We may credit Netflix’s desire to embolden its people and their fast responses to public failures as key acts of fearlessness and why they’ll bounce back from their chaotic 2011.)

Will Yahoo turn this around? Can’t tell yet. We’ve seen one fearless move so far. They need to make the hard decisions about investment decisions (especially around mobile), business models, and community-centered approaches.

But here’s what they can look forward to if they do. It took only five years for Apple to be seen as a leader in the phone space. In that time, 75% of mobile industry’s profits and 40% of its revenue was built from a business line that did not exist 5 years ago.

Yahoo, once a pioneer in online communities, needs to act less like the 800-Lb Gorilla of yesteryear, and more like a fighter in a comeback challenge — lean, resilient, and fast. And that is the lesson for all of us: when fear rules in the work culture, ideas are weak, stillborn or hidden. And crucial innovation never takes place.

(This was originally published in my work at Harvard Business Review. Original post here, or in long form: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/yahoos_shakeup_demands_fearles.html. As is true for all my HBR posts, I appreciate you leaving comments in the original post location.)

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TED (the conference) offers an onsite bookstore with handpicked titles. The Bookstore is run by a socially responsible business, BetterWorldBooks, which donates monies in the millions to literacy programs in the developing world. Like any bookstore in a community, it offers a place to discover.

Along with a handful of guest curators, the job is to carefully choose a list of books to add to add to the conference experience. At first, I was happy to help but then came the task of picking a few. It wasn’t quite one of those “what books would you take with you if the house were on fire” or “bring with, on a deserted island” kind of thing but still more agonizing than I would have originally thought. Here are 3 that made the list:

Wrinkle in Time. By Madeleine L’Engle.
This was my favorite book in 6th grade. Even though this has an allure of physics and math (with an evil force threatening the planet), the book holds gems of life’s truths. These words help me learn sometimes the only way to save the world — the UNIVERSE — is to be strong and know your own mind, especially when it’s different from everyone elses’. Or in Meg’s words: “Alike and Equal are not the same thing at all.” Buy it: A Wrinkle in Time: 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet)

Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman
Notice how women aren’t equally represented on the TED stage (or on the global corporate, leadership, and governance stage)? Well, until we appreciate how humans make the craziest (i.e. stupidest) decisions based on biases, we’ll never create a more just (and more importantly, better) society. (His 2010 TED talk on the experiencing vs. remembering self is well worth watching. ). Buy it here: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Fixing the Game. By Roger Martin

“The dumbest idea in the world is maximizing shareholder value.” That is what fellow thinker, Roger Martin, and independent director of RIM and Thomson Reuters thinks. And he’s right. As long as we chase the wrong metric, we won’t fix the financial system. A smart conversation starter, and I think one that corporate directors ought to debate further. Buy it here: Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL.

Reforming Wall Street, retooling for 21st century … these are wicked challenges. The kind that will need fresh new points of view, that are welcomed, and creating new measures so we add ways to increase value creation. Hence these picks.

If you were asked to curate a list, what books would you pick and why?

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Four Must-Reads:

Banks: You Can Take and Not Give, But Not Forever

“Why are the banks paying only 0.4 percent interest on a savings account if they can afford to open offices on every other block in Greenwich Village?  The other day I was catching up on balancing my account and realized that, for the last six months, I had earned about $4 in interest but had been charged $35 a month for service.”

This essay raises a real issue. Much of January, I’ve been writing what looks to be a 9-part essay series on the implications to traditional institutions when they face the social era. Which caused me to ask the Twitter community: “What happens when we lend to each other instead of banks?”

The banking industry should worry. So should just about every institution that hasn’t figured out the capability to exercise collaborative power.

Apple & The Message Consumers Will Send.

“On the other side of the world, a young girl is also swiping those screens. In fact, every day, during her 12+ hour shifts, six days a week, she repetitively swipes tens of thousands of them. She spends those hours inhaling n-hexane, a potent neurotoxin used to clean iPhone glass, because it dries a few seconds faster than a safe alternative. After just a few years on the line, she will be fired because the neurological damage from the n-hexane and the repetitive stress injuries to her wrists and hands make her unable to continue performing up to standard.”

Do you have any doubt that suppliers would change EVERYTHING tomorrow if Apple told them to? There are clearly enough profit margins available to fix this issue. Apple is the richest company in the world, posting profits for last quarter of 42.4% last week. Now, the question is whether average consumers (including yourself) care. Sign the petition or learn more here:

Essay: The Trust Paradox
A fellow thinker, John Hagel, has written a thoughtful piece about what once did, and what will define trust.

Trust used to be largely backward looking – did the person or the institution have a track record indicating that they had the necessary skills to deliver results? In these more uncertain times where skills have a depreciating half-life, the focus shifts to a forward looking question – does the person or institution have the values and disposition required to learn faster by working together in times of increasing uncertainty and rapid change? Can they be relied upon even though their existing skills are increasingly challenged and undermined by rapid change?

The implications for individuals and organizations are huge. Whole essay worth reading here.

Amazon, Analysts & Why The Sky Is Not Falling
Amazon has become a real company to watch, not only because it continues to morph from a retailer to a platform player but because they seem to do what is right by the company without regard to the street / analysts / circus. If you read some of the recent press, it sounded like gloom and doom. The universal point of view was that Amazon was making all these investments, which weren’t paying off. But taking a look at the detail didn’t suggest that. While the top-line went down, the bottom line went up. I had been thinking of how and why the analysts can be so easily distracted when I discovered this post.  The lesson is two-fold: (A) Amazon is fearless in how it chooses to reinvent, and (B) the metrics used by Wall Street are not a solid indication of value created. Many, many key metrics are missing.

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So, I am here with all my edges.  If that makes you uncomfortable or upsets you, you are welcome to un-friend me or just move on if you are part of the public beyond my friend network.  There are many other interesting people on Facebook to get to know. You are also welcome to express your displeasure on my wall if you are part of my friend network. I admit that I sometimes post things in part to stir up some controversy. I welcome debate and expressions of personal views. I want to get to know you as well.

More here. There are many that will argue to continue to live compartmentalized lives, choosing to not share much on any social network, but I want us to consider what happens when we move from a world of resumes to a world of portfolios, where our passions actually make up part of what we do for work.

Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple – Who will Win?
An amazingly deep piece on the 4 titans of tech influencing all business and many consumer trends. By Farhad Manjoo, whom I find to be one of the few thoughtful writers doing actual analysis.

To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust. HP, for example, tried to take a run at Apple head-on, with its TouchPad, the product of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. HP bailed out after an embarrassingly short 49-day run, and it cost CEO Léo Apotheker his job. Microsoft’s every move must be viewed as a reaction to the initiatives of these smarter, nimbler, and now, in the case of Apple, richer companies. When a company like Hulu goes on the block, these four companies are immediately seen as possible acquirers, and why not? They have the best weapons–weapons that will now be turned on one another as they seek more room to grow.

There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today.

Interesting throughout, it’s well worth the long read. (The magazine layout is easier to read so worth picking up the copy.)

Occupy Wall Street – Still Don’t Get It?
Many people don’t get the movement. So when I saw this, and did a guffah, I thought it was worth sharing.

“While a mortgage CEO received a 40-month sentence for stealing $3,000,000,000, a homeless man who turned himself in received 15 years for stealing $100.”

People who wonder what the 99% are whining about maybe don’t experience inequity and therefore don’t feel a sense of injustice. I wrote my take on it here, and I continue to believe not enough people get it because it is hard to define what “it” is. The OWS thing is hard also to define because they are not pushing against something as much fighting for something. During the last civil unrest, it was easy to say “no to war” but harder to know what peace looked like. But this is typically how change happens … in messy, ill-formed ideas getting assembled together by willing participants who want a shared outcome…

<Enjoy your weekend. Celebrate life.>

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She’s got a new book coming out this week: The Plugged-In Manager. I saw an early preview and I swore then that it would be a best-seller. It’s that good and serves a really practical space for people wanting to use collaborative technology to improve how things work.

One big and fundamental assumption Terri makes is that sharing = good. And that more sharing = more good. Interestingly enough, I know a lot of managers who think this robs them of power (if I am not a central hub, what am I?) or that sharing is inappropriate (my job is to act as a buffer and conduit). So, I asked Terri 3 questions and I want to share her take on them.

Why Does it Matter?
In fast changing situations, our world is too complex for many (any?) of us to take on significant tasks by ourselves. Sharing is the practice that signals what you’re trying to do with an expectation that others will begin to help. If we don’t share, then we’re just asking people to individually connect a set of dots. We’ll get a picture, but I guarantee it won’t be a work of art. Nuance and color will be missing even in the simplest situation. Sharing is the best tool we have for dealing with the complexity and speed of our environment.

When and Why Does it Work?
Given that we are getting used to sharing in so much of our personal and professional life: 750 million active Facebook users, 100 million active on Twitter, and 48 million on LinkedIn, sharing is now a standard practice in social life.

Sharing at work is a bit different. At work, it’s more sharing as teaching. This practice is about modeling plugged-in behavior and “thinking aloud” so others can see the ideas in context, as the idea is coming into shape, hopefully even getting their own hands dirty so they learn at a deeper level than just thinking about the issues.

If things are not transparent, you are making people “implementers” rather than people moving along together toward a goal having agreed on many of the rules of the game before it starts. I always find myself a bit guilty when I explain sharing in these ways. It’s sharing for a purpose, sharing to reach a goal, sharing in a way that will help me with the task at hand. It’s not sharing just to be nice or open without some expectation that it’s going to move the organization forward. But that’s when it works.

How can you share too much?
Privacy and regulations immediately jump to mind. Both personal and professional/legal limits exist to what we can or should share. The first practice I talk about in The Plugged-In Manager, is to do a Stop-Look-Listen. It also serves as a safety net. If we stop and look at our situation first, we should be aware of critical limits to our sharing (e.g., quiet periods during an IPO, Federal regulations around financial, health, and student information). If course, let’s also remember that we’re working with people that have actual feelings; all organizations have cultural norms and strategic needs. Those all need to be weighed in…there is no one size fits all. That’s why we still need leaders.

While Terri might feel guilty to say sharing has a purpose, she’s absolutely right. It’s not about “nice-nice”, it holds with it an expectation that people are playing in a different way. Without that cultural context, innovation rarely happens.

I met Terri a while ago because Barry Posner (who, along with Jim Kouzes is #1 best seller in the leadership category with I think 4M copies of books sold) enthusiastically endorsed The New How and thought Terri would ”get it”. He also thought we’d have some common interests and, no surprise, he was right. I’ve become a big fan of her as she developed her ideas around being Plugged-In. She’s done a fantastic job collecting case studies of how real leaders (like Tony Hsieh of Zappos) use this combination of technology/people/organizations to enable their companies to be better. If you think this is an area you need some insight into, it’s a great resource. (By the way, if you don’t know this, authors value support the first week of a launch – it sets the trajectory of a book’s adoption…) It’s also a nice companion to Andrew McAfee’s work on Enterprise 2.0. You can find it here.

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