The most simple truths have deep implications. Today, the average person has access to information that, 20 years ago, only the richest billionaire did.
I remember when as an analyst at Apple doing pricing and market research work, 
my job was to read the ($500K/year subscription) Gartner and IDC reports and get the nuggets out and then create a document of insights to circulate.. but only to the executive management team because that’s who would use the information.
Today, of course, all that is moot.
Anyone, quite possibly everyone, can get a pretty good idea of what is going on in a few minutes of web research. No exec team needs to hoard the information. No middle management team needs to parse out what it means. And what any individual can do — with seemingly disparate other people — is as powerful as anything we’ve ever seen. As powerful as governments, as powerful than big Goliath global organizations.
And that changes what we can create in business, the models to measure value creation, the leadership needed and even the very ethos that we effectively function by. It’s the Social Era, and it means change for all of us.
If you’re a regular reader of Yes & Know, you know I’ve been talking about this idea well before last year. But right around March 2012, I started doing my first talks on the topic, and have since published a book with Harvard on the topic and so on. Well, somewhere along the way, I got invited to give a talk at a venue that Google (the company) hosts whereby they invite speakers who are in the area to come talk to their employees and they film it and release it at no charge. Al Gore spoke the day after I did. (!)
I hadn’t honestly thought what it would feel like to be speaking these ideas — in front of effectively one of the most powerful organizations of this change. A little weird actually. But, still. Worth doing and worth sharing.
Filmed in February 2013, and just released today:
