david weinbrger

TITLE: "leadership at the end of the age of information"
My summary: Interesting lecture about how networks can change the face of representative democracy, organisational structures in a corporation, and how individual interact with each other. Useful observations on how social systems are used and abused.

• "this is an old-fashioned talk because that's what I was asked to do"
• "it's a good time to look at what the age of information has done to our idea of leadership"
• "the stone age has ended but we still have stone... the age of info has ended but we obviously still have information"
• "we've always reduced and standardised what we know.. so machines can process it"
• "we've known from the beginning of the information age that we know more about things than the systems do"
• "peculiarities and quirks make a person who they are.. machines strip that out and make people boring!"
• "on a person's facebook page there's lots of information about a person... and lots of links.. created without control or centralisation"
• "a much richer view of a person than we got during the age of information"
• "hyperlinks increase contextualisation... they're the opposite of 'information'"
• "the architecture of links creates an abundance of stuff.... and of crap!"
• "but we know how to deal with crap"
• "it's abundance of good which is a problem"
• "our culture/institutions aren't ready for that"
• "leadership has been based upon scarcity"
• "most people are followers"
• "the process of making a decision is exactly the opposite of how computers work"
• "the cliche is that it's lonely at the top"
• "we treat leadership as a form of heroism"
• "that systems rely on a single person is a structural flaw - but for some reason we've turned it into something positive!"
• "no one person can do the job we expect a leader to do"
• "the jobs of leaders can be disagregated"
• "decision making is a failure of leadership"
• "wikipedia - decisions are taken only when the system has failed. and then the decision making is akin to a coin toss"
• "strategies impose scarcity on the future"
• "real leaders are realists - they would not have built wikipedia"
• "realism simply isn't ambitious enough"
• "in a networked world... leadership is a property of the network"
• "networks have the properties that we used to want from a leader"
• starts to reference Obama's campaign
• "the obama team has an understanding of how the web works - put up a new website, it's not perfect, what is, keep fixing it"
• "let's say the obama campaign wanted to launch a social network for citizens"
• "conversation and intimacy don't scale"
• "potentially millions of small conversations"
• "the more interesting ones would rise up, become more visible"
• "eventually someone from the government might jump in"
• "now a user is engaged with talking with the government. that's great, right? tight?"
• "but who elected this person? simon willis calls this 'reputational democracy'"
• "this is a new level of democracy that did not exist before"
• "that system is highly dependent on little tiny choices that the developers make"
• "a move from a 5-star system of rating to a thumbs up/thumbs down model could have massive implications for the dynamic of the system"
• "there's nothing wrong with this, if the decisions are taken in a networked way"
• "it's impossible to predict what the new leadership will be"
• "we are engaged in a struggle over the nature of leadership"
• "there is no way through it except to struggle on"
• "i hope that old-style leadership will be toppled from its mythical position"
• "we needs leaders everywhere"
• "leadership needs to take on the properties of the best networks"