It happens every year. The bad weather thaws or rains itself out just in time for Austin, Texas, to become known as The Place With the Most Amazing Temperatures On Earth. Today it was all big blue sky and 75 degrees and blinding 8 a.m. sunshine, giving SXSWesters another reason to break out the shades (the first being that for culture-savvy, social-Web tech geeks, SXSW Interactive [#SXSWi] is the coolest place in the world to be).
I suppose one can officially claim a “movement has begun” when the movement has a party at South By Southwest, and so we can now call Social Entrepreneurship officially “started”. The Good Capitalist Party will be Monday, March 15th, 2010, from 7:00pm – 9:00pm, and 1500 of your closest friends have already RSVPed. The party is free, run by @Montero with the generous support of sponsors like Social Edge, Kiva, and my very own Austin Center for Design – an educational institution in Austin that combines interaction design (IxD) and social entrepreneurship (SocEnt) to make some awesome SocEntIxdFtw. You’ll probably be recovered from the frog party by this time, and so come out and say hello. I’ll be there, talking about frog’s efforts in social innovation – including Project Masiluleke – as well as promoting Austin Center for Design.
It’s both amazing and hilarious to consider that being human, or treating people well, or interacting with one another, is now in-vogue in big business. We did a turn with quality (“we need to make things well!”) in the 80s, optimization (“we need to track the supply chain and distribution chain!”) in the early 90s, the internet (“bricks and mortar is dead!”) in 2000, and now it’s All About Social. But when you unwrap “social”, you start to realize that it’s a container for some major, powerful, and fundamental aspects of human life. It’s not a business construct, as was six-sigma or ERP. The stuff we mean when we talk about “social” is the stuff of life, and it’s natural. And so I find it both amazing and very, very funny to observe how fundamentally hard it is for some people to “manage social” and to understand the role social plays in the context of business.
From last October, all the tier-3 hospitals in China, the highest ranked and best equipped public hospitals, were required by the Ministry of Health to provide clinic appointment services. The national initiative of building the clinic appointment system aims to reach these objectives: 1) arrange doctors' agenda better, 2) reduce patients' wait time, and 3) provide better medical consultation. In shorter words, in face of pressing healthcare issues, the government kicks off a service initiative to improve the healthcare efficiency as well as work quality.
Making doctor appointments is common in most developed countries, but it hasn't been put into public use in China before. You can go to the hospital anytime and get a queue number at the outpatient counter. The counter staff then dispatches you to a medical division and you wait outside the diagnosis room till your number is called. Waiting is not a nice thing in any scenario, not to mention when you are feeling sick. Seeing a doctor is like going on a blind date. You don't know who you'll meet and what you would expect in the hospital. All you know is that you feel not well and probably nervous in the medical environment.
TED conferences, you might think, are happy affairs. You get up early, meet the most fascinating people, listen to jaw-dropping talks (each followed by a standing ovation), have deep conversations, and party until dawn – and all of that for four days in a row, safely remote from your usual daily routine. The reality, however, is more complicated. The event is a physical and mental stress test, an emotional rollercoaster ride that challenges you with constant over-stimulation, extreme cross-pollination, and tidal waves of acceptance and rejection as you navigate the social networks in the conference’s “social spaces.” To slightly paraphrase Heidi Klum: “With one group you’re in, with the next group you’re out.” And yet you will never hear anyone who was lucky enough to attend TED come back and not rave about their experience. Why is that? Daniel Kahneman, the mastermind of Behavioral Economics, provided the answer – at TED2010: TEDsters are happy because they expect to be happy. Let me explain, or rather, let Daniel Kahneman explain.
For Wired UK’s “Work Smarter” issue (just released), I had the pleasure to speak with John Winsor, co-founder and CEO of Victors & Spoils (V&S), the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. You can find a shortened article in the Wired UK magazine. Here’s the interview in full length.
Penguin, the fabled English publisher, is plunging head first into the world of iPad content. Not iPad books, exactly, as these things are not recognizable as books in the normal sense - they are closer to games and full-fledged apps. Even in the case where they are adapting existing print books, there is enough new stuff going on where it diverges significantly from what we normally think of as "book". A Kindle ebook these are not. Check out the video above for an intriguing peep into what they have planned.
