Duleesha Kulasooriya, head of research at the Center for the Edge, gave a fabulous talk at TEDxConstitutionDrive - "Identity as a barrier to growth" - that had a slow burn for me.  The theme of the conference was Identity, and Duleesha was making the somewhat  controversial point that identity - as powerful and fundamental as it can be - can inhibit us from growing and becoming more than we are today.  He makes a deeply resonant argument for authenticity - defined as the convergence of passion and vulnerability.

 It's one of those perspectives, like the best new ideas, that have slowly infiltrated my worldview and how I think about identity.  

Have you ever found yourself in slipping into one of these two situations:
- Where you find yourself mentally scoffing at someone that obviously doesn't know the rules of engagement, in the workplace or on Facebook, e.g. by  "over-sharing" (TMI or Too Much Information is, if you're interested, a term that appears to date from 2002, a full decade ago).
- Where you tag someone with a title, a phrase, an anecdote, and it makes them less than whole and human in the eyes of both you and the others around you, e.g. "douchebag", "asshole", "weird dude", "psycho", "sleazy", "not that smart", or the host of "remember whens" that attach that individual to circumstances long past.

Empathy has been getting a lot of play in books and media, but the thing is, while empathy gets conflated with compassion, they're actually very different.  Empathy is about stepping into the shoes of someone else, understanding them in a way that comes from the gut, to the point that you might not respond in a way that is necessarily  kind.  It's about understanding poverty so well that you can encompass the resilience and joy that can surface in the midst of slums, at the same time your heart goes out to them because you feel the constraints they suffer under, feeling that pang almost physically.  It's about being able to smile at the same time you cry for someone who has lost someone, because loss only comes from once-great joy and the remembrance of that joy is worthy of a smile.  The extreme end of empathy is love.  

To feel that someone else is like you - like you - is the opposite of sociopathy and the beginning of something that, without getting too fruity, verges on the divine.  There's something there - to likeness and family and love as bringing someone into your family and being willing to die for those who are like you - I don't have words for it today but there's something there.

When we're short on time and the feeling of security, we shortchange people.  We revert to these in-group/out-group exercises, where we bond by excluding others.  We feel a secret gladness that we know, that we're in the in-group.  We see others as static, while at the same time we are indignant that others don't allow us the space to grow.  

Oddly enough, Duleesha's talk was prefaced by an excellent talk by Beau Lewis on "The American Hipster."  According to Beau and Adbusters, "Everyone hates hipsters. Especially hipsters."  I don't know if Beau would agree with me, but I felt like he and Duleesha were advocating the same thing - the differentiation of people through passion, rather than group lines that were either inherited or otherwise not chosen in any meaningful way.  I think Beau would advocate the shift of hipsterism towards embracing passionately who you are specifically, as opposed to who you are not or what group you are in.  Whether it's veganism, or liberalism, or libertarianism, or male, or female, or American, or young, or well-read, or well-traveled, or a New Yorker, to me it comes down to what you choose and what you love.

It's a way to escape the evolutionary status rat race, which some consider the driving force in all of our lives, this need to make more money, be more beautiful, feel better than others, find a mate.  We have infinite opportunities to be differentiated, especially with what we as individuals are enabled to do today by technology.  We can differentiate ourselves through *creation*.  We don't need to ascribe to a single dimension of status, and who cares about everyone liking us when, our time being finite, we only get to spend that time with relatively few people.  The mad rush for status is an archaic artifact of genes that don't know what century they're living in.

It's hard to be empathetic.  You have to carve out space in your life -  time to consider, emotional security to quiet the voices in your head, kindness to offer a wedge and way in.  But we should take seriously the power we have in this world and over others.  Identity is co-constructed by our genetics,  our environment, and our wills - and arguably among the most powerful elements is the surrounding social interplay.  In the same way that we are affected by others, others are affected by us.  If we believe this, and recognize the power there, we should see vulnerability, and the implied risk that is undertaken, as heroic.....and step lightly. 

Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou - to our amazing speakers, our equally remarkable  attendees, our sponsors who made it possible, our vendors who make it happen,  and last but not least, my hard-working fellow organizers. It was a time.

Our hearts and minds are full tonight.  Video and photos to come. 

PS.  We found out we were Flavorpill's Editor's Pick on Friday a bit late but still psyched nevertheless:

In a bit of spare time over the weekend, I made this homage to Wikipedia, my beloved daily tutor on life and everything else.  Wikipedia and Wikipetita are both going dark at midnight in solidarity against SOPA...  :)
http://www.wikipetita.com/

http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/14/10158059-programming-prodigy-passes-away-at-16-hear-her-philosophy-of-life

 "Arfa Karim Randhawa, the computer programming prodigy who became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional at 9 years old, [just] passed away at the age of 16."


Her life philosophy:  "If you want to do something big in your life, you must remember that shyness is only the mind," she said. "If you think shy, you act shy. If you think confident you act confident. Therefore never let shyness conquer your mind."

Take a moment, even if you're not shy, and consider that.  Replace shyness with insecurity or status-seeking or stress or the desire to be right or the desire to be recognized.  Then go outside into the sunshine and maybe skip a little, no matter how your day's been going.

I've been spending some time noodling on enterprise apps and enterprise app stores.  Not the most exciting noodling space on first glance, but that's only on first glance.

There's that William Gibson quote:  "The future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed."  That's not broadly true but I wonder if Isaac Asimov was right that we can readily predict the probabilistic future on a large scale based on mass psychology.  Carlota Perez seems to think so.


Based on Perez's work studying four earlier technological revolutions:

"Each revolution comes in two stages: first there is a period of installation of the new and disruption of the old way of doing things. The fact that a substantial amount of the new infrastructure has to be built out before enough income can be derived from its use leads to over investment, a speculative bubble, and market crashes. Every time."

"During the Installation period,the state is pushed into playing a role that is subservient to dominant finance capital, which drives the spread of the new industries by attracting existing wealth towards the stock market. The new entrepreneurs thrive and compete and new leaders and giant industries emerge. The frenzy ends each time with a bubble and a crash."

"Conditions are set for the second period of the technology, namely its deployment stage, where the state comes back into the picture and finance capital is moved back into its basic supporting role. In deployment the technology spread sits benefits from early adopters to the rest of society and the new wealth rather than being concentrated at the top, is redistributed bringing a golden age of prosperity.  This period lasts two or three decades until those technologies become mature."

"[Four years ago] Carlota [found] that we [were] in the eighth year of a transition that in the past has lasted anywhere from two to thirteen years."



That puts us near the end of the transition phase.  One of the strongest arguments, in my mind, that we are moving into the "golden age of prosperity" - despite all evidence to the apparent contrary - is the rise of enterprise apps and enterprise app stores.  Technology that was  once an overhyped disappointment is living up to its promise, moving to late-adopter realms that were historically home to  the most conservative of consumers.

And it’s also not just mobile – organizations are looking at taking the Apple App Store model backwards, looking at new ways to deliver self-service enterprise PC software in a consumer app-like experience.  This consumerization suggest that that organizations will be looking for new ways of partnering with vendors, licensing their IP, repackaging that software, and delivering it to enterprise customers – even in the non-mobile space.  

This new model implies competition among enterprise applications, in a space that has been lucrative for vendors because it is relatively less competed.  Historically, for vendors, the enterprise is the “fat plum that’s hard to pick” whereas the consumer market is the “crabapple hanging low on the branch.”  As everyone knows, bird in hand, etc etc.  This is an oversimplification but intensifying competition in the enterprise space is going to turn whole industries upside down – as well as whole institutionalized IT departments.  You only have to look at the difference in mobile apps vs. traditional desktop applications – in mobile, a consumer app goes for 99 cents while an enterprise app might be $9.99.  In contrast, an Oracle implementation might be $10 million.  Even Salesforce can be $1500 / user.

Enterprise consumers need enterprise apps – or to be more precise, enterprise consumers need enterprise apps in a world where they have competitors with access to productivity-enhancing enterprise apps.  It is hard to deny that technology is getting better in ways that push out the performance frontier – and if you’re not on somewhere on that frontier, you’re not competitive.  Ergo, the advent of “shadow IT”,  off-the-ranch purchases by business units and enterprise consumers which accounts for one out of every four dollars of corporate IT spend.

More broadly, this is being driven by expensive labor becoming more expensive, growing scarcity of time and attention, and increasing criticality of “instant on” as the “killer app” – both in hardware (i.e. the iPad) and software (i.e. the app).  Mirko Minnich, CTO and SVP of Elsevier Health Sciences  said: “I believe every enterprise will ultimately adopt the App Store as the primary model for delivering information in the future.”  If you extrapolate that forward and think about the implications of the “app as search” and basic HTML5 apps becoming easier to build, there may come a day when the average person takes tools in hand, and search, social and app creation collide in extraordinary ways.

So, coming back to today, if you were an organization considering an enterprise app store, how would you go about it?  

While there's an obvious decision to make as to whether to use a third-party or start from scratch, the critical piece of it really comes down to the governance model and strategy:

• Will the store include internally and externally developed apps?  Will the apps be internal-facing or external-facing?
• Who approves the app and what the criteria – is the bar low (e.g. stability) or high (e.g. usefulness)?  
• Who manages the overall curation, curation of the “front page” and branding – if anyone?  
• How do you streamline the controls so as not to inhibit innovation?
• Who pays and how do they pay (e.g. expensing, charge to the firm, redemption codes)?  How is licensing / bulk purchases handled?  
• What is the right balance of control in a world where most “apps” are less than $10?  
• How do you institute a two-way dialogue between enterprise consumers and IT?  
• Are apps “rated” or evaluated in some way, either through committee or crowd-sourcing?
• Who owns the app?  How is it maintained, if at all?  
• How personalized / integrated are the apps?  
• How do you control access to different groups (internal  / external, levels in the firm) and across borders?  
• What level of security is needed, and how do you ensure it?  
• Do you treat it like a laptop (something to be “turned in” when employment ends) or a legal pad (something employees keep)?  

There's a whole treasure chest of innovation waiting to be unlocked here - and it's in part from this increased productivity, greater quality, and value-added innovation that flows through the enterprise to consumers that we'll finally arrive at the golden age promised by Carlota Perez.