E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Life Without eMail – 5th Year Progress Report – The Community, The Movement

There have been a lot of people who, over the course of the last few months, have been asking me whatever happened to that initiative I started a while ago around ditching corporate email (Under the moniker “A World Without eMail“), since things seem to have been a bit quiet over here in this blog for a little while on that very same subject. Did I give up on giving up on corporate email? Did I get tired of it and moved back to email? Was the experiment a total failure? Did I get tired of it and move on to something else? What happened? Well, nothing and a lot! The movement is still alive and kicking. It’s now more popular than ever and it’s still going as strong as ever, if not more! To the point where it’s now evolved into what will be the next stage and my new focus area: Life Without eMail.

A couple of months back I was talking about this with one of my fellow IBM colleagues, and very good friend, Rawn Shah, and while brainstorming on something that I am hoping to be able to share very soon (Which I am sure plenty of folks out there have been waiting for it for a while!), we thought it was time for me to help the movement evolve into something much more exciting: going personal. Indeed, instead of focusing on the whole world, which may have been a bit too ambitious and perhaps over demanding on everyone as in too large to cover, I am switching gears and instead adopt a new mantra towards it: Life Without eMail. 

Why? Well, mainly because if there is anything that I have learned over the course of time, and, specially, in the last couple of years, is that the world doesn’t use email. People do. So if someone would want to free their life up of the email yoke it’s got to start with people. We are the ones who should, and need!, to break that chain. The (corporate) world is not going to do it. It’s just far too comfortable keeping up the status quo of abuse, political and bullying games just as it is. It’s a matter of divide and conquer. And so far email is winning, at least, according to some folks, although I reserve the right to disagree with those statements, specially, when we start separating email as a content repository from email as an alert / notification system (BACN anyone?). Either way, that’s why I feel it’s probably a good time to move on to the next challenge. To design a new kind of work, a new mindset of work habits that would inspire each and everyone of us to become much more collaborative and keen on sharing our knowledge out there openly through digital tools, whatever those may well be.

So, instead of just focusing on the world itself, it’s time to focus on the people, the knowledge (Web) workers, to help them free themselves up from what may have been stopping their passion to pursue something bigger, much bigger, for themselves. That is why from this year onwards I will be talking about going personal with Life Without eMail. 

It’s no coincidence either, really. Because those of you folks who may have been following this blog for a while would realise now how, a couple of months ago, we just went through the 5th year anniversary since I first started “Thinking Outside the Inbox“, then how it evolved into “A World Without eMail” and how it all comes back to basics, eventually: that is, live a successful, purposeful, effective and rather productive work life without depending so much on corporate email. Indeed, I can’t believe it either myself that February 15th 2013 marked the 5th year anniversary of an initiative for which a large chunk of people thought I would be fired from my current work within two weeks, thinking I was just plain crazy, and, instead, here I am, 5 years on and having a real blast with it. 

Of course, there have been plenty of obstacles along the way, and there are still plenty of them ahead of us, but, if there is anything that I have learned in the last year, since my last progress report update, and even more so in the last few months, is that this movement is now unstoppable. And that’s why I thought it would be a good time to put together this blog entry where I could reflect on what has happened since the last update I published over here, where we are moving forward and what surprises do I have reserved for you folks, because I do have a couple of them…

But let’s start with the beginning. First, let me assure you that although this article is going to be a bit long (Remember, it’s a yearly update hehe), it is not going to be as massive as the last one I put together by the beginning of last year. This time around I am just going to focus on giving you folks an update on what’s happened in the last 12 months, then share some further details on a new experiment I have conducted last year that I am sure you would all enjoy learning some more about it and after all of that we will go through the surprises I have got prepared for you. So, let’s begin… 

A World Without eMail – Year 5 – Progress Report

If you remember, in the last blog entry on the topic I mentioned, for the previous year, how the average of incoming emails I had over the course of the whole year was down to 16 emails per week, which is roughly about 2 emails per day. So, as you can see, I wasn’t capable of killing email per se as most folks have been saying all along, specially, when I am being introduced at a public speaking event. However, if I look into what I used to have before I started this initiative there has been a decrease of up to 98% of the total volume of inbound email, which I guess it’s just not too shabby when thinking about how 5 years ago I received a total amount of 1647 incoming emails and last year only 798. 

No, that’s right. eMail is not dead and it’s far from being dead, despite what some other folks may have been claiming all along. This is something that I have been saying all along myself, too! eMail still has got its place in the corporate world. More specifically in three different contexts or, as I call them, use cases. To name:

1. Universal Identifier (For whenever you need to sign up for a new service)
2. Calendaring and Scheduling of events in your agenda (Most of those meetings, appointments seem to come through email still).

3. 1:1 Confidential, sensitive exchanges (HR, Legal, Financial matters would be prime examples for this use case. Notice how I mention 1:1 and not 1:many confidential emails, by the way, more than anything else, because as soon as you include more than one person it’s no longer confidential. You never know where it will go next and who may leak the information across)

However, beyond those three use cases, there isn’t an excuse anymore to move the vast majority of our interactions into more open social, collaborative, knowledge sharing spaces: digital tools. And this is when it is getting really exciting, because, despite the various different reports that indicate how email use has gone sky high through the roof, here I am to confirm how not only the number of incoming emails for yours truly has remained steady, but it actually decreased for the 5th consecutive year, ending up at barely 15 per week. Yes, barley 15 per week and if it weren’t for a couple of weeks where that traffic experimented a certain peak I would have been on 14 emails received per week! Too funny, as an anecdote, that one of those weeks was the very same one that 5 years ago it also triggered the giving up on corporate email by yours truly! 

Here’s the full report of the entire year, where you can see the maximum number of emails received for one day, and the minimum. And right next to it, you will see as well the comparison with the previous 3 years, so you can have a look into the overall trend from that 4 year period. If you would want to check out the entire progress report into more detail from all of those years go to this link and you will find it there: 

Not too bad, I guess, for an initiative that most people thought it was going to be dead within the first two weeks, don’t you think? 5 years on and a Life Without eMail is now a reality. And it can only get better … 

Social Networking tools *do* make you ever so much more productive

Over the course of the last 5 years one of the main comments I have been getting all along from those folks who may have been exposed to this movement has been along the lines of how as interesting as it has been moving my work interactions from email into social networking tools, it seems as if the only thing I did was swap from one tool for another. Still the same result. Well, not really. Here is why…

You may have seen that particular piece of research that McKinsey did in 2011 where it mentioned some fascinating insights on our corporate work habits confirming how the average time that most knowledge workers spend just processing email is roughly around 650 hours per year. Yes, I know it may not sound too much, but that’s actually nearly 3 months out of the year people spend it processing email. Now, if you add up the month of vacation approx., we end up with nearly 4 months out of the whole year being spent just working through emails, because you do check out your mailbox while you are away on vacation as well, right?

So earlier on last year I decided to do a little experiment where I would try to measure the time I spend on internal social networkings tools to get my work done and see how that would compare to the time spent doing email. If I would have just switched from one tool into another set of digital tools it would show pretty much the same time spent, right? Well, wrong! 

Most of you folks out there know how much of a big fan I am of the pomodoro technique, which I have blogged about a couple of times already. Last year I decided to ruthlessly measure the time I would spend in internal social networking tools in chunks of 25 minute long pomodoros and see how many of those I would accumulate over the course of months. And now that the year has gone by it’s time to share the stunning results. 

Over the course of 2012 I have spent 683 pomodoros of 25 minutes each to not only keep up with what was happening around me through social technologies, but at the same time to get my day to day work done. So that means I have spent 17.075 minutes working my way through these digital tools, that is, 284.5 hours approximately. Eventually, resulting in 35.5 days or, in other words, 5 weeks. Yes!, not even a month and a half!! Who would have thought about that, right? But it gets even better…

Because it also means it could save people even more time to do other more productive tasks. These statistics are just from myself, a power user of social networking tools with no scientific method in place. A social computing evangelist at heart. Someone who lives these digital tools, walking the talk, learning by doing. Perhaps the atypical social networker, because that’s where I have moved all of my work related interactions to a great extent. As an example, in our internal social networking platform, IBM Connections, the average number of connections / contacts fellow IBMers have is roughly around 40 people, approx. For me, I’m currently coming close to 3,280 folks, so you can imagine how my internal networks do not represent the normal and why I strongly believe that those productivity gains in time saved using social tools could be even bigger for vast majority of knowledge workers out there. 

Thus what does that all mean? Well, essentially, that next to all of the perks and various benefits I have been sharing around becoming more open, more public, collaborative, flexible, autonomous, transparent,  agile, and more responsible for how I work I can now add up that living social / open has made me more than two times as productive as whatever I was 5 years ago! And believe me, this is something that I really appreciate, because, like for everyone else, work does never decrease, but it is always on the increase, so knowing that I have remained over twice as productive over the course of the years, no matter what, has been a splendid and surprising new finding that has made me realised the whole initiative since I got it started 5 years ago with it has been more than worthwhile.

But what do you think yourself? Would you be able to relate to this new experiment yourself as well? Specially, if you have started already that journey of reducing your dependency on email, is it something you can confirm yourself, having experienced similar results, although perhaps not at the same scale as what I have done and described above myself so far? Do you feel it’s a realistic conclusion altogether? I am not claiming it’s a rather scientific experiment, since it isn’t, but I’m starting to think that it could well prove accurate enough to confirm the ever significant impact of social technologies in the corporate world. 

The one thing that I do know now is that relying more and more on social networking tools for business to carry out my day to day work does make me much more productive and effective than whatever email claimed to be in the past. And that’s a good thing! Finally, the living proof is there! It’s all about working smarter, not necessarily harder. All along. It’s all about making it personal and making it work for you, just like I did for myself. And therefore the new moniker kicking in from now onwards…

Life Without eMail – The Community, The Movement

So, “where to next then?”, you may be wondering by now, right? Well, certainly, I am not going to stop here. Like I said, there is no way back anymore, but onwards! The movement is alive and kicking and we are going to take it into the next level with a couple of surprises I have got for you folks for sticking around following this initiative all along and for being so incredibly supportive over the course of time and for sharing along with me this fascinating journey. Hello and welcome to the Life Without eMail community. The Movement.

Last year’s progress report, you would remember, was rather massive, more than anything else, because I decided to summarise one whole year of progress with a substantial amount of interesting and relevant links about the impact of social networking tools on helping us reduce our dependency on email by a large margin. I talked as well about other companies attempting to do the same, as well as sharing plenty of interesting and relevant links on good practices on using social tools, or fine tuning the email experience to get the most out of it. 

Well, this year I am not going to do that. I still have got a bunch of top-notch resources, but instead of sharing them over here in this blog post I decided to eventually gather them all, and over the course of time, share them over at my Scoop.it account  that I am in the process of feeding it, as we speak, and where I will continue to add those links over time, so from here onwards you would be able to keep up to date with all of those relevant links I may bump into that would cover this topic of “Life Without eMail” from other people interested in the topic, or writing / talking about it, as well as including articles I may write myself, interviews I may conduct or public speaking events I may well do, so you could have them all in a single place. Starting already today! 

But the main surprise is another one I have got prepared for you folks. Plenty of people have been asking me over the course of the years whether there would be a central place where those #lawwe and social networking enthusiasts could gather together to share their own experiences, hints and tips, their know-how, lessons learned, and whatever other activities where they (we) could all learn from one another. And time and time again I have been telling folks there wasn’t a specific space. Till today. 

Indeed, along with Prof. Paul Jones, Paul Lancaster and Alan Hamilton, all really good friends and folks who have already embarked on freeing themselves up from the corporate / organisational email yoke as well, we have decided to put together a community space where we could hang out with other folks interested in this movement and help share our very own experiences, know-how, and plenty of practical hints and tips on what it is like having ditched work email for good. The original idea, and due credit, of course, is going to go to Alan Hamilton, who suggested to me some time last year to put together a community space where we could hang out. And while we couldn’t get it sorted out back then, too much going on, as usual, I guess it’s never too late, eh? So thanks ever so much, Alan, for triggering the thought of having an online community for us to get together!

And after much discussion and looking around for some really good solutions that may be available out there, we have all agreed to create this particular community space over in Google Plus Communities. So here’s the link to it: 

• Google Plus Community – Life Without eMail

We hope you would find the time to come and join us in the community, where all of us, me included, will be sharing plenty of our own experiences, as I mentioned above, on how to reduce our inbox clutter while we keep sharing some additional insights on what’s happening in the space of social networking, Social Business and, of course, Open Business and how they keep disrupting the corporate email driven world as we know it. Still today. Our main purpose is to help out knowledge workers become more open, transparent and collaborative through digital tools vs. just keep dragging along through an excessive and perhaps unnecessary abuse of our email habits. I can surely guarantee you it’s going to be a fun ride! 

So much so, that if you are really willing and committed to give it a try yourself we will be sharing with you some initial tips by which we can guarantee you that within the first 5 weeks, since you start, you would be able to see your incoming email volume getting reduced by over 80% and without hardly any effort, just applying some methodology I have developed over the course of time and which I am sure you would be able to follow with no problem since it isn’t rocket science, really, but just the trigger to break the chain and to, finally, have that rather rewarding and fulfilling sensation of owning your work, perhaps for the first time in a while! 

Will you join us? Remember, 80% reduction of incoming email in just 5 weeks! Here is the link again to the community to get you going and thanks ever so much, once again, for the continued support, for sticking around and for having made these 5 years quite an interesting, inspiring, exciting and rather refreshing time! 

Onwards into a Life Without eMail!

[In my next article on this topic, I will be writing about a rather interesting twist that I have gone through this year so far. A hard reset. A reboot from everything that I have done in the last 5 years… But that would be the story for another post soon enough…]

Meaning Conference Highlights – A Collaborative Future #lawwe

Not long ago I mentioned over here in this blog how one of the many reasons why I went through that extended blogging hiatus towards the end of 2012 was due to a rather intense business travelling schedule that took me on a tour of several different European countries to participate, as a speaker, on various conference events, customer meetings, enablement workshops and so forth. Intense is probably the right word to describe what it was like, but another one that I can think about would be memorable. I do have, indeed, plenty of fond memories about the vast majority of those events, but if there is one that has got a special place in my heart is that one event that kicked off last year and which raised the stakes incredibly high on its first edition to the point where it will always be in my thoughts not only because of the tremendously energising vibe it had all around it, throughout, but mainly because of the amazing experience of attending, speaking and participating in an event like no other in search for something that I am starting to feel we need nowadays more than ever: Meaning. 

Of course, I am talking about the Meaning 2012 conference event that took place in Brighton, UK, on October 1st and that three months later I am still remembering it as it were just yesterday. What an amazing event! Not only was the quality of the agenda and speakers top notch (I had the privilege of being one of them giving me a unique opportunity to continue learning from the greatest and the most unexpected), but the atmosphere around it was just electrifying and incredibly energising. The amount of hard work and the dedication to make things right, the incredibly warm sense of hospitality we enjoyed while in there, and the humanity shown throughout the entire event by folks, now really good friends, like Will McInnes and Lou Ash, along with the rest of the NixonMcIness team!, was absolutely a pure delight. Something other conference events should mimic and learn from a great deal! And all of that on their first edition! 

There have been several different blog posts, articles, references, highlights shared across by a good number of folks who attended the event, which have made it quite a rewarding experience going through as I am writing down this blog entry, remembering the wonderful event that we got exposed to over the course of a single day and, most importantly, the sharing of some of the most brilliant ideas we got to exchange and share openly not just from the speakers themselves, but also from people attending the event live with all of the networking that went on and on and on. A delightful experience all around! 

That’s why I couldn’t help resisting the urge to create this blog post where I could point folks to the recordings of the various different speakers, which you can find them all right over here, so that you could have a look and go through each and everyone of them. At your own pace, whenever you would want to. They are all worth it. Big time.

As usual, and like I have been doing over the last few months, I did a bunch of live tweeting from the event itself as well, and I then captured all of those annotations into a .PDF file that I uploaded into my Slideshare account for folks who may be interested in reading further what it was like experiencing the conference live. The direct link to it can be found over here. And here’s the embedded code in case you may want to flip through the pages as we speak: 

I had the privilege as well of being the last speaker of the day, wrapping up what was quite an amazing day that would be rather tough to forget in a long long time. Of course, I talked about one of my favourite topics from over the last 5 years: Living “A World Without eMail“. This time around expanding further on the notion of what a collaborative future may well look like and hold up for us with the emergence of social software tools in the corporate world. I got to talk about plenty of what I have been learning in the last 5 years after I started that movement, back in February 2008, which reminds me that we are getting close to that 5th year anniversary, where I have got a couple of lovely surprises packed up that I am sure folks who have been following this initiative all along would find rather interesting and surprising. But more on that later on…

For now, I thought, as a teaser, as perhaps an interim update from my last blog article on the subject (Yes, I know! I am long overdue an update on how things have been moving along, aren’t I? Well, coming up shortly!), I would go ahead and share the link to the recording over here, so that those folks who may be interested in the topic (It lasts for a little bit over 17 minutes), can have a look into it and watch at your own pace. I’m sure it will evoke a good number of questions and additional insights that I am more than happy to entertain and facilitate on the comments section below, so feel free to chime in as you may see fit, and stay tuned for that upcoming update on the progress report of what it has been like living ”A World Without eMail” in the last 12 months. Oh, and don’t worry, it’s not going to be as massively long as the last one. That’s where one of the surprises would kick in eventually … hehe

Here we go: 

Hope you folks would enjoy watching through it, just as much as the huge blast and true honour I had myself on stage delivering the speech.  The vibe in the audience was something that will be very hard for me to forget. Ever. And for that I am eternally grateful to both Will, Lou and the rest of the NixonMcIness team!, for their kind invitation and for making of Meaning something that I can just define with a single word: special! … [Truly special]

An enormous thank you, indeed, to everyone involved in making it happen!

Four Principles for the Open World by Don Tapscott #hippie2.0

For a good few weeks I had on my pending to-do list that action item of watching, I was told, one of of the most inspiring and thought-provoking TED Talks in recent times that would certainly not leave you indifferent for a long while. Yes, I was advised that it was that good. And I must admit that, after having just finished going through it in its entirety, having noticed as well how it’s been all over the place in the social streams out there, I wasn’t disappointed at all, on the contrary. Mind-boggling would fall short by far in describing how good it is. I would even go one step further and state that the Hippie 2.0 movement is alive and kicking. And I am, for sure, very grateful about that! More than anything else because of a single key concept that permeates throughout the TED Talk and which I have been advocating for a long while as one of the biggest advantages of making use of social technologies, whether for work or for personal use: Openness.

Indeed, I am talking about the recent TED Talk from Don Tapscott under the suggestive title “Four Principles for the Open World“, which lasts for nearly 18 minutes, and which talks quite a bit around some of the major key themes from social networking for business that have become some of my favourite topics as of late in the realm of Social Business: Openness and Collaboration in new, more powerful ways. 

Indeed, in that rather inspirational presentation Don brings up lots of wonderful insights and powerful messages around digital natives and digital immigrants, and our growing sense of no fear of technology which will certainly help inspire a good number of open interactions that perhaps in the recent past were not taking place. Now, I never bought personally into the whole argument behind digital natives and immigrants since I have always thought it was all about working styles and how you, as a business, could help accommodate accordingly, for those various different generations getting work done. Together. As a network, or as a community, interacting and collaborating with one another. But nevertheless his perspective is quite an interesting one, for sure!

What’s really fascinating though about Don’s TED Talk is how, over the course of nearly 18 minutes, he gets to talk about 4 core principles from social networking for business that would resonate, quite strongly, not only within the business world, but also within each and everyone of our societies, within each and everyone of us as human beings, and this is essentially what makes this presentation just delightful, but equally inspiring. 

Don’t worry, once again, I am not going to spoil the fun and share with you folks a summary of what Don talked about throughout that time. I would rather encourage you all though to go through it and watch it, but you probably will need to be ready to experience shivers going through up your spine, because I can surely guarantee you that you will have plenty of them! So without much further ado, here’s the embedded code of the Talk so you can start watching it right away: 

Not too bad for a Friday afternoon, don’t you think? Actually, not too bad for whatever time in the week you go ahead and watch through it. Absolutely brilliant stuff, to say the least! Now, as you can see from his pitch he gets to talk about 4 different core principles that are influencing rather strongly, not only the business world, but also our societies for that matter. And if there is anything that I have enjoyed the most from watching the video clip is the fact that, right there, you probably have got some of the most compelling reasons as to why we have passed, a long time ago, the point of no-return with regards to social technologies and how they are impacting the world. 

Thus I thought that to close off this blog post I would focus on quoting those 4 key principles and what I learned about them, as I watched Don go through his presentation. Basically, my own take as I feel you may be wondering what I think about each of those key principles, specially, in the context of Hippie 2.0, right? Now, the funny thing is that if you have been reading this blog for a while you would notice how this is not the first time that I have talked about each and everyone of those principles, so it would be interesting to see how Don’s pitch has changed my overall perception of those key themes. Let’s go! Let’s do it! 

Here they are … The Four Princples for the Open World:

1. Collaboration: Essentially, we are consciously evolving into a new business world, as well as a society, where there are no longer any boundaries in / throughout organizations, where the firewall (Even our very own personal one!) is soon going to become extinct and where hiding behind it is going to continue being frown upon as you would have something to hide, therefore not becoming trustworthy enough, which we all know of is not good for business.

   Talent is no longer inside of your organisation, but also outside, and, in fact, ALL OVER the place! So why neglect it or ignore it any longer when we are all starting to understand how the most powerful component of collaboration is that concept of co-creation? With your customers, clients, business partners, even with your own competitors. Remember? Social media, and social technologies for that matter, are all about social production where the main benefit is no longer on creating private value alone, but on creating a public one that will benefit everyone as part of that entire ecosystem. That’s why collaboration, specially, virtual collaboration through social networking tools is becoming so critical nowadays in a world that’s now more distributed and virtual than ever before. Still think your organisation could live by without breathing a collaborative corporate culture? Hummm, I don’t think so. Maybe 10 years ago that was possible, but definitely not today. And, most definitely, not tomorrow!
   
   

2. Transparency: This is a big one. A huge one, actually. Indeed, as Don mentioned institutions and organisations are getting naked, whether they like it or not. It’s no longer about providing good value and good products, but about having core values. Values that the entire organisation can live by every single day. Values that, without them, you won’t be able to build trust. And we all know how critical trust is in today’s day and age where without it we can no longer get work done. Do you still work the closest with people who you do not trust much? … I doubt it. And rightly so!

   I truly loved a particular quote that Don mentioned on this part of his speech and which are true words to live by in the Era of Transparency: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we need a lot of sunlight on this troubled world” (Somehow, it reminded me of wearing sunscreen, basically, be prepared before you go naked remembering who you are, what you do, what core business values you have and live them. Walk the talk…)
   
   

3. Sharing: This is probably one of the toughest to comply with, embrace and live through principles that Don talked about. Specially, in the business world. He basically talked about giving up on your (business) assets, your intellectual property. Think beyond the personal private business benefit into the more general, public one. The social good. Indeed, the original definition for Social Business. Failure to do so will represent a massive problem and a huge challenge not just for that business, but also for the overall humanity. And his account of what’s happening with the music industry as one of the worst examples of not being open to sharing, along with the pharmaceutical industry, are just mind-blowing, not only because of the impact upon themselves, but because of the overall impact in our society, specially, in the latter case, where, if they would want to survive themselves, and all of us, for that matter, they would need to share their assets in the commons before it is too late, looking out for that social good, which in this case would relate to giving up those assets for the well being of humanity. Some pretty serious stuff that would unfold in 12 months, according to Don. 12 months and the clock is ticking … 
   
   
4. Empowerment: And, finally, one of my favourite principles: Empowerment, which, in a certain way, would be pretty much related as well to Engagement, which has been one of my preferred topics to talk about lately, specially, after my last blog post on the topic. Don comments how both knowledge and intelligence are power, and how as they start to become more distributed thanks to the extensive use of social networking tools, (Yes, where “knowledge shared is power”) it will bring up something that it still amazes me that we are in 2012 and we don’t see enough of it all over the place: Freedom. And in all senses of the word. Very powerful messages in here from him for sure on how networks and communities, the good old wirearchy we are all already pretty familiar with, will be driving the emergence of that freedom in everything that we do, collaborate on, share across and participate in. Essentially, help us redefine not only how we do business, how we get work done, but also how we live as a society. Yes, I know what’s going through your mind at the moment as you read through these words… Hippie 2.0 overload!! Oh, yes, I know! I love it, too! And about time, don’t you think?

From there onwards, Don takes us all towards the end of an amazing presentation with a delightful and very beautiful trip down the memory lane of us, human beings, as a culture, as a civilization, and over the course of centuries by stating what openness meant for all of us in each of the various different stages, and which we may have forgotten already: The Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age, and what he calls the Age of Networked Intelligence. The latter being of vast promise. The new power of the Commons, the one for which we no longer can see the point of no return. The one from which we just can’t go back, nor get off the train. Far too immersed on it. 

And this is the point when beauty and an unprecedented sense of wonderment got on stage, because right then Don talked about the whole concept of “There is Leadership, but not one leader” as he showed the absolutely stunning example of immense flocks of starlings, up in Scotland, preparing to roost at dusk, which is probably one of the most beautiful reminders of the true power of nature that we have got the privilege to witness and enjoy every single day that goes by: 

Yes, indeed, there is leadership, but not one leader. Nowadays, more than ever, there is a strong, growing, real sense of interdependence, amongst all of us, whether doing work together, or whether we all are part of a single unique society, us, human beings, where we are also finally coming to terms with a key message that we just cannot ignore anymore in today’s financial econoclypse: “Business can’t succeed in a world that’s failing“… Think about the kids of today, i.e. your kids, and think where you would want them to be tomorrow. Couldn’t we create some kind of collective intelligence, that we share together, creating that global awareness and consciousness that would help build a much better, sustainable, generous, respectful, caring, transparent, collaborative, sharing and empowered world for them? Think of it, what will be the legacy we will leave them with that they will talk about in say 30 to 50 years from now? Today’s world, or tomorrow’s networked, interconnected, brilliant future? 

Our choice to make. Not theirs.