Swarm Creativity Blog

The Idea Ever since Facebook rolled out pages in 2007, it has become very easy for users to show their interest in music, film, books, artists and other entities in various categories by clicking the "like" button on a specific facebook page. Most of the time, the inform ation about your personal “likes” is not protected automatically and therefore can therefore accessed by everyone, even if not logged in. We know that Mark Zuckerberg likes the Yankees and is a fan of Jay-Z, but that might just be of interest to his friends or People magazine. But there is much more information that we can infer from the social graph. Can Barack Obama know about the preferred beverages or favorite books of his fans? He can! ...but he probably doesn' t care. With the information provided by Facebook’s social graph it is easy to identify connections between books, films or brands - without conducting a survey. The Data Building a network by linking two pa ges, depending on the frequ...

I think that time has come to fundamentally rethink the way we train and reward managers. While social entrepreneurship has become a popular buzzword at management schools, and Andrew Cuomo, the new governor of the state of New York asked all his senior staff to take an ethics class in the first sixty days of his tenure, this is still just lip service. My proposal is far more radical: Make managers redundant! Let me explain what I mean. 4 Motivational Phenotypes of Knowledge Workers When trying to understand the behavior and motivation of knowledge workers, it helps to group them into four phenotypes. These four types of knowledge workers, vastly differing in skill set and motivation, are: (1) the artists, (2) the scientists, (3) the teachers, and (4) the managers. Artists want to create something new and beautiful, to touch the lives of people interacting with their art. Whether it is painters, sculptors, actors, singers, or orchestra musicians, they do what they do mostly not becau...