Openness as Strategy: Leading Open Knowledge Communities
We live in a world where information and communication technologies have confronted us with new logics of collective action that allow new forms of organizing knowledge and that need new forms of strategic thinking. With the digitization of value creation and the ability to collaborate on value creation across space and time, we have been able to move from a one-to-many, or mass society, to a many-to-many, or network society – knowledge communities have become the fundamental building bloc of our society.
A reduction in the transaction costs of collaboration to the level that is possible with many-to-many media, allows new forms of organizations that collaborate openly by sharing knowledge in value chains across space and time. Such open value chains need new forms of organizational strategy and leadership if they shall live up to their promise. There are several examples of great leadership of Open Knowledge Communities, Jimbo Wales, Linus Torvalds, or Ory Okolloh come to mind. However, there is not yet much thinking about how to teach the principles of such leadership. There is some writing on the new logic of many-to-many society and there are some very practical how-to-guides, however, what is missing is a fundamental reflection on what strategy will look like in a many-to-many world. In philosophical terms, we are missing a realistic perspective on the fundamental transformation we are experiencing. In keynotes and seminars, I have expressed this need with the question, „what would Machiavelli suggest to us in an open knowledge society?“
by Phillipp Mueller on June 30th at 19:00 in Track I
Philipp S. Mueller is business development director public sector at CSC (www.csc.com), director of the Center for Public Management and Governance of the Business School (SMBS) of University of Salzburg and member of the steering committee of the Google Collaboratory for Internet and Society. From 2007 to 2010, he was visiting professor at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. Until July 2007 he was a professor and director of the Master’s in Public Administration at the Graduate School for Public Administration and Public Policy of Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico (EGAP – Tec de Monterrey), and before 2003, senior research associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. In his research, he focuses on the interactions between information technologies, strategy, and leadership. His first academic publication on ICTs, strategy, and public policy was in the ACM-Journal Database of Information Systems in 2003, a high impact Journal in the information sciences. He has published the monograph, Unearthing the Politics of Globalization (LIT 2004), the edited volume, Criticizing Global Governance (Palgrave MacMillan 2005) and is finishing Open Statecraft – Strategy in a Many-to-Many World (Scoventa 2011). He teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, Erfurt University, Universidad de los Andes, Ludwig-Maximilians University, and Zeppelin University. He consults major Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, and government’s worldwide on strategic issues. His blog can be found at www.shapingnetworksociety.com, his twitter handle is @philippmueller.
Rufus Pollock
Daniel Dietrich
Jason Kitcat
Sebastian Hellmann
Lucy Chambers
Hauke Gierow