I get so frustrated with shiny balls approach to Social Media - Tie some 2.0 shiny balls onto your hard 1.0 organization. Coopt the tools to continue being a manipulator.

Here Lee speaks the truth. The reality of a Social Enterprise is that it is not a manipulator. It is an organism that facilitates you getting what you need.

Being mean about this it demands a cultural rebirth. It demands that what and how you do things inside enables you to do this outside.

Lee reminds us that to change ourselves takes more than will, as anyone who had given up eating bad food or smoking knows. It demands that we set up new habits. That we do things differently. So a workplace that still meets, communicates and interacts in a top down, silo laden, hierarchical manner is going to fail.

So what do we do to make a change? How do we create these new habits?

Install the tools and processes of a 2.0 culture inside and get good at this.

You must not put new wine into old bottles.

I am beginning to think that corporatism is the root of much evil.

It starts by focusing on profit above all else. There is nothing wrong with making a profit, as I even try to do this, so that I can feed and clothe my family. The problem begins when you do this “above all else”. When corporations were granted rights of persons, without any social or moral obligations, we started down a slippery slope as a society. Now we have too many people making their livings on behalf of a disembodied entity that only wants to make profit.

Add to this amoral mix the notion that ideas can be owned and patented. For instance, software programs, consisting of nothing more than lines of code, are ideas. So now we have an information society, moving into a knowledge society, where some greedy people think that corporations should own ideas and make profits off these ideas for a very long time. The problem is that we cannot grow as a society without the free flow of ideas. Patenting ideas will slow down our collective ability to learn. However, the US Patent Office thinks that it is a good thing to protect ideas, as do other national patent offices.

Take for instance a software company that has bought and borrowed ideas from multiple public sources (processes, code, how-to) and put a brand on it and called it a unique idea. So far, no one has taken the idea to patent the concept of zero and stop further development of any computer programs (see The People Who Owned the Bible, for another analogy). In the case of computer code or ideas, it is impossible to say where the original idea started. In the case of ideas, pretty well everything is based on some prior art.

We can see the Counter Reformation of the Corporate World today as they use Copyright as their main attack. Think Harlod exaggerates? Do you not know what is going on in the UK? Here is JP on this http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2010/04/05/the-digital-economy-bill-be-careful-...