Read This Book: “Life, Inc”

As part of my research into the Connected Age, and why business needs to be more human, I came across Douglas Rushkoff’s “Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World And How to Take It Back.” This is an important, eye-opening book. Rushkoff is a akin to Neo in the Matrix, seeing through our societal behavior [...]

…and there’s no way that Ticketmaster is Connected

An article in today’s NY Times talks about how the man who was instrumental for growing Ticketmaster to be the value-draining behemoth we all hate is now spearheading a competitor that aims to return ticketing to the specific venues. Ticketmaster is most definitely a hanger-on from an earlier era, and it’s inevitable that startups will [...]

Textbook publishers are most definitely not ready for the Connected Age

This article is about a month old, I know, but still worth pointing to: Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math. It’s an excellent example of how, when you engage in approaches that are suitable to the Connected Age, you can make serious inroads. Textbook publishers are among the most backwards businesses you can imagine, sadly [...]

Success without advertising – a sign you are Connected

Steven Johnson tweeted this morning: It’s remarkable how the defining brands of the decade (Twitter/FB/GOOG) reached that prominence with basically zero traditional advertising. It made me think that a sure sign of a Connected Age company is one that succeeds without traditional advertising.

Book Review: The Most Human Human (in short: read it!)

After seeing the an interview with author on The Daily Show, and reading a glowing notice in The New Yorker, I made a priority of finishing The Most Human Human before I ended family leave. It’s a delightful and discursive book, wending its way through cognitive science, philosophy, poetry, artificial intelligence, embodied experience, and more. [...]

The “Connected” Meme Flourishes

At the beginning of March, I gave a talk where I posit that we are in a “Connected Age” and that business must alter its practices accordingly. Shortly after, I find out that Dave Gray had recently written a blog post about the Connected Company, which then turned into its own blog, and Google Group. [...]

Thoughts on CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

Thanks to paid family leave, Stacy and I were able to duck out to a matinee of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in 3D… with an 8-week-old in tow! The subject matter of the film, the prehistoric art on the walls of the Chauvet Cave, is heartstoppingly powerful. Bearing witness to creative and communicative output that [...]

As things get trickier, we need to get more human

Earlier, I wrote that the Information Age was simply an extension of the Industrial Age, as the introduction of computation further entrenched bureaucratic values. One key way that the Information Age differed from the Industrial Age was the development of complexification. Electro-mechanical things have a certain limit to just what they can do. Embed them [...]

From Industrial/Information Age to Connected Age

I am endlessly frustrated by how we cling to 19th and 20th century paradigms for conducting business in the 21st century. When it comes to business, much of what we take for granted, which we assume to be just how things are, were actually purpose-built, beginning in the Industrial Age. Before then, you had a [...]

Breaking Free From the Iron Cage: Business in the Connected Age

Given the nature of my work, the lens through which I tend to look at things is about how can organizations deliver great experiences. Most people, when thinking about experience design, focus on execution — design and development. And while quality execution is crucial, it’s also the most straightforward element. It requires skill, talent, and [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz