When Toby Moores and I were chatting many moons ago about the ideas that eventually became Amplified ‘08 I yet again got really excited about the possibilities for business of applying “small pieces loosely joined” principles. 

If, as I do, you believe that business is about using collective energy to do something and get paid for it then any way of engaging that energy is legitimate. We have been “extracting”, “exploiting”, and “sweating” our “assets” for long enough – how do you do things when you have to entice people to get involved and make your businesses sticky enough to retain smart people who can increasingly move elsewhere or do their own thing?

I often use a quote from the management guru Peter Drucker to get across the problem:

In a knowledge economy there are no such things as conscripts – there are only volunteers. The trouble is we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.

But do you end up with a mess when you have a bunch of volunteers? Do people suddenly turn into misbehaving imbeciles when the constraint of command and control is removed?

I believe that with the increased communications available to us through the web we have the potential to invent whole new ways of running businesses. The energy attracted by the various groups which have formed the basis for Amplified is testimony to the willingness to congregate round ideas and smart people. Can we work out how to do more with this energy? Could we run businesses in ways more appropriate to this new environment? 

Could we run a piss up in a brewery?