Hoxton Street Monster Supply Store interior (photo: www.monstersupplies.org)

At Labs we like nothing more that creativity put to good use (reference our love for ichainsaws, gloves, design-led activism and fightwear with a social mission). Chuck in some Mortal Terror and we’re yours.

With the recent launch of their online shop, www.monstersupplies.org, our friends at Hoxton Street Monster Supplies have extended what is essentially an imaginative, immaculately designed fund-raising platform. It’s all in aid of Ministry of Stories, a creative writing non-profit which is supported by all proceeds from the shop.

If you need to stock up on Zombie Fresh Mints or my personal favourite, a tin of “A Vague Sense of Unease”, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies is the site for you.

A Vague Sense Of Unease, available at http://www.ministryofstories.org/

And, hey, the holidays are upon us, so satisfy the buying-spree beast within with a little monster-based goodness – just make sure you get your order in by this Friday 1pm (GMT), if you want to make last orders before Christmas.

Behind the shop at 159 Hoxton Street, through a hidden door, the Ministry of Stories exists to help young people in East London learn how to be storytellers. Which, as @jeremyet always likes to say, is where the magic happens.

Ministry of Stories Writer (photo: http://www.ministryofstories.org/)

You can shop online here or volunteer to help at the Ministry of Stories here.

Credits:

The website was created “by a small group of unpaid humans in their spare time”: design by Gavin and Jason Fox, build by Simon Pearson, project management by Chris Meachin, user experience by Mike Towber; and art direction by We Made This.

monstersupplies.org

It’s nearly impossible these days to conduct any relationship entirely offline. Professional relationships are managed on email, Linkedin, and blogs; brands develop robust relationships with us through online loyalty schemes; friendships are built and maintained through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to name a few; and more and more people are meeting their romantic partners via online dating sites.

So I suppose I shouldn’t have been particularly surprised the other day when I came across a set of start-ups in the area of online relationship management for couples. These businesses claim to help us keep the spark alive, monitor our relationship health and generally be happier together by using their online services. Here are a couple in detail:

• Tokii claims to be ‘the world’s first relationship management platform’ with a suite of products designed to ‘proactively improve relationships’. Couples can use the ‘tradingpost’ tool to trade things like washing the car for a backrub, monitor each others mood through the ‘moodmeter’ and spice up their relationship with fun, interactive games.

• The Icebreak helps couples keep their love lives fresh and fun through a game-like platform where couples score points by sharing moments from their day, answering ‘icebreaker’ questions and working together to improve their relationship health.

In many ways, these businesses signal a natural progression to complete management of relationships online. If most of our relationships are blossoming online, why not throw our romantic ones into the digital world as well?

Whether I’d personally use the service or not (undecided, at best), I have to admire the Zag-like thinking behind these businesses. They’ve identified an opportunity area that appears ripe for brand invention – you can see how by looking at the idea through these three key principles of brand invention and innovation:

Principle #1. Meet a consumer need

If romance is blossoming online (Match.com claims 1 in 5 relationships start through online dating), people will need a safe place for their relationship to develop digitally. Consumer need? Tick.

Principle #2. Go where the money is

Online dating is a growing business, as is the booming business of divorce. A digital service that helps keep the spark alive and maintain relationship health in the time between meeting and potential divorce could slot right in to this open space and scoop up all those struggling couples. Money? Tick.

Principle #3. Piggyback on existing behaviours

Self-tracking and the gamification of everyday activities are both hot behavioural trends currently connecting our ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds. Tokii and The Icebreak both feature metrics and statistics that chart the health of your relationship over time and track improvement. They also reward you for improving your relationship with points and physical rewards, making working on your relationship like a game. Existing behaviours? Tick.

It’s not easy to find open spaces for brand invention and I’d argue that these two businesses have managed to do just that. Well done.

But perhaps there’s a bigger, moral question that has to be asked: There’s now a brand called Eulogy in the UK  which aims to bring death and mourning into the online/social sphere; there are countless online dating brands to help you find love; online brands help couples throughout the process of marriage counselling and divorce; and now we can manage our romances online too.

So, are there any areas of private life that should remain private and untouched by brands?

Click here to view the embedded video.

We love businesses that turn our expectations positively on their head. Luke Dowdney, the founder of the charity Fight For Peace, did exactly that when he came in to see us about the launch of a new clothing brand, LUTA (@lutaclothing). Check out the trailer above, directed by Seb Edwards at Academy Films, for a powerful introduction.

Founded with the support of private investment, LUTA is a “collection of fightwear, trainingwear and streetwear that brings together real fight performance, favela style and a genuine social mission”.  We’ve been working with Luke behind the scenes and so went along to hear him tell the story behind the brand at its launch last week, which was held at Fight For Peace’s East London academy.  LUTA aims to be a brand built on favela spirit – “Real Strength” is its motto – quality performance clothing to compete with established brands and also on the basis of a 50% profit share scheme.  That’s to say that LUTA pays as much of its profits to Fight For Peace as it pays its shareholders. ‘Even if the brand doesn’t pay its shareholders a profit in any given year, it will still pay FFP a minimum of £10,000 for that year, ensuring that its support is stable and ongoing.’

Brazilian national boxing champion and LUTA ambassador: Roberto Custódio (left) began his boxing career through training with Fight For Peace. Photos courtesy of LUTA, via Flickr

The model here is social entrepreneurship which we’re seeing more and more of – from Rockcorps channelling the power of music and celebrity to make volunteering a part of youth lifestyle, to TOMS matching each pair of shoes purchased with a pair given to a child in need. We’re seeing, too, more and more mainstream brands seeking to put their mission statements into action on the ground, often through social and CR initiatives.

What’s interesting with LUTA, however, is the reversal of that model: the ‘philanthrocapitalism’ of this potentially lucrative, profit-driven brand.

Idris Elba, star of HBO’s The Wire, supporting the launch of LUTA clothing

What could marketers – non-profits or otherwise – learn from the approach Luke is taking?

It strikes us that charities often go about securing donations by capitalising on either our compassion or on our resolve to remove the awkward guilt that ensues when we turn away from a good cause. We need to know the story behind the charity first though, in order to feel moved enough to do something about it. And it follows that, to get people to listen, conventional charities need to be opportunists in their approach to securing donations. The flow of income may be unpredictable, making it difficult to plan projects.  What’s more, a ‘landmark’ Harvard Business Review article, published two decades ago, describes the flaws in charitable foundations.  These include the finding that little effort is devoted to measuring results, and that these foundations have unjustifiably high admin costs.  That article has been repeatedly cited, years later, to bring home the fact that even though the flaws are widely acknowledged, not much has changed.

In the conventional charity model, endorsing the perception of their beneficiaries as victims may be necessary in order to incite charitable motivation. But this also, however unwittingly, can further remove potential supporters from the reality of their plight, so that those who could/do donate feel more like outsiders watching from afar.

Idris and the Fight For Peace Youth Council

In the case of LUTA, it’s a very different story.

LUTA focuses on the quality of its clothing in order to make it a credible competitor to existing brands. The fact that half the profits go to a good cause simply adds incentive to a purchase that would, regardless, have still been considered.  This seems to make more sense in terms of behavioural economics.  We instinctively avoid guilt and chase inspiration. So, instead of encouraging people to give, literally, for pity’s sake, it’d be more effective instead to stir action-provoking emotion through an aspirational brand that embraces themes of determination and hope.

Are there other learnings we’ve missed or other great examples? We’d love to hear about them if so. In the meantime, enjoy Academy Films’ powerful film made to promote LUTA:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A little about Luke:

Luke Dowdney MBE is a social anthropologist and former amateur boxer from East London, he’s spent the past decade establishing and running the Fight For Peace boxing and education academy in the Complexo da Maré, one of the biggest agglomerations of drug gang-controlled favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

Luke speaking at the LUTA launch

Fight for Peace offers youths in favelas an alternative to becoming involved in organized armed violence. It offers the opportunity for them to gain strength and self-respect through the discipline of martial arts, as well as providing them with supplementary education and preparation for the job market.  He’s since opened another FFP academy – this time in East London – with the aim of continuing to grow internationally.

Image by Eistean, via Flickr

I suspect innovation, or more specifically, how we deliver it, is a topic that’ll continue to cause debate in any creative industry worth its salt, for the simple reason that innovation isn’t an ‘add-on to what we all do, it is the decades-old bedrock of our existence: asking audiences to see their world in new ways, seeking new routes to communicate, shining a light on invention. We may embrace co-creation and recombinant culture, but our industry still worships at the altar of originality. Who of us doesn’t want to do ground-breaking stuff? Inevitably, it follows that the very idea of “innovation transcending functional expertise“ can feel like a total anathema.

Certainly, my immediate response to the questions about Chief Innovation Officers and agency labs is pretty simple: in most cases, I wouldn’t appoint someone to the job.

I say this for three reasons:

a. Few agencies aspire to operate close enough to the “bleeding edge” to justify the cost.
b. As others have commented in the past, the hiring of a CIO all too often represents an abdication of a management team’s responsibility to lead change.
c. It’s a tight rope walk of a job. Incredibly easy to slip off.

And yet…for the people with the appetite to try it, here are a couple of thoughts on why, when and how we *might* make it work:

1. Start by picking your company carefully.

Oddly, it’s at the extreme ends of the spectrum of corporate health that this role may be most useful: at the hellish end where a company is wallowing in a stagnant backwater, the short term appointment a CIO could help signal a fresh agenda. At the opposite end, when an agency has grown too big to sit around one table yet retains a forward-looking culture, a CIO can play a powerful, much more strategic role. More on this below.

2. Demonstrate the value of exploring the ‘edges’.

Make sure everyone around you (that’s the whole agency, not just management) are on board with the commercial and creative advantage your role can bring. Summarised, the task is to explore and exploit the opportunities at the “edges” of your business, as described in a related FT.com article from earlier this year:

“Edges could involve new product introductions, expansion into new markets, or the launch of entirely new business propositions…the edges of companies are generally more open to change and the adoption of new technologies, because they face more unmet needs and fewer established routines. The people who are attracted to edges tend to be less risk-averse, as well….Longer term, edge initiatives have the potential to become the new core of the enterprise.”

3. Think while you make, make while you think

We all need time to reflect, but you can’t begin to prove the real value (to yourself, to anyone around you) described above if you’re not getting your hands dirty. To quote Alan Wolk commenting on Ben’s post, “working on real projects and helping introduce new ideas into agency culture” is a given. Be a thinker AND a maker.

4. Don’t buy “innovation is the CEO’s job” for a second

It’s also the CEO’s job to take ultimate responsibility for the financial performance of the business, but very few companies would question the need for a CFO. CIO is still a new role so it’s under particular scrutiny. The challenge for any CEO is running a core business whilst staying abreast of change that’s constant and shows no sign of slowing down. Having a scout – or a team of scouts -ahead of the wagons simply lends foresight.

5. Be a muscle, not a limb.

You will spend a large proportion of your time on the outside of the agency, seeking out the new. In doing this, keep in mind you are at the service of the agency and its clients, not an entirely separate enterprise. You’ll find you automatically look at the world through a “will this be useful to us commercially and creatively in future?” lens, versus disappearing entirely from view.

6. Face income.

This is the ultimate test of value: will a client pay for it, now or later? At Labs we have a foot in both camps. Experimenting with some stuff than frankly we barely understand AND working with fee-paying clients in areas that are still emerging but with strong indications they will make a return.

7. Be generous.

Give everything you learn away. Other people will make it better or think of something you didn’t imagine. You will be repaid tenfold down the road.

8. Stay weird.

If there aren’t a couple of people looking at you askance about the more experimental stuff you’re doing and thinking, you’re probably not doing it right. Part of this is about immersing yourself in a very diverse set of external influences, see point 9.

9. Head out into the wild.

We are herd animals, we like hanging out together, swapping stories. So let’s do that. But also let’s make sure we spend time outside the industry. Some of the most outstanding sources of stimuli, the innovation that is inventing new categories, melting down old industries and rebuilding them, is happening well outside the area code of adland. Work with start ups, look at the spaces between industries, beg, borrow or steal a ticket to an event no-one else you know is heading to, examine the unlikeliest of sources, study markets in growth.

Back to the questions of agency labs or Chief Innovation Officers – do we really need ‘em? My answer now is “Yes, if your agency is wholeheartedly committed to being ahead of the curve”. Agencies must answer that question first.

Today sees the launch of The Black Sheep Fund – which we believe is the first venture capital fund of its kind. It is a venture between Zag (BBH’s brand invention business) and Spark Ventures – the London based VCs that backed start up phenomena including lastminute.com, Kobalt Music, notonthehighstreet.com and Moshi Monsters.

The background is increasingly obvious: There is a dearth of seed funds for start ups. If things feel tighter than they used to be in the States – then it is ten times harder to raise money in Europe right now. The banks demand personal guarantees for business loans (!), and institutions are incredibly risk averse. If you are proven entrepreneur with a string of successful exits under your belt, then you will get by. But if you are young, hungry and full of belief in your big idea – you might well get nowhere. The thing we spotted was that the next big digital business is just as likely to come from new entrepreneurs – and that is why we set up this fund.

The premise is simple: We offer a unique cocktail of business building and brand building  in one investment package. All VC’s invest cash and sit on boards. Our fund will do this plus it will help to ensure the business captures the imaginations and loyalties of consumers too. We call it ‘creative capital’. We aim to invest this creative capital in businesses that intersect consumers, technology and content. Examples would include smart new social tools, disruptive e-retailing concepts or contagious GPS games. The portfolio will be broad so long as the role of the brand is business critical. The Fund was announced today in the Financial Times, and we already have our foundation funds in place. Over the next quarter we will be meeting prospective start ups and raising the rest of the fund – targeting £10m GBP.

The invitation is open: If you or anyone you  know is currently sitting on a great start up idea that they plan to take to market – then do consider the Black Sheep Fund on your short list of VC’s. We are primarily a UK based fund, but we are idea led – and a good enough idea with the right management could be invested in overseas. And, if you are an angel, with a growing desire to re-enter or join in the start up scene, then do get in touch for more information. The fund will qualify as an Enterprise Incentive Scheme (EIS) – which the UK government made increasingly attractive in the Budget last week.

Get in touch: fund@bbh.co.uk

For more on the Black Sheep Fund, BBH and Spark Ventures:

ZAG, a wholly owned subsidiary of BBH, is focused on brand invention.  We invent brands by exploiting brand lags – where consumer activity outpaces brand activity.  The trick of course is not only scouring technology, media, breaking trends, and cultural & consumer insights for what consumers want and need, but then uniquely satisfying those needs in a delightful and profitable way.

ZAG is fortunate because via BBH we have a unique network of collaborators who provide expertise in areas fertile for brand invention.  Now, ZAG NY is looking to extend that network beyond the BBH walls and tap an even larger bevy of creators, innovators, entrepreneurs, and anyone else with a brilliant idea.

This slideshare serves as an official call for ideas which will be formally evaluated this November to feed the 2011 pipeline.  While we’ll entertain ideas throughout the year, this marks one of three annual formal reviews that will garner the most focused attention from the ZAG team.  Pitches will be heard live or by phone/skype/virtual meeting starting week of November 8th.

To stay up to date on ZAG news and thought starters follow our Blog.

(Presentation is best viewed by clicking MENU and FULL SCREEN)

Over the last few years I dedicated my ‘extra’ time to understanding and cultivating the theory, articles and case studies surrounding propagation planning. I shared everything I learned on my Blog. By sharing, others contributed and the ideas got better.

Sharing and generosity are very important in the advertising industry today. They make all of us better. As they say, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Edward Boches, who is in the process of formalizing propagation planning at Mullen, wrote a great post this week asking a provocative question, “Do you give content away because you want credit?” For me, I give content away to become a member of the club. A club of strategic planning minds that contribute everyday to a greater collective. This club is made up of so many people that I couldn’t possibly name them all here… but you know who you are.

So I was thrilled when Mark Lewis and the Planning-Ness conference asked if Mike Monello (Co-Founder at Campfire) and I would share our thoughts on propagation planning. I hope that you can take something away from this deck and inspire your creative and social media teams to develop work that gets spread.

(Best viewed by clicking MENU and FULL SCREEN)

Image Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

I have returned from the promise land, a place of myth and fable among ad agencies. We have many names for this place but I tend to call it… upstream.

It’s a question we as an industry often ask ourselves: “How can we get more upstream in our client’s business?” and this isn’t an uncommon theme here on the Labs blog (if you’re interested in reading some related material, check out Ben’s post So What Exactly Might Adaptive Brand Marketing Be? and Mel’s Marketing Mashup).

We’re just wrapping up a consulting project with a client where we had the opportunity to work more upstream than agencies typically work. We were asked to help a client develop an investor presentation that would allow them to raise funds to hire an ad agency. Before I get into that story I wanted to take a step back and share how agencies move upstream and what steps need to come first.

1. Moving from Execution to Strategy:

Having a dedicated strategic planning department is the first step. This isn’t as easy as it sounds for all agencies. Many agencies in smaller ad markets want to hire planners but struggle to find them. As an industry we have done a poor job training and cultivating young planners over the last 10 years, which I believe is the reason we have a shortage of Senior Planners in the States today.

The question inevitably comes up… Can we cross-train somebody to be our planner? I have worked with many strategic account managers and the biggest difference between an account manager and an account planner is the time planners get to think about strategy. It’s hard to be conceptual and strategic when your time is filled with other aspects of agency business like hounding the client to sign production estimates.

Being strategic by itself isn’t enough to hold your own as a planner. Schools like VCU and Miami Ad School help with this transition. They provide the fundamentals of research, moderation and creative inspiration. Some of the best cross-trained planners that I have met include Pam Scott who worked at Goodby years ago, and Laura Scobie who currently works at Fallon.

2. Moving from Strategy to R&D:

In the agency world we are told that meeting with the ad agency should be your clients best meeting of the week. However many brand managers might say meeting with the R&D folk makes the best meeting of the week. Some industries are more prone to employing brand managers that get excited about R&D than others. In my experience these categories include Toys, Consumer Package Goods, Casual Dining Restaurants and Technology to name a few.

Sometimes strategic and creative time is best spent thinking of new product or service innovations for clients. Ad agencies have developed amazing innovations for clients, and I think the best example of this is the Happy Meal for McDonalds. Just this week I heard CP+B is testing a new product for Kraft Mac and Cheese for the Grill.

3. Moving from R&D to Venture Capital:

Like I mentioned at the beginning, BBH Zag is helping a technology start-up develop an investor presentation. The goal of presentation is to raise a large sum of money that will allow them to hire an agency, be first to mass market and own this developing category.

Rarely do agencies get a chance to work this far upstream with a brand because the resource and time risk is too great. However, if agencies want to live in a world where ideas rule, there is no other place like venture capital. Understanding how to pitch an idea in 30 minutes or less, understanding what investors have to see and correctly size the marketplace for new market categories are unusual assignments for most agencies.

MIT has a program that teaches students how to pitch venture capitalists and if you do some searching on YouTube you’ll find videos that get students excited about the program like this one:

These are just a few thoughts. We don’t have all the solutions and would like to hear what you think: Do agencies belong upstream? Have we earned the right to be more than a vendor… to be a true client partner? Are we professional enough to make commercial recommendations? Do we demonstrate daily a habitual, deep-rooted interest in their business? Are there other ways for agencies to find themselves upstream?

There were a ton of good ideas (others) and some a little more loony (mine). For what it’s worth I’m sharing my provocation here because, as always, we’re interested in hearing what others think. A round-up of the rest of the day will be shared soon.

In a nutshell, my provocation began with the question: if clients only pay for the things they can’t do themselves, what does that mean when we work in a real-time, social web world?

A bit of context first.

We’re all familiar with this behaviour now, sure. Its relevance in terms of client-agency ways of working is perhaps even more obvious: ‘baton passing’ doesn’t work. The old linear model where there were distinct lines between client and agency are now blurring:

Many of us may baulk at the idea that ‘Creative’ sits as a shared task… but thinking about brands marketing themselves in a social web context – where the content is often real-time and personal – how many brands are exclusively outsourcing their voice on Facebook and Twitter, say (and/or will continue to do so)?

With all the blurring and collaboration, not to mention the warp speed with which we all need to work, comes a need for agencies to keep an eye on the value and difference they bring. To repeat: Clients pay for the things they cannot do themselves. Add economic pressure to the mix and you cannot help but think that too much duplication is unsustainable.

This led to a proposal of two, deliberately stark alternative models (super extreme to make the point – you get the idea):

There are of course some less disruptive alternatives, more on this below. But considering those two extremes for a second, we ended with the following questions:

Back to the alternatives: of course there are some agency-client relationships that are experimenting with nimble new approaches set up precisely to thrive in a constantly changing, connected world. Apple and TBWA Media Arts Lab are a (well-established) example, our own relationship in BBH NY with Google Creative Lab another. Victors & Spoils, the IdeaLists and more recently Alternative Genius are of course adopting entirely new models.

We’d love to hear what you think on this. What will characterise the brand team of the future? Outsourced, in-house or a perfectly spliced, collaborative client-agency team with complementary yet different skills?

***

Thanks again to Paul, Belinda and everyone we met on the day. Looking forward to seeing you at Curious 02..

'Frenzy' by Amayu, courtesy of Flickr

“The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.” Landon Kettlewell, fictional CEO Kodak/Duracell in Cory Doctorow’s “Makers”

I’ve finally finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel “Makers” and – like a lot of people I suspect – needed to take a little break afterward to put my brain back together again. It’s the usual Doctorow high octane cocktail: stuffed full of imaginative near-future action & immutable human frailty, at times the plot veers close to depicting a post-capitalist, economic Armageddon. I’m not going to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it by saying more.  Instead, against an ever-increasing backdrop of recent pieces examining crowdsourcing (here are two of our own, here and here), I wanted to dig quickly into a single thought that the book provoked in me within its first few pages.

What if, instead of thinking about sourcing from the crowd, we reverse engineer that thought. In other words, why not send the company out into the crowd?

As Doctorow’s character Kettlewell (more force of nature than human being) puts it:

“Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field …capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our business to start. Our company isn’t a project that pull together on, it’s a network of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and the krill will strain through our mighty maw and fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a company any more: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility.”

In our world, we regularly talk about the agency of the future being a ‘networked’ agency, if it isn’t already. It’s not who you employ on the payroll, it’s who those people are connected to on the outside. Only Superman can ‘do it all’ at warp speed, the rest of us need strong, mutual partnerships and a bucket of caffeine. Well-managed crowdsourcing takes that a step further, enabling a kind of controlled serendipity: potentially speeding the process to commercial & creative gain. Co-creation is a strand of crowdsourcing that can lead to physical production in many cases – think Nike ID and the rest. At the root of both is a flattening or democratizing of media and, to some degree, production.

As an aside, this is something John Willshire @willsh takes on a (significant) step in his presentation for the Battle of Big Thinking, where he talks eloquently about social production. On flicking around the interwebs as you do before you start to put fingers to keyboard, I discovered that Faris – of course – has already linked Makers and Willsh’s presentation with an excellent piece in praise of fabbers (the 3D printers that feature heavily in Doctorow’s new book and an innovation that also gets a nod in Willsh’s presentation), with the conclusion that:

“As Wilsh points out, we are moving towards the technologies necessary for social production….Anything that exists digitally can be copied and distributed at zero cost, and once everyone has a  fabber [3D printer], a new type of industrial revolution seems inevitable.”

Indeed. Alex Bogusky and John Winsor also talk about democratizing prototyping in Baked In and the impact that can have on how a company actually behaves. This leads back to my initial thought here, which is less about 3D printing per se and a lot more to do with the radical re-structuring of an organization. When technology has enabled ‘company culture’ (think the connections between people brought together for a commercial purpose) to exist outside of four square walls, knowledge to be shared instantly, timezone differences used to increase not hinder corporate efficiency etc -  isn’t it time we start really living the dream of the networked enterprise? Empowering small, autonomous, nimble teams to go out and source the next solution?

This isn’t just a way to reinvent red-blooded western capitalism (check out the comments on Tor.com where Makers was serialised ahead of publication); it might also be a way to look at developing economies. Let’s skip the consolidated corporate, ‘mass production + mass media’ stage and embrace a micro economic model where everyone can be an entrepreneur, a maker, a seller, a dreamer.

A final point on size – we’re all used to hearing the number ’150′ cited as the ‘optimum organizational size’. As the business strategist Tom Peters put it in 1994:

“Arguably, we got away with violating this limit during the age of mass production and hyperspecialization, when the traditional craftsmen’s imagination was subordinated to machine logic. Now, brains, imagination, craft, and whole jobs are once again the order of the day and 150 people, give or take, may again be the right group size.”

In a flat world, might 150 in fact be far too large? Might a network of multiple, much smaller, autonomous teams actually be more commercially successful than a conventional corporate body?

Doctorow seems to conclude somewhat ruefully that simple human will or belief is the greatest obstacle to this approach succeeding. What do you think? Does this model feel viable or is it just venture capitalism taken to an over-inflated extreme?