Hunkering Down, Pushing Ahead

The econolypse is rippling through the world, a shock wave moving across countries, industries, and nations, and right into our lives.

I have spoken with dozens of friends directly impacted: losing jobs, laying colleagues off, cutting back on plans for business expansion.

My business is just me: I am a soloist. My work continues pretty much as it has in recent years. I am working with companies that are creating new social tools, or enterprises that are trying to apply them. That really hasn’t changed, and I am seeing a fairly consistent stream of opportunities, despite the faltering tech economy.

But I am cutting back on a number of plans that I have discussed in recent months, so that I can focus on a handful of important projects:

• Edgewards — Starting last year, I began formulating plans for a blog ‘swarm’ to be called Edgewards. I still think there is a place in the world for the really top-notch writing by our brightest, but I am putting this on the back burner (and turning the burner off), for now.
• /Mind — as part of my Edgewards plans, I launched a blog on the topic of cognitive science called /Mind with some solid contributors (Brynn Evans and Sanjay Kairam). But with Edgewards being shelved, /Mind doesn’t make as much sense. I will be pulling my entries out, and reposting in /Ambivalence (from which /Mind grew in the first place). I know that Brynn and Sanjay will be posting elsewhere.


• Same-old, Same-old Events — I am cutting way back on most events since in the best of times they are generally yawnfests, and in this, the worst of times so far, they are a sort of conspicuous consumption that is totally unhelpful. I am not against conferences, per se, just boring ones. I will be attending some events this year, but way less than the two per month I was averaging even a year or so ago.

I am pushing ahead with a small number of focused initiatives, like the Open Enterprise 2009 research project. I am working on this project with Oliver Marks, researching the state of the industry. It has been fun in the past weeks, and we are just getting started. Check out www.stoweboyd.com/oe09 for more information, and to participate in the crowdsourcing of topics, companies, and other themes we should be pursuing. I have a strong sense that E2.0 is high on many companies’ agendas in light of the economy, and we will be presenting a stream of our findings and observations. Take a look at my recent interview with JP Rangaswami.

As my socio-political interests have surfaced, /Ground has become more central to my sense of connection to the world than ever. My contributors there — Rachel Weidinger, Marnie Webb, Hillary Hart, and recent guest Karl Long — and I will continue to explore the problems that globalism and unsustainable economics are causing the world, and what we can do — individually and collectively — to counter them.

One theme that I have been pursuing in recent weeks: I have a sneaking hunch that executives in the tech sector — like others — may have started to twig to the fact that things will never go back to how they were a year or so ago. We have crossed some invisible Rubicon, and return is impossible. But at the same time, we don’t know what the future really holds, or even the shape of things to come.

The focus on near-term tactics has dominated discussion recently: lay-offs, financial results, stock valuations, and CEOs coming and going. How can business leaders take strategic action if they have no really good strategic basis to plan or project? They can’t just extrapolate from a small number of data points into an uncertain future, can they?

I have been kicking this theme around with some very smart people, and I hope to be able to talk more concretely about it in a few weeks.