Dove risiede la libertà di espressione? Quale dove sono i limiti della legge sull’istigazione all’odio? Social Network vs menti deboli, ci avete mai riflettuto? Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana e Sir Elton John, oggi, ci danno una lezione.

Wired scrive oggi nella sua pagina un super articolo, che qua riportiamo in parte (e che vi consigliamo leggere completamente) ma che ci ha fatto pensare molto sul l’influenza dei social networks oggi.
Mi preme dire che non sono fanatico di nessuno dei due partecipanti (ne della musica di Elton John ne dell’abbigliamento di Dolce&Gabbana), ma invece sono molto interessato nel soggetto di discussione, MANIPOLAZIONE DI MASSE e, se da qualche parte esiste, anche DEMOCRAZIA.

Le chiavi di lettura di questo articolo sono:
1- Grazie ai social network, siamo tutti capaci di controllare il 100% delle menti debole o senza personalità?
2- Conseguenze di un post, qualunque social media sia.
3- Oggi siamo tutti capaci di controllare le masse, e senza un minimo di coscienza le conseguenze potrebbero essere devastanti.
4- Grazie alla loro influenza su i nostri politici, oggi si potrebbero scegliere le sorti delle leggi e della vita tra 20 anni, Proprio oggi.
5- Dove risiede la libertà di espressione?
6- Quale dove sono i limiti della legge sull’istigazione all’odio?
7- Social Network vs menti deboli, ci avete mai riflettuto?

Yuleisy Yamiley 

Je suis Dolce&Gabbana. Original design by Dr. Pietros Cannon.

Dolce & Gabbana: ma non eravamo tutti Charlie?

“…..Sul tema ho ovviamente le mie idee. Una delle quali, per esempio, è che l’amore non può certo costituire un sacrilegio rispetto agli “schemi prestabiliti” della tradizione. O, peggio, della presunta “normalità”. Lo Stato, come ho già argomentato sulle adozioni ai single, deve smetterla di mortificare i cittadini dividendoli fra persone di serie A e serie B. Semplicemente perché, assegnando o negando diritti sacrosanti in base a parametri senza fondamento, mortifica sé stesso e tutti i suoi cittadini. Inclusi quelli ingiustamente privilegiati.

D’altra parte il fenomeno degli uteri in affitto (di qualsiasi orientamento siano le coppie che vi ricorrono) mi lascia abbastanza perplesso. Specie per le implicazioni neocolonialiste che si porta dietro. Non è un caso che la Thailandia abbia appena vietato la pratica. Ricordate il caso della 21enne Pattaramon Chanbua che ebbe due gemelli “per conto” di una coppia australiana? Uno dei due nacque con la sindrome di Down e i genitori “committenti”, una volta resisi conto della situazione, si rifiutarono di prenderlo con loro, lasciandolo alla poverissima madre naturale. Questo solo per dire che le implicazioni sono decine e non tutte auspicabili. Anzi.
Ma, ripeto, questo lato del dibattito, in particolare se squadernato con l’usuale approssimazione da social network, in questo momento non m’interessa. Per quanto paradossale possa essere. M’interessa pormi e porvi una domanda di metodo: fino a poche settimane fa non eravamo tutti Charlie? Voglio dire, c’è un qualche tipo di proporzione fra le frasi di Domenico Dolce e lereazioni arrivate dai vip di tutto il mondo, a cominciare da Martina Navratilova passando per Ricky Martin fino a Victoria Beckham? Dal profumo scaricato nella tazza del cesso alle mutande scagliate nel cestino fino alle camicie infilate nella differenziata o alle minacce di falò dei capi D&G (Courtney Love). Per non parlare, ovviamente, delle dichiarazioni, dei tweet, dei post. Fra i quali il più equilibrato rimane in fondo il primo, quello di Elton John su Instagram.
D’altronde basterebbero le parole di Stefano Gabbana a chiudere la questione: “Crediamo fermamente nella democrazia e pensiamo che la libertà di espressione sia una base imprescindibile per essa. Noi abbiamo parlato del nostro modo di sentire la realtà ma non era nostra intenzione esprimere un giudizio sulle scelte degli altri. Noi crediamo nella libertà e nell’amore”. Che poi, se anche avessero voluto esprimere un giudizio sui “figli della chimica e sui bambini sintetici”, non avrebbero forse potuto farlo? Quale sarebbe stato il problema? Le nostre emittenti trasmettono a getto continuo le bestialità di chiunque riesca a impossessarsi di un microfono, Twitter si trasforma spesso in un suk dell’odio e due personaggi pubblici – più o meno rispettosamente, il punto mi pare alla fine questo – non possono dire la loro di fronte a un giornalista che li sente per un periodico?
Ripeto: non eravamo forse tutti pronti a immolarci per la libertà d’opinione appena tre mesi fa? O forse c’è un equivoco: siamo disponibili ad accordarla solo a certe categorie – i buffoni di corte, gli umoristi, i giornalisti – imprigionando chiunque altro all’interno di assurdi obblighi d’opinione legati alle dichiarate preferenze sessuali? Da qualsiasi fonte derivi e a (quasi) qualsiasi argomento si applichi, il pensiero unico ci fa fare più passi indietro che in avanti. Intendo sul piano dei diritti per tutti. Certo anche il pensiero stupido non è che aiuti molto….”

Simone Cosimi
Giornalista

L’articolo lo trovate in originale su: WIRED ( http://www.wired.it/attualita/media/2015/03/16/dolce-gabbana-non-eravamo-tutti-charlie/ )

David Lester on realising he wasn’t alone with his big idea and how dealing with the competition with his first business has prepared him this time around

Let’s talk competition. About three years ago, when I started researching the market for my new start-up citrusHR, there was nobody offering anything like it, at least for small businesses.
When we started development, about 18 months ago, we saw three or four firms offering relatively simple versions of the employee database we offer, though still nobody offering the full set of services I think are important for a small business audience.

But by the time we launched, just a couple of weeks ago, I was aware of an amazing 23 companies offering some sort of online employee database. Some of those also include some of the other elements of our service. So in a year and a half, a fledgling market went from having three small, basic suppliers to having 24! I had expected more competition to launch, but not that much more!

Why competition is good for business

Should I be terrified, or concerned? Actually, I am excited. (Perhaps I’m too easily excited…). My main reason is that when there are so many people who think an idea is good enough to pursue, it is strong evidence that there really is a strong market.

In fact I believe that within five years most employers will use a service something like ours. The real question for me, and for the bosses of the other 23 suppliers, is will our business succeed.

I will be amazed if there are more than five major suppliers in this space in five years’ time. The rest will either sell out to others, or go bust, or quietly pull out. A few will probably find a small niche and operate quietly and sensibly within that; so I imagine there might be 10 or 12 viable suppliers by then. So I don’t think that half the people offering this service today will still be around in five years. Which should be scary, right?

I am OK with this, oddly, because I have seen it before. My first company was a computer games developer and publisher; we started in 1988, when there were already lots of games publishers – in the UK there were probably well over 50 back then. The market was growing, which helped hugely – new companies didn’t need to steal customers from their competitors, they could simply grab new customers entering the market.

The other reason for my excitement is that when faced with a similar challenge 25 years ago, I came up with a good strategy for carving out a good, profitable niche for my company. And I am confident that the same applies today.

I love football, and like to use analogies from it – apologies to those of you who aren’t fans! When young people first play football together, they pretty much all follow the ball around – so you literally see a mass of kids running around in a crowd, trying to kick the ball.

As they learn the game, the better players learn the importance of position, reserving energy, and finding space – which gives them time to place their pass or their shot.

Major new growth markets feel very similar, with everyone initially chasing the ball. So in my new sector, almost all the 23 competitors do essentially the same thing; only five of them do anything at all other than storing employee records online. I see citrusHR as being on a wing, in plenty of space, running with the ball.

Learning how to win

So far this is all somewhat interesting, but so what… the key is to understand your market, and find a position for your business which is different from the rest. In the computer games market, most companies (including mine in the beginning) were publishing a wide variety of types of games.

We then decided to specialise (in strategy games, as it happens), and got to know fans of that type of games really well, which enabled us to give them more of what they wanted; it worked really well – we went from selling about 10,000 copies of our best game in say 1991, to 100,000 copies in 1995, and two million copies in 1997! The payoff for being well positioned – and focused on our strategy and not our rivals’ – in a growing market can be enormous, as I found out.

Time will tell as to whether the position I have carved out for citrusHR will prove successful. I expect that some of the different aspects we offer will prove really popular, while others might not. I don’t know which, yet, and hope to learn this from our customers as fast as I can.

But being in a growth market is exciting; I’m enjoying the journey, and will keep you posted here as to how we get on.

by David Lester

Source: startups.co.uk

Following are seven tips for managing the critics online.

Create an internal policy. Everyone on your team—both internally and externally—needs to understand what your policy is for managing critics online. A bad situation can be made worse by a well-intentioned employee or external partner who doesn’t understand your policy. The policy should lay out who will respond to critics, what they’ll say, how quickly they’ll respond, and what to do if someone not authorized to comment sees or receives a comment.

Be cautious. When dealing with critics, particularly if they’re anonymous, you don’t know how severe the reaction could be or how successful they may be in creating an online crisis involving hundreds or thousands of others. A good rule of thumb is to publicly say you hear them and you’d like to discuss offline. Then take it to the phone or in person. Get it out of writing so you can hear the tone of voice or see body language. Don’t get defensive or engage in a back-and-forth debate online.

Assume the best. Even if you think the answer is obvious or right in front of their face, sometimes the critic is misinformed, doesn’t know where to look for the information on your site, or may be unwilling to search. When they complain about the obvious things, be helpful, pleasant, and non-defensive. You should never assume malicious intent until you’ve covered the obvious.

Consider the medium. Unless you run a sports, religious, or news site, it’s unlikely anonymous trolls will want to spend their every waking moment criticizing you. So keep your goals in mind. Consider the medium of the criticism and the message of the critic. If it’s directly on your blog or on Facebook, it’s far more difficult to ignore than in a tweet.

Deleting posts. While deleting posts may remove the damage for the time being, when people discover you’re doing so, they’ll take you to task for that… and it won’t be pretty. Consider a politician who lies about his affair. Soon enough we all find out; cue news conference, with his family standing next to him, to admit the affair he lied about for months. It’s far worse to be found out later than to attempt to ignore it to begin with. And, when you’re transparent about your blemishes, an amazing thing happens: Your community comes to your defense and the critics sulk away.

Use common sense. Take your corporate hat off and think like a human being. No one wants to be talked to in corporate jargon or to be showered with pre-approved PR messages. Be understanding, listen, and make things right. Don’t act like a robot that can only repeat one or two messages. Use common sense when responding. Ask yourself if the critics have real complaints or they’re someone just harassing you. If it’s the former, be patient and give the person time to vent their frustrations.

Have a written external policy. The policy should describe when you will delete comments or ban critics, and establishes the tone of the conversation allowed on the site. For instance, the policy at Spin Sucks is that you can’t swear (we’ll edit out the swear words if you do) and the discourse must be professional. We once had a troll who copied and pasted his rude comment to the top of the stream every time the community pushed it down. He had been responded to, so we told him that if he continued to do that, his comments would be deleted and he would be banned. He stopped doing it. The written policy helps you moderate the conversation in a professional but open way.

It’s a very uncomfortable position to be in. None of us want to be criticized.

But, as the saying goes, if people either love you or hate you, you’re doing something right.

 
By Gini Dietrich

Source: allbusiness.com

Anyone who has worked for both a large corporation and a small, entrepreneurial company can talk endlessly about the differences in the two cultures and mindsets.

In this post, I look into these differences and the challenges they cause. It is a long post based on my latest book, Making Open Innovation Work. You can download it for free at this link : – )

The 7 key differences between big and small companies when it comes to innovation are:

• Speed of decision-making
• Attitude toward risk
• Allocation of resources
• Who understands the business model and who manages it:
• Processes or lack thereof
• Following rules versus breaking rules
• Differering definitions of innovation

Before I get into each of these differences, I would like to start out with a response I got to an earlier blog post on how the two types of organizations approach open innovation. The response was given by Russ Conser from Shell’sGameChanger program. Here’s what he said:

“Stefan, as is often the case, you’re on the right track—SMEs need big companies as much as big companies need SMEs. The trouble is that it’s a classic example of one being from Venus and the other from Mars. Precisely because they’re different and they need each other, they often come into conflict early in a relationship. Us big-company guys still have plenty to learn about how to work with SMEs without killing the very things that make them valuable (e.g. creativity, flexibility). Meanwhile, SMEs also need to learn to have realistic expectations of what they have and what they still need if they want to make their ideas real—much of which can often be found in the hands of the corporate types (e.g. financial resources, complementary skills, or practical context).

My experience is that most often there’s more than enough value at the intersection for both to be happy with the gains of a relationship, as long as they don’t kill each other in the process of creating it.”

Here’s another comment worth noting on culture from an anonymous poster in response to one of my blog posts: “Smaller firms tend to be younger and more entrepreneurial. The ‘can do’ spirit of innovation is often alive and well and a key part of their DNA (think Silicon Valley start-ups vs. Fortune 500s. As firms grow, this creative energy gets slowly squeezed out as the corporate focus turns to quarterly performance (vs. a longer-term view), stable operations (vs. disruptive innovations), and productivity improvements (vs. investing in growth).”

The differences that can cause problems when big and small companies come together for open innovation can be stark. Let’s look at a few that impact the way the two types of organizations approach open innovation:

• Speed of decision-making: Large corporations, with their abundance of silos and bureaucratic levels, often require considerable time to make decisions. Analysis paralysis is not uncommon, with decisions that seem simple to an outsider taking ages to make. In contrast, in smaller organizations, decision-making can be fairly rapid.

Thus, when these two types of organizations come together in open innovation, the smaller company may find the speed of progress frustratingly slow. At the same time, the people from the large corporation may be troubled by the constant pleas of the smaller partner to move faster. Both sides may be left feeling that the other side just doesn’t understand them.

Intuit, a California-based maker of financial software, is one corporation that has worked hard to overcome this problem. They understand that the reply time they can offer potential partners in their ecosystems is critical. As a result of this understanding, they try to provide a clear go/no-go within just forty-eight hours when they stage their Entrepreneur Days. This can take weeks or even months for many other companies.

• Attitude toward risk: How large and small companies feel about risk-taking can vary considerably. Particularly where the smaller company is a start-up or still in a fast-growth stage, the organization at all levels may wholly embrace risk because, at this point, the whole business is a risk. However, in a large corporation that has been around for decades, people may be far more vested in keeping things as they’ve always been than they are in trying something new and potentially risky. Here again, this difference can lead to frustration on both sides when two such organizations engage in an open innovation partnership.

Here’s another aspect of this difference as described by Bengt Järrehult, director of Innovation and Knowledge Management at SCA Hygiene Products and SCA Packaging, in a comment to my blog post on this topic: “The biggest difference as I see it is the balance between the defensive and offensive behavior. The bigger (and often the more mature) the company is, the more the company has to lose, and as ‘losses loom larger than gains’ (Tversky & Kahneman) the behavior of the larger, mature company gets more defensive and hence the relative focus on more potentially breakthrough innovations versus continuous improvements decreases.”

Obviously, if a large company and its smaller open innovation partner differ in terms of what type of innovation they should seek—breakthrough versus incremental—this can cause their partnership to fail. This is why clarity of purpose from the get-go is so important.

Edward Thompson, an advisor in the telecommunications industry, also weighed in on the topic of risk: “Big companies certainly can innovate. They have the required resources and deep talent pools. However, big companies are often very risk adverse, so it’s difficult to get a particular business unit or division to adopt an innovation that is not exactly in their market or technology sweet spot. True innovation often requires a company to embrace a totally new market space. Big companies are very reluctant to take any sort of risk associated with entering a new field.”

• Allocation of resources: In a small company, every penny counts. Resources, which can be scarce, are allocated based almost solely on whether they will boost the bottom line. This bottom line focus may not be so distinct in a larger corporation. With more abundant resources—at least in comparison to smaller companies—people in corporations may be relatively free spenders, although this is certainly not always the case and hasn’t been in recent years as the recession has taken its toll. However, the small company may expect its larger partner to foot every bill and may not understand that even big companies have their limits. The result of such a relationship can be similar to problems that arise when two people with very different attitudes toward money and spending get married.

• Who understands the business model and who manages it: Here’s an astute comment Michael Lachapelle, a Canadian expert on business design and business models, made in response to a blog I wrote about the differences between large and small companies when it comes to innovation:

“One of the considerations in driving innovation is who understands the business model of the company. In a small company it is much more likely that everyone in the company understands how the company works and how the individual parts will combine in the business model to create and deliver value to the customer/client.

Larger corporations tend to be much more fractured, and thus the staff is less likely to understand the whole. In this context innovation affecting the whole company can be a hard, long-term task, as one has to build a common understanding and mobilize around very different views of the company. Innovation is more likely to occur at business or product line level, then at a whole of company level.

A second consideration is who manages the business model. In big corporations, people feel responsible for only their portion, or sphere, of control. This control is manifested in being able to influence decisions or budgets, or being able to define meaning within the context of the business.

There are only a few people who “control” the whole organization, so innovation of the company has to be managed and driven by the senior executives. The more “distributed” control over the key areas of decisions, budgets, and meaning, the more difficult it is to drive innovation.”

Both of Michael’s points can lead to frustration for smaller companies when they try to engage with larger corporations in open innovation. Small companies may sense a lack of passion among corporate employees who don’t understand the whole business model, and the layering of control in corporations will often lead to slow decision making, as already mentioned.

• Processes or lack thereof: Many small companies don’t yet have defined processes in place to drive innovation forward. This is one of the areas where partnering with a larger company can really benefit them. Ironically, however, as someone pointed out in a comment on my blog, while “in theory, this dimension should go to the big guys who tend to take the time and effort to embed systematic processes,” this isn’t always the advantage that it might first at seem.

He continued, “I’m a big believer that innovation can benefit from process, tools, and governance and is not just a matter of divine inspiration—although that helps too! However, in practice, not many big firms have GOOD radical/blue ocean innovation processes. They tend to be good at incremental innovation (smaller-scale product improvements or extensions) because (1) this is their bread and butter and so they have dedicated resources focused on this, and (2) radical innovation is high risk and highly disruptive to a large organization from a resource, capital, and management focus perspective.”

• Following rules versus breaking rules: Mark Palmer, a communication advisor, added that “big companies preoccupy themselves with competitors, the market, and the rules. Small companies are more inclined to make up new rules.” This relates to some of the benefits of working with small companies as mentioned earlier. Of course, rules should be followed, but sometimes they do need to be bend—or perhaps even be broken—to make real progress.

Those large firms that are still strong innovators (Google, Apple, P&G, 3M, etc.) tend to be the exceptions that have continued to foster a great culture of innovation while also embedding strong processes that help nurture breakthrough ideas in the challenging confines of large, bureaucratic structures.

At an open innovation conference I attended, Cisco said it is trying to move from a culture of competition to a culture of shared goals, a move largely driven by a desire to innovate with external partners. Open innovation has the potential to change much-outdated corporate thinking beyond the “not-invented-here” culture.

As you work with external partners, you are exposed to other ways of getting things done. You bring diverse thinking into the organization. This can make you consider whether your current practices are good enough, or whether you have to adjust these or perhaps even develop new next practices for your organization. An example: you get new perspectives on collaboration. Perhaps this can inspire to better interaction and collaboration between business units.

That’s said, large companies have always used their size and power to get things their way. This is no different with open innovation. So I am not surprised when I listen to people from smaller companies complain about the behaviors of large companies when they start working together.

Such behaviors were confirmed by several large companies at an Open Innovation Summit I attended some time ago. There, executives from large corporations openly shared stories on how they had used their size and corporate power to get deals that favored themselves, and they even admitted that some deals could be so lopsided that they could discourage other smaller companies from working with them. Only half-joking, they also said that their view of win-win situations goes like this: “We win a lot. You win a little.” Or, “Win-win means that we get to kick the little guy twice.”

At least some larger companies are aware of this situation. I predict that as more large and small companies innovate together, larger companies will realize they can no longer afford to tarnish their reputation by behaving badly in such partnerships. They’ll begin to understand how important it is to be perceived as the preferred partner within their industry.

• Differing definitions of innovation: In response to a blog post I wrote about the differences between large and small companies, Jackie Hutter, CEO and IP strategist at Evgentech, a company with patent pending technology that greatly improves battery charging speed, made the following insightful comment based on her experience:

“One thing I have noticed with my own company is that there can be a real disconnect between the meaning of “innovation” between small and large companies. Some—perhaps most—large companies view innovation as a “super” product development team. These are the folks who look for breakthroughs, but these so-called “breakthroughs” are expected to slot into an existing product or project at the company. In contrast, at a start-up the “innovation” is their whole business, and developed wholly independently of the products and timelines of the large company.

We have already seen this when a Fortune 500 company selected us through an open innovation portal. The company was supposedly looking for innovations like our technology, but they effectively wanted it to fit into their existing infrastructure without much modification. They didn’t see that our technology could change the game for them because they were playing a different game than us. But even if they had seen that we were different, they wouldn’t have cared because they liked the game they were playing.

Fortunately, we were able to see that this company was not going to be a good partner, and we didn’t burn much time on them and moved on quickly. (They seemed a bit surprised when we effectively told them, “we’re not that into you.”) We learned much from this experience, and have modified our potential partner intake to specify “strong innovation mindset” because we recognize that unless a company is already wired to understand the opportunities that our technology will provide their company, they have a low likelihood of being successful in getting to market with our disruptive technology. And, if they aren’t successful, we won’t get paid.

Source: www.15inno.com