Thomas Power's speech in The House of Lords of 08-Feb-05

Here is the complete speech that Thomas Power did in The House of Lords on 08-Feb-05.

This is a must read !!

I have added amazon pictures with links to all the books mentioned for your convenience...

"Since 1998 when Penny, Glenn and I started Ecademy I have been busy studying and studying every single day. I love studying, researching, thinking, pondering, analysing and observing. I am if you like a permanent student. I am addicted to learning.

For me Ecademy has been like doing a giant PhD constantly reading and re-reading all the thoughts of people around the world past and present attempting to appreciate what is going on. It’s a PhD that has no end, yes I have published five books since 1998 but now I consider them all very dated compared with where I am right now.

So today I want to take you on a journey into my mind and illustrate through a series of books how you can inform your own mind of what is actually happening out in the world right now today. And how simplicity is in fact more complicated than complexity. Personally I am obsessed with being at the cutting edge of the world’s development not just online and in business networking but also in terms of ozone levels, green business, marketing, Hydrogen power, wind power and just how the elimination of debt and poverty will be realised in this century.

I always get stressed if I am not right at the forefront of global thinking. Whilst this is my trait and I sense it comes from my Mother, my Father inside me was a history teacher and a historian so I have a deep, deep love for history and for reading about the past and seeing how it links to the future.

One of things I have noticed in my reading is that most people who write books are ahead of their time and most of their opinions are ahead of their time too. In some cases authors can be 5 years ahead of their time and in other cases true visionaries like Marshall McLuhan can be 50 years ahead of their time. Because this is the case, often when you read their books enough time has past for their opinions to seems real and present and personally this gives me tremendous guidance in my own endeavours to study and de-cipher the future based on analysing the opinions of leading thinkers of the past.

First then today I want to start with Marshall McLuhan and his concept of the 1960s called The Global Village.

A global village connected by what he described then as robotism which we now refer to as the Internet or perhaps computer networks. In the 1960s he was able to describe the upside and the downside of robotism and if you read his book today you would believe it has been written this year. The accuracy and the sense of vision beggaring belief.

In 1990 Michael Rothschild wrote a book called Bionomics in which he stated that the economy would become a like an Ecosystem and behave like the natural world of animals and the earth.

Michael was 10 years ahead of his time and only now is his book a best seller.

In 1996 James Moore wrote The Death of Competition once again using that word Ecosystem that Michael Rothschild had used in 1990.

As I do I became obsessed with the word Ecosystem and titled my third book in 2001 on that subject but in my book I failed to truly appreciate the concept of what I was writing about until now. James was basically saying that in a networked world there would be no competition because there wouldn’t need to be any, everyone and everything would co-exist and support one another Networks were in other words compatible and not competitive. There would be no time to compete. I find this concept alone completely dreamy.

This led me to The Cluetrain Manifesto in which David Weinberger describes markets as conversations which being a networker I loved because of I love talking, asking questions and listening to answers.

It was the word conversation that became my next obsession and I studied

Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson and Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott.

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So now you can start to see the way my mind was working and you can experience in the here and now how your mind is trying to make pictures and shapes out of what you are hearing today. But probably confusion reigns in your mind right now. I have not given you enough shape. I had Global Village, I had robotism, I had ecosystem and I had conversations. But where would I go next?

All this led me to the wonderful world of Malcolm Gladwell and his blockbuster “The Tipping Point” in which he talks of Connectors, Mavens and Salesman.

If you haven’t read it yet, you must. It will help you grow. I think this was and is one of the best books ever written in our lifetime and will stand the test of time as a classic.

The Tipping Point led me to a book by Philip Ball called “Critical Mass” and how one thing leads to another based on a series of small events prompting other events.

So once again here in the room your mind is whirring away trying to piece together this immense jigsaw of thought and opinion and I have hardly begun.

Richard Stallman then wrote Free Software, Free Society in which he basically exposed the software industry and large media enterprise for trapping society in a world it did not understand by selling them software and that all software should be free in order to free the human race.

Microsoft clearly think very highly of Richard Stallman. That was just the beginning for me of the theme towards globalization.

Eric Raymond wrote The Cathedral and The Bazaar to indicate the big Cathedral companies were going to fall prey to the small market stall operators in the Bazaar.

This was followed then by Free Culture in which the awesome US lawyer Lawrence Lessig who sits alongside Malcolm Gladwell in my view described how Big Media uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down culture and control creativity.

Locking down culture, controlling creativity are strong words to publish in the western world. So this period became my anti-institution period which is probably not the right thing to be talking about today in a place like this. What was obvious is that the Internet was advancing faster than the Governments and Corporate Institutions could keep up with and that they were effectively moving into a period of decline and perhaps even decay. The Catholic Church went through something similar in 1517 when Martin Luther posted on a church door that Rome was basically a corrupt institution. Clearly decline and decay do not mean demise as the church begun it’s reformation in 1540 and has been on that same road ever since. What does happen to institutions and brands to a lesser degree however is that they get superseded by fashion and fads for a while because humans love to drift in and out of various fashions really on rolling 30 year generation cycles.

Then out came the book Blur by Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer which told us that the world was going so fast that no-one could keep with it at all.

True words of comfort to someone like me. Hell of course to the average consumer. A string of books on the same theme then followed and I started to wonder whether it was possible for me to keep pace with my studying and research. I realized my mind was in chaos, I realised that working with Penny, Glenn and Julian I needed to make sense of this ecademy network that by now was approaching 5,000 members and clearly had some value but it was unclear to me what that value was and how to monetise that value? In those days Ecademy was little more than a website and some wine. Many would argue even today it is no different. So just how do you create order from chaos in a networked world.

Along comes Dee Hock the founder of the VISA network in the 1960s who used the word Ecosystem yet again and his book is titled The Birth of the Chaordic Age.

Dee Hock was combining Chaos and Order and inventing a new word. A man after my own heart. This book became my new crutch as I absorbed the journey he had been through to create the VISA network which is arguably the largest transaction company in terms of turnover in the world and yet no-one knows really where it resides or what it is other than a logo in your pocket somehow connected to your bank. VISA is I believe a true mystery. Technically it is the biggest company in the world that is not floated on any stock exchange and no-one really knows why. The link between what Dee Hock was saying and the institutional control that Lawrence Lessig purveyed was deeply profound but I couldn’t see it.

So next I went almost mad. I read a book called Sync – The emerging science of spontaneous order.

Let me say that once again – The emerging science of spontaneous order. For those oxymoron lovers here today how would you deal with a phase like that.

Sync led me to “Surfing the edge of chaos”.

Surfing the edge of chaos led me to a book called “Complexity – The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos”. My head was spinning, how is your head right now? Spinning too? Sip some wine. Clearly like me I am sure your head is now spinning as you receive more information in one sitting than you might have done in 4 years at University. Stay with me if you can.

Steven Johnson an awesome writer then published “Emergence” in which he talked about the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software.

Who would have thought those things were the same and had the same behaviours? This is one of the best books I have ever read in my life. Back on the scene then appears David Weinberger who I mentioned earlier from The Cluetrain Manifesto that markets were conversations.

David’s new book was called “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”: How the web shows us who we really are.

Who we really are? Who we really are as people? A self exploration? The web will uncover mankind? Again another classic and two classics following closely behind one another within months. Stephen Johnson and David Weinberger are now great friends …I assume you can all guess why. LOOK UP AND SMILE

Then came The Emergence of Everything - How the world became more complex.

This was followed by “It’s Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business” and that good old Ecosystem word is resurrected yet again.

Then came Linked which described how everything is connected to everything else and what it means.

Linked was written by the top Network Scientist in the world and I read this and the next one while on holiday in Italy. You can see why Penny has telly-sleeping among her 50 words.

Small Worlds followed Linked in which it talked about:

The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Now I was getting really excited once again as things were starting to fit together in my mind although I didn’t really know why. Was it just intuition? Or was it the fact that everything I read I could observe in reality online and offline through Ecademy and listening very carefully at the networking events I have been to in 50 countries around the globe. Ecademy is an Ecosystem and an economy within that Ecosystem in its own right. Michael Rothschild in 1990 had been right.

Then came a monster book Six Degrees and the Science of a Connected Age – Duncan Watts is truly a gifted professional. Almost everyone in the world knows and talks of The Six Degrees of Separation yet very few of us know how this science and mathematics actually works.

Duncan’s book is marvellously simply. I recommend you read it and appreciate it for what it is. He also clearly describes the flaws of six degrees thinking.

Then my two favourite words that always feature in my books came next. Charles Parkinson published “Random Connections” and I am very jealous of him for getting their first before me as I wanted to title a book with the very same.

Then came “Out of Control” – The new biology of machines, social systems and how they will impact the economic world.

Ecosystem was back and back again big time but this time it was back with Social Systems and that was the word I was looking for to connect with the social environment developing online at ecademy. Are you getting excited yet? Can you see the links? Are you smiling inside? Is your mind whirring or collapsing into your chardonnay and claret?

John Holland then came out with Hidden Order in which he talks about “How Adaptation Builds Complexity”.

If you speak to your Chief Technology Officer Julian Bond he will tell you he has written 75,000 lines of code inside Ecademy and it has undergone 550 version releases in the last 3 years alone. How’s that for adaptation building complexity. No single member can now keep up with one website like Ecademy.

Then a crazy strike from left field appeared in the form of Telecosm in which George Gilder described what the world would look like after Bandwidth Abundance.

Everything in the world connected to everything else over the internet and yes I do mean everything. Now take a rest. Have a breath. Sip your wine or water. Allow the roller coaster to calm a little. The next big change in my reading then appeared, I was all scienced and chaosed out, I could read no more mathematics and observe no more graphs and pie charts and I truly love statistics.

And then bang from out of the blue comes: Bowling Alone – The collapse and revival of American Community by Robert Putnam.

Oh wow ……………………. What a book!

So everything I had been reading was having a fundamental impact already at street level, at the human level, at the family level and most importantly at the personal level where the stress and pressure on individuals was literally causing mental breakdown both for the corporate worker and the so called emergent worker. People were suffering from change-itis or changism. Change Consultants were appearing everywhere around me at every ecademy event. What is a Change consultant? God only knows. I am not any old consultant I am a change consultant they said to me. Consulting on Change, are you sure? Hmmmmm … I know I was not sure.

Then comes another blockbuster The Support Economy which explains why corporations and institutions are failing individuals and what the resulting next episode of capitalism will look.

The Emergent Worker term appears.

The emergent worker living in a business ecosystem. The statistics indicate that 50% of the US population will be self employed by 2010. The same will come to the UK by 2015 to 2020. The world is thus heading self employed. The world is heading self employed inside self employed networks or SENs or should it SEMPs. The corporates are shrinking and outsourcing is just a new word for redundancy. The networks are thus forming to sustain the new un-employed with work and emotional support. Personally I have been unemployable for the last 7 years and even got fired from Waitrose deli for eating too much of their profits. At last I was making some sense.

Then we have The Caring Economy by Gerry McGovern.

Then comes The Naked Corporation by Dan Tapscott.
Then The Naked Leader by David Taylor.

Then The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Yes it truly was all beginning to make sense, real sense. Indeed the institution and the corporation were coming to and end and the rise of the individual was upon us. The new world was not about government and not about giant companies, it was about individuals, little ordinary people working from home, struggling to do their thing, make their way.

Lord William Rees-Mogg of this place published The Sovereign Individual in 1999 a true masterpiece in which he advised individuals how to transform themselves into the information age.

This is a great read and confirms The Lords were adapting faster than we thought. This then took me back, way back, along way back to the past because I wanted to know how would these individuals connected to these global networks were going to be led and managed if it were not be by institutions and corporations.

Over 20 years ago Robert Greenleaf now deceased wrote Servant Leadership in which he described how true leaders would become servants of the people, performing the symbolic role of leadership but under close scrutiny of the connected public checking and advising on every move with online networks gluing them all together.

Then we witness Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold in which he describes the connected public using mobile phones and SMS texting to organise their protest marches and campaigns against issues they disagree with.

In Switzerland the public vote on policy this way each and every month.

Smart Mobs led into Rob Cross’s book of 2004 in which he described “The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work really gets done in Organisations”.

This was followed by the monster “The Wisdom of Crowds” in which James Surowiecki explains why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom of connected individuals shapes, business, economies, societies and nations.

At last everything was becoming clearer.

Of course now we know all this I could refer back to books from the past like Achieving Success through Social Capital a masterpiece by Wayne Baker in which he tells you how to tap into the hidden resources of your personal and business networks.

If you don’t network online you are not going to eat within 10 years.

And now as we come close to present day Todd Stauffer publishes Blog On – Building online communities with weblogs.

Three years ago I did not know what a weblog is now the 50,000 members of ecademy publish our daily newspaper each day themselves. Written by the people for the people. Yesterday over 1,000 members wrote the news for the other 49,000 is that democracy or what? Blogs will ultimately dismantle the power of the media as indicated in yesterday’s FT. Read it out and hold it up. Bloggers send a warning shot to corporate america.

It is at this point I will introduce you to my new word. That word is WOMNET and WOMNETS. “Word of mouth networks” This is the new institution, this is the new government, this is the new corporation. WOMNETs are coming to street near you, be ready. And of course am I just hyping up WOMNETs to support my belief in Ecademy, no I don’t think so.

My next book choice is called: “Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Capitalism” by James De Filippis.

Power to the people, it is the people stepping forward to take control and manage their global community themselves.

So what is coming next: Manuel Castells book is called: The Rise of The Network Society.

Richard Florida’s book gives us: “The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life”.

Emergent worker appears yet again.

Mark Taylor gives us: The Moment of Complexity defines The Emerging Network culture in society.

Don Tapscott then tells us How to create value in ourselves in a Network economy.

All the reading fits together like a jigsaw.

Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom describe the new economy as Karoake Capitalism a brilliant attempt to illustrate simplicity and complexity at the same time.

Then Peter Fingar brings us “The Death of e and the birth of real new economy business models”

Joseph Pines talks of The Experience Economy and that we need to takes our clients and customers on a journey and impact all aspects of their lives.

Douglas Atkin then tells us in “The Culting of Brands” that Brands will need to become cults to survive the onslaught of individualism.

Marc Gobe goes further and his book Emotional Branding tells us to Connect Brands electronically to People.

Even beyond these guys is Lovemarks – The future beyond brands.

If you are unfamiliar with Lovemarks go to http://www.lovemarks.com/ Where you can nominate the brands you have fallen in love with and are emotionally attached to. There are 1897 nominations on Lovemarks.com so of which are even for ecademy.

Then we switch back temporarily to 1993 and a most unusual title Technopoly. The Surrender of Culture to Technology how very close Neil Postman was some 12 years ago with his opinion.

Of course I recognise in this talk I have bamboozled you to mars and back so come and relax a little with me as I draw to a close.

Barry Schwartz has brought us The Paradox of Choice in which he tells us quite rightly “why less is more”.

Ken Wilber summarises my last hour of nonsensical analysis with his new book called The Theory of Everything in which he describes an integrated vision for business, politics, science AND spirituality.

And finally and by no means least, Malcolm Gladwell has yet again brought us a very mad monster follow up to The Tipping Point.
It is called Blink – The Power of Thinking without thinking.

So do not try and understand what I have said for the last hour, enjoy one another and enjoy your wine. It’s time to relax and leave everything to gut feel and intuition as there is no way in the world any human can keep up with the world we have created.

My only advice therefore is to sip your chardonnay and recognise that across 50,000 members inside Ecademy the three most popular words are family, music and travel … It really is a very, very simple world after all 50,000 members down 6 and half billion to go.

Thank you very much."