At HarvardBusiness.org, Tammy Erickson writes,

Future leaders in all spheres will have to contend with a world with finite limits, no easy answers, and the sobering realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts. Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points of view. There will be no dominant voice.

In this context, I’m convinced that Gen X’ers will be the leaders we need. The experiences that shaped those of you who were teens in the late ’70s and ’80s, as I’ve outlined in past posts, translate into valuable contemporary traits and perspectives.

After some reflection it seems obvious — and there’s maybe some insight into the philosophy of history here: there’s a kind of symbiosis that occurs as we grow up: the world forms around us while we form within the world.

The challenges and opportunities we face now are not spontaneous accidents, they developed over the course of decades. Likewise, people’s competences, attitudes, values, and habits have developed over a long course of time and it seems only natural that generational characteristics will correspond with dominant challenges at their moment of full maturity.

There might be some further psychological or sociological insight here as well: as we grow up, how much are we affected by novel, incongruous, and emergent features of the world, which our elders (whose faculties of perception were already fixed by their upbringing) fail to notice — or notice in any generative way?

Still further, I’d guess that some people tend to notice novelty and incongruity more than others; how much does that affect which individuals eventually emerge as leaders?…

This isn’t to take anything away from Erickson’s work. If these suggestions have merit, we’d still have to go on and investigate and articulate exactly what features and characteristics are becoming dominant — which is precisely what Erickson has done for her forthcoming book.

Another bit of a ramble (I love where it ends up), starting with this Time Q&A:

TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging?
Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that difficult to shape the story. The first part of the book is really a series of profiles of people — Justin Hall, Dave Winer, Jorn Barger — who were some of the key figures in pioneering blogging. In the middle of the book, my job became picking out the stories that had the most to teach us about what blogging was all about. At that point, the challenge became figuring out what to leave out.

You seem set on changing some of the popular notions of why people blog.
One thing I’ve become very conscious of is how careful you have to be making generalizations about bloggers. You have millions of people blogging. There are a multitude of answers to any question about what blogging is, who bloggers are or why they do it.

The author is Scott Rosenberg, the book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. It seems like an opportune time to reflect on where digital media has come from and where it is going. The volume of meta-commentary about the nature and future of blogging has gone up recently. Just about all of the mavens and A-listers wrote something-or-other on the subject last month.

Laura McKenna at 11D generated loads of response after blogging that

blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It’s still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It’s actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you’ll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal — a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that’s why I’m continuing to keep at.

To which Ezra Klein lamented

The blogosphere isn’t thrumming with the joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years. And that’s a shame. But the upside is that it’s more careful. It reports and investigates and uncovers. My blog certainly isn’t as fun to write as it used to be. But it’s also a lot better than it used to be. And it certainly pays more. And so it goes. The blogosphere grew up and it got a job, or, to be more specific, lots of jobs. That made it less fun, but, like a frat house legend who now goes to work every morning, probably more useful to society.

I’m not even sure that’s an analogy, as Klein (born in 1984) and more than a few of the other big blog-turned-job stars are at the age when they’d be finishing grad school, coming out of internships, and settling into responsible positions anyways.

No doubt there are a lot of exceptions, and, as Daniel Drezner pointed out:

new bloggers are not exactly neophytes on their subject matter. Johnson was the IMF’s chief economist, for example.

So exactly how much of the professionalization of blogging is inherent in the medium, vs how much of it amounts to the professionalization and maturity of individual bloggers?

I say, don’t worry because more generations of unprofessionals will arrive soon enough.

For perspective, consider that just as Ezra Klein complains the blogosphere lost its “joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years,” I imagine a number of older hackers and BBS and Usenet users complained that blogging circa 2003 lacked a particular “joyous, raucus, weirdness” of their earlier scenes.

(E.g. Jaron Lanier comes to mind. He made some remarks about blogging in that provocative essay of his, and apparently he still favours the old static HTML for his own site.)

Sort of as the Policy Blogger Class of 2003 co-promoted themselves into professional, respectable positions (read Rob Horning’s reaction), we might also see still-newer classes embracing still-newer platforms which established bloggers don’t see coming… changing the media landscape yet again, and disrupting Ezra Klein et al the same way they disrupted old-school pundits and columnists.

It won’t happen exactly the same way again. All I’m saying is that blogging will be vital for a long time, but certain kinds of blogging won’t necessarily be — because we’ll still have new classes graduating, hungry and irreverent, into a media landscape filled with opportunities that didn’t exist for previous cohorts.

Shortly before the policy bloggers got wound-up on the subject, there were already some high-volume conversations about the nature and future of blogging coming from more technology-oriented mavens.

Steve Rubel left blogging for lifestreaming:

Now that I have been at it for over five years, writing a weblog is starting to feel very slow and antiquated. It’s like a singles tennis player who focuses solely on the baseline game, logging long balls back and forth. The statusphere, on other hand, is like playing doubles – and at the net all the time.

Robert Scoble went the other way (for a bit anyways):

Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems.

One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. [...]

The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.

Chris Brogan struck a resolving chord:

I get this. I understand the interest in immediacy. The thing is, I think both are required. While I think there are several occasions where the instantaneous experience of the real-time web is compelling, I still think there are plenty of times when a well-considered blog post has some value.

There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby. It means we spend less time in deliberate contemplation. It means there aren’t as many places to exercise our larger thoughts.

[As long as these basic platform issues are unsettled, there's no telling where things will go...]

Come to think of it, there is a still-rising movement we should identify and try to understand more thoroughly: the general inversion of influence from top-down authority to bottom-up innovation.

Think way beyond media… Journalism is just a beachhead.

I.e. What would the world look like if, by 2015, digital platforms have undermined the foundations of higher education, or government itself, to the same degree the newspapers have been disrupted already?

To be continued…

[Note: I originally had the quotes from Rubel, Scoble, and Brogan before McKenna's. I made the edit moments after publishing.]

As maybe one of the most marked turns in the history of mainstream military strategy, Thomas Friedman quotes a US officer in Afghanistan saying, “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore.”

Friedman elaborates:

Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers running these wars understood that R.B.’s (“relationships built”) actually matter more than K.I.A.’s. One relationship built with an Iraqi or Afghan mayor or imam or insurgent was worth so much more than one K.I.A. Relationships bring intelligence; they bring cooperation. One good relationship can save the lives of dozens of soldiers and civilians. One reason torture and Abu Ghraib got out of control was because our soldiers had built so few relationships that they tried to beat information out of people instead. But relationship-building is painstaking.

That’s especially interesting after I was recently introduced to the notion of “relationship centred medicine” by Andrew via email. It’s quite new for me but I’ll surely be looking out for it more often.

Today we also heard about Amazon’s purchase of Zappos — uber-exemplar of not just customer relations but employee relationships and organizational culture as well.

I first heard of Zappos when I read a story last year that they pay new employees to quit.

Here’s Zappos-prez Tony Hsieh presenting at the Web 2.0 Summit a while back, and here’s today’s video of Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon and the immediate implications of the deal.

Hmmm… another topic to watch.

We’ve been hearing for years about “T-shaped people” (with deep knowledge and competence in one or two areas, crossed with wide knowledge across many domains); Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote about “I-shaped people”:

These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between. [BusinessWeek]

The concept is well intentioned, but who wants to “firmly planted in the mud” when we’re talking about innovation?! Surely there are better letters — or how about numbers? — to use for a derivative analogy.

I’m a big fan of 8.

Rather than being stuck in the mud, let’s continuously circulate from Ground-Level to Blue-Sky — picking up insights at various places along the way, which feed back into the system, converging, colliding, mingling, and remixing in the middle.

Even 0 would be better than I.

The latter resembles a pedestal, calling to mind impressions of permanence and supposed perfection — precisely the wrong way to go.

Anything that suggests static existence has to be tossed out asap. We need images and metaphors that accommodate motion and growth.

Which makes me wonder, what shape are innovation gurus?

As I started reading Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy today, I was delighted to discover the whole book is framed by the concept of neurodiversity — specifically, the notion that autism shouldn’t be conceived strictly as an impairment, but as one cognitive style among many, with its own strengths and weaknesses.

From the book:

I prefer the word “learning” to “recovery”; many autistics learn how to overcome their cognitive disadvantages. Would we say that a non-autistic person, as he or she grows, “recovers” from having the disabilities of a four-year-old? Or would we say that the person has learned a lot?

Personally, I started learning a lot more — and with a lot less anxiety, guilt, resentment, depression… I became a lot happier — when I came to terms with my autism-like cognitive style and worked with it rather than against it.

Developing practices and ideas that nurture these characteristics has always been part of Open/Conceptual’s fundamental purpose. That should be evident by reading a lot of what I’ve written in the past two years (especially here).

I suppose I’m “out of the closet” now. I can’t figure out how high-profile I should be about this aspect (which is itself a manifestation of a characteristic from the autistic spectrum). Regardless of how much self-disclosure I use, watch for neurodiversity to come up more often in the discussion here.

Oh, and also, why don’t you get the book and read along?