It’s Monday morning and here I am, my thoughts and ideas being put together and shared for free. Why not? You may well ask. Why should this not be so? And I have a couple of answers there that might interest you. The first one is very much a 21st century, co-creationist, open-minded one: I think that the traditional way we calculate value is narrow-minded and outdated and we really ought to find fresh ways to do it. Ways that empower not just ourselves but those around us. This builds relationships (even if we are not aware of it), creates connections, unleashes the power of shared information and the shareability of its results and creates a fluid, evolving matrix that makes us all smarter, more capable and better informed than ever before in history.

“To Google” may have become a transitive verb for “using search to obtain information” but at some point in the future one of its variants will be a synonym for “think big and disrupt everything”. Ok, let’s unpack this statement to add a little substance to its style. 

Do social media networks make us dumber? Do they make us smarter? Are they prisms that focus and magnify our worst attributes, turning us into a digital mob that launches global witch hunts in a single click? Do they have the ability to bring out the very best of us, helping the innate trust towards others that we have within us, emerge? 

It’s true that when you’re at the top everyone wants to pull you down. This is the same for brands as it is for people and Google is no exception. Part of this is natural selection, you automatically become the ‘target’ to beat. As a trailblazer your achievements become the benchmark others measure themselves by. 

When Google+ came along its remit was as obvious as its functionality was complex. It brought in individuals from the entire Google ecosystem and began, by degrees, to ascribe weight to their presence, expertise, connections, interactions and knowledge. It tuned profiles that used to be “strings” into people and entities that were proper “things”. 

Technology and morality make for an uneven mix. There is always the feeling that we should agree on a Cartesian split, where we make the former the province of man and the latter can be ascribed to a higher authority (of some description) that we can safely ignore in our day to day lives. 

Every business understands the value in branding, but few get the values of branding. In presentations I’ve often discussed how branding now cannot be separated from other business considerations like search, content creation, a social media presence and the core values that make a business what it is. 

In the 21st century every fresh challenge comes with its own set of unique questions. Big Data is slowly transforming everything in a development arc that follows the predictability of the S-curve that’s been associated with every technology.

“What is Trust?” the very fact that we need to ask something so basic shows both the poor state of our understanding of what it is and the fact that we know now that trust is a requirement for a relational exchange of any kind to take place. 

After Leon Trotsky’s assassination in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1940 the Soviet Union, under Stalin began a systematic, wholesale erasure of the past, complete with the careful, expert alteration of photographic archives and historical references.