Coming up for air.

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It’s like when you are 10 and you get a brand new bike for your birthday and it rains, torentially, for the next month.  And all you can do is sit there and stare at it shining in the garage…

So think of this post as a short, sweet sortie into the rain of meetings, deadlines and travel that have stuffed September fuller than a turkey bound for Christmas…

As you know, I believe that markets and financial services in the 21st century are ultimately digital businesses, cornerstones and representations of the “information economy”.  As a result, I would suggest that anyone wanting to lead and/or succeed in these businesses needs a lucid and enlightened understanding of this information economy and the internet substrate that underlies it.  This probably sounds obvious but, at the risk of sounding patronizing, I would suggest that many (heretofore successful) business people in financial services have at best a superficial or tangential understanding of these powerful currents running under the surface of our emerging information economy.

In the spirit of trying to redress this situation,  I would like to bring attention to two people who I would suggest could form the core curricular foundation for an executive course in Information Economy 101.  These are not obscure personalities but in their universe, mainstream thought leaders, celebrities even.  Indeed for many (most) readers of the Park Paradigm, this will be old hat.  However my hope is that some readers will not have been exposed to their thinking previously and that perhaps others (already familiar) would be nudged to push this information into their organizations and to their leaders.  Call me crazy, but I think any person tasked with running a large financial services company is unqualified unless they are familiar with the concepts so powerfully articulated by people like Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow.

Cory’s Cambridge Business lecture is a great place to start:

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