Ecosystem vs egosystem

Friday, February 24, 2006 by admin

A brief thought for a Friday.

I was at a briefing with some IBM folk the other day, and I was listening to Karla Norsworthy talking about how IBM works to influence industry and technology standardisation. At one point she said “ecosystem” – but the combination of her American accent and my poor listening skills made me hear “egosystem”.

Of course it wasn’t long before I thought of the blogosphere – it’s kind of the ultimate egosystem. On bad days the blogosphere seems to me like the mother of all wine-and-cheese parties from hell – thousands of people in an aircraft hangar with their chests puffed out, saying “blah blah blah” loudly to no-one in particular. Some are more tipsy than others. (Look here for another, more provocative, take on the broader subject).

And of course I then got to thinking about how a lot of the interest in blogging today is about how to marry the egosystem with the business ecosystem – how to leverage blogging and bloggers for revenue, margin, profit, mindshare, whatever. So on the one hand we’ve got the business ecosystem – where success and failure are based on meritocracy and objective measurement – and on the other we’ve got the egosystem, where getting ahead is all about who you know and how many people you can suck up to.

And finally, within the space of a couple of minutes, I realised: actually, there’s no difference at all;-)

In business, and as advisors corporate IT, it’s too easy for us to kid ourselves that businesses are machines which can be mechanistically optimised. The blogosphere reminds us that underneath it all, it’s egos that run the machines.

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