Apple announced new tools to create and view iBooks on the iPad, and a new distribution channel for digital textbooks. In doing so Apple ignited a firestorm of debate on the subject of digital books, and the future of the publishing industry, book distribution, and likely consumer consumption patterns. More importantly, they set the stage for what we will someday recognize as a new medium, a new form of content in its own right.

And meanwhile Apple is doing so at a time when the publishing industry is at risk, with outmoded business models, under attack on multiple fronts.

More Than Just Textbooks

Apple positioned their January 19 announcement as an education event, with the aim of revolutionizing the textbook publishing industry. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 6% of textbooks are delivered today in digital form, forecasted to reach 50% by 2020. That’s a big target in its own right, but I’d guess Apple’s unspoken aspirations are even broader…

Well beyond what we think of as “books”

Years from now, we’ll look back at this moment and realize that Apple lit a fire, fueling a new medium, one still to be named.

What Apple has in mind is not just a book or a textbook rendered digitally on an iPad. Their vision for this new type of content goes well beyond digital books, enhanced ebooks, or whatever labels we use today.

Their vision mashes up elements of movies, games, animations and dynamic models, interactivity,  hyperlinking and nonlinear navigation — key enhancements to the core elements of storytelling, narrative flow, design, layout, etc. Here are some of the core elements that will drive our understanding of this new medium, as I see it.

— Source, Christine Thompson, Informing Arts ©2012

Textbooks First, But Not Last

I suspect Apple chose the textbook as the initial target for reinvention because the limitations of a print-based medium for multi-dimensional, complex or time-sensitive subjects are so well understood. Apple’s long experience at selling to and supporting educational institutions affords the company unique insights into what works, and what’s broken, when it comes to 21st century education.

The textbook publishing industry is huge, and can help finance the trials that will eventually shape the winning characteristics of this new emerging medium. In North America alone the traditional textbook publishing industry generates $12–14 billion annually, according to one expert (for a more conservative assumption: > $4 billion in 2011 textbook sales, according to the WSJ today; $8 billion in 2010 according to Forrester. Clearly no one agrees on the definition of the industry, but it’s huge.)

From Apple’s perspective (as a master of disruptive innovations), the educational publishing industry must be a sitting duck, ripe for transformation.

““We are educating people today in the same way as we did when there was 1% as much knowledge.”

– Danny Hillis, The Economist, March 22, 2001

That said Apple is willing to be a partner, not just a disrupter. Apple announced that it plans to partner with educators and publishers (reported by the Wall Street Journal today). When this partnership is productive, those who embrace change and can envision a new medium should profit enormously.

This New Medium Requires New Talents & Specialties

What will emerge is a new form of multi-faceted content. This new medium will require contributions from many specialties, such as:

• Photographers, videographers, musicians, producers
• Designers, illustrators, animators
• Art/creative directors for the ensemble as a whole
• Game developers — people who know how to incorporate game mechanics (“gamification”) within designed experiences
• User experience and interaction designers
• Usability testers
• Web developers and producers (HTML5 and CSS3 experts), scripters and coders
• Information architects, taxonomy and tagging specialists

And of course, the usual:

• Writers and copywriters (as well as translators for books with global appeal)
• Editors
• Fact checkers
• Talent spotters (acquisition experts)

On the strategic level this new medium will require visionaries, risk taking pioneers, game changers and others whose personalities are probably abhorrent to the traditional publishing world.

Not to mention new models for brand building, social media interactions with consumers, and new forms of marketing. But that’s a whole different subject in its own right.

[Disclosure: I played a key role in Apple’s early days of digital publishing, but have had no involvement in their current activities. The opinions described here are my own, based on interpretations of what I’ve read and heard over the Web.]

With more people accessing blogs and websites from smartphones, content owners need to check out their existing page designs to ensure they are “smartphone friendly” — optimized for mobile usage. By that I mean: usable on a smartphone without requiring a magnifying glass to read or navigate them. Blogs and websites that aren’t just a “minimized version” of the original content.

Yes, people can use pinching or other fingertip gestures to control scrolling or magnification on their phones, but this is less than ideal. Problems abound.

Some navigation schemes work poorly or not at all for people with fat fingers. People with bifocals or those over 40 may have trouble reading tiny type…

Photos or videos intended for viewing on a laptop or desktop PC may download slowly, or be difficult to see if not optimized for mobile viewing.

How Best to Optimize Mobile Content?

If you’re a business or content owner like me, you will need a way to adapt to a growing array of devices with divergent requirements — without increasing the time you must devote to your blog or website. This may not be a pressing problem today, but when mobile access starts to exceed 50% of your audience, the problem will become urgent.

(If you earn your living designing and developing blogs or websites for others, Halleluja! You’ve just stumbled on a new revenue stream.)

It’s impractical tackle these mobile optimization requirements on a post-by-post or page-by-page basis. Instead content owners need a smarter, more modern technical platform to handle this for the blog or website as a whole. The smart way to tackle web + mobile optimization is by using a design strategy called “responsive web designs.”

Assuming you’re not a web developer by trade, you also want a platform that handles the heavy-lifting for you, without requiring you to make extensive use of hand-coded scripts…

WordPress Users, Rejoice

If you use WordPress to manage your blog or website, there’s a new tool in the offing that can simplify your adoption of a responsive web design strategy. Check out Headway Themes. (Pricing ranges from $68 to $378, depending on the options.)

Their upcoming release, Headway 3.0.5, aims to tackle some of the core layout challenges: enabling the designer or technically savvy blogger to turn fixed-layout designs into flexible or “responsive web layouts.” (Read the book Responsive Web Design if you want a deeper understanding of this topic as a whole.)

Headway experts discuss the new functions in a screencast here; note that the responsive web demo takes place at about the 8-minute mark… (Caution: this video and discussion are intended for people already familiar with Headway.)

How Headway (or WordPress, for that matter) will simplify the task of serving up the optimal media for each device is still unclear to me at this point, beyond the fact that it will involve the use of “media queries.”

A Good First Step

Whether or not Headway has the perfect solution in Q1 2012, I’m relieved that the WordPress developer community has begun to tackle some of the challenges presented by rapid adoption of mobile web access. Their efforts should eventually make it easier for content owners to adapt content for optimal viewing across a broad gamut of devices.

At present <5% of my blog visitors arrive here via a smartphone. This gives me time to experiment with WordPress and Headway (or others), try different approaches using an experimental site, and be ready with a solid solution once mobile traffic becomes significant.

In the meantime I look forward to some hands-on testing to see what’s involved in optimizing for mobile web visitors.

I skimmed the premiere issue of Chief Content Officer. Although it’s promising, I am disappointed in the contents and on-screen quality of this first issue. And wondering about its content strategy…

My comments are critical, because I expect this magazine to be an exemplar — to practice what it preaches.

CCO is still in beta, so we can hope its limitations will be resolved shortly by its publisher, the Content Marketing Institute.

Unclear Content Strategy

The content strategy for this publication feels fuzzy, in terms of editorial objectives and readership assumptions. It appears to be writing for newbies. I’d hoped to find CCO an exemplar of thought leadership, a source of inspiration for people who are, or aspire to be, chief content officers for their enterprises and media companies.

Plus, I’d hoped it would provide useful case studies and in-depth guidance to content practitioners and executives, helping them advance their skills and perspectives. Instead it feels as if it’s aiming too low, delivering “fast food” thought nuggets rather than real substance.

Hence my notion that it’s trying to serve content newbies rather than mavens — if so, that’s a logical disconnect from the publication’s title, and the capabilities required of a so-called “chief content officer.” Assuming CCO’s aspire to the C-suite…

By way of example, here’s a story called “Anatomy of a Content Strategy.” There’s no depth here. Maybe the headline sets up the wrong expectations. This is something like an infographic, with links to the sponsor’s online content.

What Does “Content Strategy” Mean?

Perhaps my real issue is with the rampant misuse of the term content strategy, given the connotations of anything called a strategy. Strategy, when viewed from a C-suite perspective, is more than a collection of tactics. Strategy defines the business context, the goals to be accomplished, and the tactics to be deployed to accomplish those goals. Strategies explain how resources will be mustered to execute those tactics.

As a result I had expected this story to illuminate what’s involved in architecting or setting a content strategy — the upfront work that should guide the tactical execution and production choices, and inform the messaging.

Given my understanding of content strategy, I’d hoped this article would speak more about Kinaxis’ (the showcase company’s) business objectives, audience (or customer) characteristics, readers’ and viewers’ media/channel preferences, etc.; and how Kinaxis chose to map the content and delivery options so they serve audience (customer) goals while meeting the company’s business objectives.

In other words what’s the rationale or game plan that drove the specific content types and sequence of activities that CCO magazine illustrates here with the Kinaxis example? Perhaps CCO could have tackled this with a Q&A conversation between the story’s author and the chief content officer at Kinaxis. (Better yet, by showing us excerpts from some of Kinaxis’ planning documents or templates.)

Perhaps I was expecting this story to be a case study. It’s not; instead it’s an attractive visual navigation device that links to specific content objects that have been created by Kinaxis, without explaining the underlying logic. When I clicked the links for each step in the sequence shown here, I’d expected to see more explanatory information; instead, you see links to downloadable versions of the specific content elements that were created by Kinaxis for their supply chain audience.

What you see is an illustration of a sequence of tactics, devoid of the strategy in which these tactics make sense.

If an organization’s chief content officer is not driving the content strategy, who is?

Production Quality Issues

When viewed on either a Mac or a PC, the visual quality is disappointing, particularly for the copy blocks (the text). The on-screen text has anti-aliasing problems (jaggies), and appears blurry with either PC Firefox or Mac Safari.

Here are some examples. Each scaled-down graphic links to the screen shot. The first example shows a text copy block (captured on a Mac at 72 dpi, shown here full size):

Here’s a page as displayed on a PC with Windows 7 and the latest version of Firefox (captured at 110 dpi), shown here scaled down, with a link to the full-size image. It too has jaggy text, although perhaps not as blurry as on the Mac. I found these pages to be hard on the eye, if I actually tried to read them on my high-res displays (>1280 x whatever).

Clearly, the on-screen page rendering technology that the publisher has chosen aspires to mimic the print version. That’s a laudable goal, but it hasn’t been realized.

Because the font rendering challenges get in the way of readability, these issues need to be resolved…

As long as I think of this as a first draft effort, I’m OK with it. But if this is the dress rehearsal for the final production, it falls short.

Aim higher, guys!

Although perhaps an unorthodox choice, my vote for a creative use of social media was the development of The Essential New York Times Cookbook, by Amanda Hesser (and countless others).

The story of its making is almost as interesting as the end product, which you’ll learn in the book’s front matter.

“A 150-Year Flipbook of American Cooking”

A chronicle of changing tastes, this cookbook celebrates America’s best-loved recipes, as well as evolving food passions. It offers a broad spectrum of choices for the home cook, while telling the story of American cooking.

Recipes range from classic cuisine to French bistro dishes, from tapas to Southeast Asian, from Italian trattoria to slow-cooked dishes with artisinal ingredients. About 1200 recipes in all.

I love how Hesser describes her objective: “It was going to be an eclectic panorama of both high-toned masterpieces and low-brow grub, a fever chart of culinary passions.” Humor enlivens the writing throughout the book, such as “Soups used to be simmered until they begged for mercy…”

Crowd-sourced Recipes

Recipes were culled from the Times’ 150-year-old food archive, as well as contributions from foodies and cooks  around the world.

The author used a variety of social techniques to source recipes and then decide which ones to consider for inclusion. Amanda and her colleagues tested any recipe recommended by 3 or more people. Some recipes, especially desserts, got dozens of votes (and over 200 in at least one case). It took Amanda Hesser over 6 years to test the leading contenders, sharing 1400 dishes with family and friends to see which ones merited inclusion in the final cookbook.

From the beginning Amanda Hesser reached out to food lovers and cooking enthusiasts to help her compile the recipes that had to be included. She relied on a voting process to help winnow down the potential candidates.

“To start, I crowd-sourced many of the recipes that had to be included by posting an “author’s query” in the Wednesday Dining section and the Sunday Magazine asking readers to let me know their favorite Times recipes. The results were delightful: thousands of emails and letters poured in, with more than 6000 suggested.

Charmingly, people shared the impact of favorite recipes on their lives:

“…Passionate accounts of readers’ relationships with the dishes they had been cooking for decades. Readers wrote me about recipes that had held together their marriages, reminded them of lost youth, given them the cooking bug, and symbolized their annual family gatherings.

The author also turned to Twitter for help naming the book:

“As a lark… I Tweeted to ask what people thought the title should be. I loved writer Andy Selsberg’s response: That Old Gray Lady Can Cook. But the overwhelming favorite was All The Food That’s Fit to Eat.

One of the reasons why I’ve come to love this book is the author’s wit, revealed both in the Introduction, as well as the preamble that sets the context for each recipe. For example, here’s her rationale for why so few recipes from the 1940s and ‘50s made the final cut:

“Sharp-eyed readers may suspect that I slacked off during the 1940s and ‘50s, but if you could taste some of the recipes I made from this era, you would see that I am saving you from a world of hurt.

If you’re still looking for that perfect gift for someone who loves cooking, or reading about cooking, check out The Essential New York Times Cookbook. It’s a wonderful example of sharing, on many levels.

Note: All citations are from the cookbook.

I stumbled upon an intriguing way to think about innovations and predict their likely success, thanks to some blog posts by a Canadian consultant, John Sutherland. Although his ideas are a bit abstract, they offer useful constructs for thinking about or assessing potential innovations.

Sutherland’s blog explores behavior space and relationship space, and their implications for value creation as a result of an innovation. Here’s what he means by these concepts:

Behavior Space

As a context for exploring these concepts, Sutherland compares the iPad to the Kindle. He analyzes their respective innovation potential in terms of likely adoption and market footprint, using behavior space as a predictor.

Says Sutherland, the Kindle does one thing really well, facilitate “mobile reading” as a new behavior — but it’s largely mono-dimensional in terms of the behaviors it affords.

By contrast just think of the many things people can now do with an iPad. (Or check out what’s available now in the iTunes App Store.) Thanks to the huge ecosystem of iPad apps, there’s no doubt that the Apple iPad enables a much larger behavior space. Consequently, says Sutherland, we can confidently predict the iPad will achieve much more market impact than the Kindle.

Relationship Space

The notion of relationship space is an useful framework for analyzing people-centered innovations. Here’s how Sutherland defines the key dimensions of relationship space:

• Time: when we are [how long things take or when they occur]
• Space: where we are
• Ourselves: who we are
• Other people: by themselves or in groups
• Objects: living or inanimate (e.g., pets, cars, books, etc.)
• Ideas [and values]: how and why we are

I’ve found this an interesting list, either singly or in combination. Let’s take this one step further.

Applying the Relationship Space Framework

Using knitting as an extended metaphor, let’s identify some potential applications using the relationship space framework. Think of these as seed concepts for iPad apps for knitters and crafters (and yes, some of these ideas can already be seen as early knitting apps in the iTunes Store):

While this is more about knitting than you may care for, this extended example shows the power of the relationship space framework for imagining new product/service concepts.

It got my attention…

And by the way, there are only about a dozen knitting apps in the iTunes Store so far.

How to Increase a Business’ Chances for Success

Lately I’ve been captivated by a new framework that enables businesses to describe their business model on a single sheet of paper. It’s a 9-box model for synthesizing the key components of a business and the relationships among those components.

This model is eloquently described by co-authors Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur in Business Model Generation — to my mind, one of the best business innovations to emerge from Europe in a long time.

Their intent is to create a common visual language for envisioning, visualizing and talking about business ventures, as well as a springboard for innovation.

Its creators refer to the framework as the “business model canvas.” Today this model can be used as a paper-based canvas with Post-It Notes for group brainstorming activities, or as a PowerPoint template for individuals or small groups. Soon there will also be an iPad app.

From my experience facilitating strategy offsites, I can readily imagine how well this canvas would support a common language for brainstorming new business concepts. It also serves as a visual reminder, one that demands a more holistic approach for defining the key strategic drivers of that business model. It’s strikingly similar to an approach I used earlier this month with a client’s global leadership team, which is why I can readily imagine how effective it will be as a brainstorming aid.

The Business Model Canvas: The Power of Simplicity

I’ve not yet had the opportunity to interact with clients using this particular framework, although I’ve used similar models and analogous concepts when working through “fast-track strategic planning.” I look forward to adding this resource as a toolkit for my consulting practice.

Although I realize the model is intended principally for envisioning new business concepts, I’ve found it handy when coaching entrepreneurs on their pitches to angel investors.

With entrepreneurs I take notes on their pitch; the canvas helps me assess how well their pitch covers all the key bases — the key drivers of their business and the relationships (or logical disconnects) among their strategies. It’s amazing how often entrepreneurs, especially those from engineering backgrounds, get so enthused about product features that they forget to talk about the customer, the customer’s compelling reasons to buy, or how they intend to reach and serve those customers. (Some of this is probably symptomatic of a lack of deep thought or hard work to validate core assumptions about customers and buying processes.)

Improving the Model: The Link to Customer Development

Fortunately, serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is collaborating with Osterwalder and Pigneur to integrate his notion of “customer development” with their business model canvas. Here’s a helpful discussion, showing how these combined frameworks help entrepreneurs think through (and then validate) new business concepts.

They’ve developed a terrific joint presentation, combining the best of their respective frameworks:

The Strategy “Stack”

The resulting “strategic solution stack” (as Blank calls it) will offer entrepreneurs a systematic way of formulating and testing hypotheses about target markets, customers, sales channels, revenue models, etc. Here’s an early iteration of these combined models, with some emphasis on where hypotheses need to be validated.

I highly recommend his blog post on this subject. I also hope Blank revises his book on Customer Development, Four Steps to the Epiphany, so these emerging concepts get fleshed out, more clearly developed for a broader audience of business people.

Sometimes you hear or read things that just stop you in your tracks. Bring tears to your eyes. Make you rethink basic assumptions. I had one of those moments yesterday.

While waiting for my PC to install some software updates, I began reading Nancy Duarte’s latest book, Resonate. Luckily I acted on her suggestion and checked out Benjamin Zander’s celebrated TEDTalk on music and passion (2008). Like the audience at TED, I was moved to tears by Zander’s performance.

But here’s what stopped me in my tracks — his depiction of his role as conductor and orchestra leader:

My job is to awaken possibility in other people.

—Benjamin Zander, 2008

Zander conducts Boston’s Philharmonic Orchestra, and is an impassioned proponent of classical music. As a conductor, paradoxically his own work is silent: music is only created by and through the instruments and talents of the people who perform in his orchestra.

What struck me about Zander’s statement is how well it conveys the calling of a true consultant: the gift of “awakening possibility” in other people and client organizations.

It also points to a key distinction between contractors — interim talent, people who do the work that’s required when client teams are overloaded — and consultants, professionals with skills and experience to guide clients to find a better way or envision a more rewarding future state.

As for me, thinking back on last week’s kudos for facilitating a strategy offsite, it helped me realize why my client was so enthusiastic about our work together. It wasn’t just the fact that we accomplished all our objectives (and had fun in the process). It was because I’d enabled the client team to get out of their usual ruts, break through their silos, think out of the box, envision a larger future, and how they might get there. They accomplished things together that they would not have imagined possible beforehand.

They began to discover their own possibility.

And that’s an amazingly powerful discovery.

Marketing Transformation

Like many traditional or industrial age enterprises, until recently GE had no strategic marketing function to speak of.  Leaders tended to believe that GE products would sell themselves, so marketers were relegated to sales support or marcom functions. The CMO role did not exist (until recently).

Skeptics didn’t believe that marketing could make any substantial impact on the business, or provide valued contributions to the company’s innovation or growth agendas. Then times changed… The downturn and maturation of many of GE’s traditional businesses forced the company to take another look, and commit to transforming the marketing function for the 21st century.

Learning from GE’s Experience

Via an article published in the October 2010 Harvard Business Review, GE shares its experience in some depth. The article reveals a fascinating before-and-after perspective, and was co-authored by 2 of GE’s most senior marketing executives and the Harvard professor who counseled them through the transformation. Revenue and growth challenges appear to have been key catalysts…

When GE realized that its products would no longer sell themselves, it had to invent a formidable marketing function from scratch.

—HBR, October 2010

The process began with a lot of internal assessments and a search for in-house leadership talent and best practices. Not surprisingly, early findings were disappointing. GE had a lot of homegrown talent with little formal training in marketing best practices.

The audit revealed that GE needed to overhaul its principles, people and processes so that marketers could operate from the same playbook: a common language, framework and success metrics. GE based its framework on the notion that today’s marketers must play a revenue-generating role and contribute to multiple aspects of value creation.

Once GE decided to upgrade marketing from its previous role as a tactical support function, it tasked marketing with the role of driving “commercial innovation,” leveraging the company’s heritage of technological innovation.

Now its innovation expanded to include ideas grounded in customer needs and market trends. Marketers took their place alongside technologists and had a voice earlier in the process, to ensure that GE’s offerings were differentiated and aimed at the right customer segments.

—HBR, October 2010

Marketing: New Roles to Drive Strategic Transformation

What I found particularly fascinating in this story is the way GE decided to cluster marketers into 4 new roles, based on their desired impact in driving change:

New Roles

• Instigators: people unwilling to live with the status quo, unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom or tried-and-true business models; people who look for new opportunities or better ways of doing things
• Innovators: people who can turn customer needs or market insights into the seeds of new (but unproven) products, services or solutions
• Integrators: people who are skilled at building bridges between the company and the market, or across silos and business functions
• Implementers: people who make things happen, and put ideas into action; people who deliver results

New Framework for Assessing Capabilities

GE also defined a new framework for assessing marketers’ capabilities according to 7 important “capability areas,” with standard definitions for the skills expected for each of those areas:

• Strategy and innovation
• Branding and communications
• Sales force effectiveness
• “New World” skills
• Market knowledge
• Segmentation and targeting
• Value creation and pricing
• Commercial activation

This framework will be used annually for employee self-evaluation, with a process that kicked off in the first half of 2010. GE plans to consolidate individuals scores in each of these capability areas so they can pinpoint where they have “pockets of strength,” and where they need to invest in hiring or grooming their marketing talent.

Recommended Reading

For people who face marketing transformation challenges in large or mid-market enterprises, the HBR article is well worth reading and pondering. An earlier McKinsey discussion is also worthwhile. The McKinsey Quarterly article targets C-level execs and focuses on change management implications.

• “Unleashing the Power of Marketing,” Beth Comstock (GE CMO), Ranjay Gulati and Stephen Liguori, Harvard Business Review, October 2010.
• “Managing a Marketing and Sales Transformation,” Joel Claret, Pierre Mauger, and Eric V. Roegner, McKinsey Quarterly, August 2006.

When it’s time for high-stakes business planning, my clients ask for help with strategy offsite facilitation or coaching on fast-track strategic planning. They want a strategy consultant who understands how to facilitate strategic planning, is a quick study about business dynamics, knows how to get the best out of their people, and can help them achieve reasonable outcomes in abbreviated timeframes. My clients are very smart, so they want someone who can collaborate with their best and brightest, and juggle big egos without fear.

This year I decided it was time to add more pizzazz to the offsites, and went looking for some best practices to adapt for my clients’ needs. I was particularly keen to find resources that leverage the power of visual thinking and collaboration so I could energize my clients’ strategy offsites. When you’re facing a room full of highly intelligent, easily bored Type-A business people, it’s important to know how to channel their energies in constructive ways.

Highly Recommended

Luckily, I found several books that have just been published. For meeting facilitation my current favorites are Visual Meetings and Gamestorming. They are great complements to The Back of the Napkin, Dan Roam’s classic introduction to visual thinking.

Adapting Templates for Visual Thinking

Both Visual Meetings and Gamestorming offer graphic templates that can be adapted for use at offsites. The templates cover a variety of situations that the authors have encountered over years of client engagements, with some real goodies for strategic planning and vision crafting.

For example here are 2 templates to guide team thinking when you’re working on the infamous “elevator pitch” with your clients or colleagues. To fill in the blanks for the structured elevator pitch, the facilitator leads the group through 7 flip charts, to uncover the leading candidates for each of the components of the pitch sentence. Then you’d use various arranging, sorting and prioritizing techniques to select the final elements to fill in the blanks for the elevator pitch sentence.

In most cases the graphic templates are well suited for use on flipcharts with Post-it® Notes, as long as you have at least minimal proficiency with sketching. Artistry is not required!

Every time I hear references to social graphs, I’m reminded about research into relationships and community structures, published by Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter in a thought-provoking book, World Class: Thriving Locally in a Global Economy (1995). Kanter’s research suggested that people, organizations and civic communities gravitate toward one of two classes: local or cosmopolitan.

Mindsets, competencies and connections are what distinguish these two social classes.

The implications can be profound for local economies, based on the prevalence and mindsets of locals versus cosmopolitans within their population. At its worst the political divides can be polarizing, especially in regions full of locals whose once thriving industry has withered away or moved offshore. Unable or resistant to change, locals can languish in a community of “have nots” who lack the imagination and wherewithal to reinvent their local economy.

These distinctions apply to the world as a whole, not just the Americans Kanter studied for World Class. As she declared so presciently 15 years ago,

Today, the world economy is a period of rapid and dramatic change, and the question of just how we will connect to this new world is the single most important issue of our lifetime.

Here is how she characterizes these two social classes.

Cosmopolitans

Cosmopolitans enjoy travel, “are comfortable in many places,” and tend to move away from the homes of their youth for access to a wider set of opportunities. They are broad-minded, have learned to be adaptable, to listen, and how to bridge cultures. By definition they are well-connected to other people and information resources. Kanter writes:

Cosmopolitans are rich in three intangible assets, three C’s that translate into preeminence and power in a global economy: concepts — the best and latest knowledge and ideas; competence — the ability to operate at the highest standards of any place anywhere; and connections — the best relationships, which provide access to the resources of other people and organizations around the world.

Cosmopolitans tend to affiliate with other like-minded cosmopolitans. Depending on how often they travel and how many places they’ve lived in, their ties to their local community may be loose, and their definition of “home” quite fluid or multi-faceted.

Locals

Kanter goes on to say,

Locals, by contrast, are defined primarily by particular places. Some are rooted in their communities but remain open to global thinking and opportunities. Others are simply stuck.

As long as their local economy remains vibrant, locals like these enjoy satisfying lives surrounded by friends and family, nourished by long-term ties, deeply rooted in their community. When all goes well, they provide the social capital and investments of time and resources that enable their local clubs, churches, synagogues and schools to thrive.

Unfortunately, locals tend to be vulnerable, says Kanter, to external changes imposed by factors beyond their control, such as factory closures, the exhaustion of local natural resources, as in Oregon’s timber industry, or the mid-century migration of the textile industry away from New England to the Southeast and now to Asia. Locals can suffer when exogenous change occurs:

…At the extreme end of the local class are those whose skills are not particularly unique or desirable, whose connections are limited to a small circle in the neighborhood, and whose opportunities are confined to their own communities. In contrast with the limitless horizons for cosmopolitans, [such locals] face increasing limits to opportunity. They lack control over resources and knowledge, which can move rapidly in and out of their communities.

Given the cultural divide between “Red States” and “Blue States,” I wonder how much of it might be ascribed to the predominance of cosmopolitans versus locals within their boundaries…

Visualizing These Differences

It would be interesting to apply these constructs to the leading social networks and other online communities, to see what the patterns might reveal. It’s probably a safe bet that LinkedIn enjoys lots of cosmopolitans within its professional membership. As MySpace moves down market, is its appeal shifting towards locals? And is FaceBook a mix of the two? An interesting visualization of US regions based on FaceBook data by Pete Warden is an intriguing beginning (as shown here).

It’s beyond my abilities to apply data mining or visualization to their members’ connections and degrees of relationship in order to compare social networks. But it will be fascinating to discover the patterns that characterize communities based on their members’ mindsets, geographic locale, and interconnections. I look forward to what will emerge from the social scientists who will study this subject.

Having said that, the unintended consequences of doing so might be frightening, especially if unscrupulous politicians and demagogues exploit the results to further polarize the citizenry of our already divided country.

News update: Pete Warden, the creator of the social graph above, has had to destroy the data set he culled (apparently without permission) from FaceBook in the face of threatened legal action, saying he could not afford the litigation costs.

Clearly, this is a controversial subject on many levels…