P.I. Podcast: Interview with Matt Mason
January 10th, 2008
Matt Mason, a former pirate radio DJ in London, is now a successful first-time business book author. The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, which just hit bookstores yesterday, offers a unique glimpse into how punk, hip-hop, graffiti and other counterculture movements have undermined the status quo and sparked innovation over the last several decades.
As I wrote in a previous post, I heard Matt speak at the BIF-3 Summit this past October, and I found his presentation very provocative, and I connected the dots back to some of the challenges we’re facing the association community. As Matt writes in the book:
Illegal pirates, legitimate companies, and law-abiding citizens are now all in the same space, working out how to share and control information in new ways. The Pirate’s Dilemma is not just about how we compete against pirates, and how we treat them, it’s also about how we can become better by recognizing the pirate within ourselves.
As the challenge of inventing sustainable association business models continues to unfold, our community will experience the same kind of upheaval over creative content that is reshaping the entertainment world, albeit on a smaller economic scale. As our long-standing walled gardens crumble, and individual content creators gain more freedom and power through technology, associations will need to think differently about every dimension of these crucial contributor relationships.
When you first listen to this podcast, you may conclude that Matt’s ideas and experiences are very far afield from the work of association executives. But if you listen carefully to what he’s saying, you’ll quickly discover that his message is both timely and relevant to where our organizations are headed in the next few years. Ignore it at your peril.
As always, your feedback and ideas are welcomed. Please post them below as comments, or e-mail me. And check out Matt’s blog for more fresh insight! (The podcast is approximately 34 minutes long.)
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Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, PI Interviews, Audioblogs & Podcasts, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, Simplicity, We Have Always Done It That Way, Garage Memes, Governing for Innovation
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