Principled Innovation LLC

P.I. Podcast: Interview with Clay Shirky

April 14th, 2008

Without question, the frontrunner for the association community’s must-read book of 2008 is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. As soon as I began reading the book, I realized that it had profound implications for how we are going to think about the future of associations. When you read the following brief excerpt, I’m confident you’ll agree:

All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences–employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be. (Bold emphasis added)

The fundamental and irrevocable transformation of the association community we have always known is now underway because social media tools are enabling simple group formation, rapid distributed collaboration and meaningful collective action in ways that no longer demand institutional infrastructure and support. Clay’s book is an incredibly thoughtful and insightful treatise on the technology-powered global social and cultural phenomena that are actively altering our society, including the reality of associations, in the early years of the 21st century.

After you listen to this podcast, buy the book and read it carefully. After you’ve read it, buy copies of it for your staff and volunteer colleagues and challenge them to read it as well. Your board should be discussing this book and the strategic issues it raises for your association at its next meeting. Here Comes Everybody will stretch your organization’s strategic imagination, and that is precisely what our community needs at this time.

The podcast is just under 30 minutes. If you’re listening in the browser, you can download the file. (If you’re viewing the feed, you’ll see two links to download the file.)

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