The naked company
by John Craig
There's a good review on Slashdot of a book called The Naked Corporation, which discusses the effects of new standards of openness. The review argues that tools such as Google make it easy for customers and activists alike to hold companies to account, so that they increasingly have to take the initiative, making openness a priority of their own. For me, one interesting example of such a tool is the Parking Lot Indicatr, to which anyone can submit a night time picture of a company's car park (busy lots serve as proxies for an imminent launch or announcement). So just as private security has gone pro-am, so increasingly has industrial espionage. These are just the kinds of organisational pressures to which the Pauls alluded in Disorganisation, and which I think are increasingly relevant to our work on the adaptive state.