Seth Godin wrote recently about Culture being invented by people who do not want to mess with new technology.

First he defines culture in terms of the opera, the novel and the newspaper – which is a debatable point in itself; but his main thesis is that the people in the ‘culture’ business would rather have technology stay still so that they can keep perfecting the culture.

I would argue that the top performers in any business (including the culture business) are actually early adopters of new technology – if only to stay ahead of the competition.

In fact there is a strong and perhaps unconscious feedback cycle set up between the early adopters and the innovators. This helps with the fine tuning and mass adoption of technology.  The advances in technology has bettered the human condition since the beginning of time – and allowed space for ‘culture’ to experiment and flourish.

With apologies to the chicken and the egg, technology does come first and culture follows.

Earlier this year, I discovered that the Gaming industry is well on its way towards overtaking the Movies business.

Video Games are almost 75% the size of the Movies Business! And growing at close to 50% per annum!!……Admittedly, the show biz is a mature industry and is not expected to have a blistering rate of growth – but Gaming almost as large as the entire Movie business?

And now, amid the doom and gloom of slowing economy and stagnant consumer electronics business, the market research specialist NPD Group is reporting

In the U.S., third quarter total industry unit sales grew 8 percent versus 2007, even as the economy showed accelerating signs of recession…… Heading into the critical fourth quarter, the U.S. games industry is on solid ground..

One of the largest companies in the industry, Take-Two

….envisions future revenue for the video game industry, …sees microtransactions and downloadable content as the “biggest opportunity” and calls subscription revenue the “holy grail.”

Meanwhile, Television viewing is moving online in a multiple-viewer, social, ‘gaming’ environment. Jenna Wortham writes on Wired -

As television audiences migrate online, media companies are eyeing social networking as a possible killer app for hooking viewers through their laptops. From simple chat rooms to unique games, the race is on to develop content that complements traditional shows — the more creative and addictive the better.

Then, the Wall Street Journal reports on Gaming coming full circle back to a hand-held device – the iPhone

The iPhone and its sister device the iPod touch, which feature big screens and powerful graphics, are emerging as serious competitors to Nintendo’s DS handheld and Sony’s PlayStation Portable….Developers are being lured by Apple’s online method for delivering games, which has lowered distribution costs and made it possible to profit on games that sell for just a few dollars or are given away with advertising…

So, Games are overtaking Movies…both are moving online along with the TV shows…these are all framed in interactive, social settings…all are available via pay-per-use subscription models…and right on your iPhone. All your entertainment is now in the palm of your hands to be consumed at will.

It’s clear that the ‘game format’ has taken over entertainment and online subscription has eroded purchase thresholds. Economic news and debates do not matter in the pastimes anymore.

Update 11/26/08 – Daniel Terdiman at CNET is also writing about the video game industry being recession-proof despite noting some caveats from Wall Street-types.

So, how do we encourage informal collaboration and communications amongst employees – but still retain some control over the corporate image that will get diffuse without the professional touch of Public Relations and Corporate Communications. The Economist reports -

On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.

Cracking down on employees in this case may have merit, but this highlights a growing uneasiness in the corporate communications and public relations circles. Where does social networking fit in the corporate world?

If such cases are considered aberrations or problems that need to be ’solved’, then a huge opportunity would be squandered – with little or no chance of the problem going away. With the rise of social networking and associated acceleration in communications, it is very easy to share ideas and influence opinions by aggregating preferences. Everyone has already been ‘networking’ in the real world. It is just that the network is now moving online to a virtual world as well. We can legislate and create procedural and legal barriers asking our staff to ’switch off’ their network for work related items – and invest in a thought police to enforce the rules and punish the guilty. It might work in the short run, but it is a losing battle. Thoughts, ideas, communication and collaboration that could be leveraged for everyone’s benefit will now just be driven deeper underground…. These things cannot be switched off in sentient beings.

The other approach is to consider why we need to control the informal communications. Maybe the ‘official’ corporate image does not match with reality; or maybe the corporate vision and goals have not been communicated to the employees – reflected in daily actions, not just an official scroll; or maybe the leadership is not leading from the front in creating a common vision and in getting constant feedback to keep the vision fresh, current and relevant…or a combination of all that..or..or…

The wall between ‘internal’ communications and ‘corporate’ (external) communications is being chipped down. Why spend resources on shoring up the wall and in crafting the pristine external message and in defending against ‘rogue’ messages? Some of those resources are better spent in creating one consistent message for everyone. Employees are the best brand ambassadors besides being customers too!

The Economist has a story on why Japan lost the mobile-phone wars to Scandinavia, Korea and others despite having been a pioneer in technology and usage of mobile devices. Japanese players are doing alright within Japan and still provide high-value components like the hard drives and screens from Toshiba – but the mobile world has moved on with other global players in hardware, software and usage.

The analysis on why the Japanese failed has an uncanny correspondence to trends and challenges in Enterprise Business Systems today.

“First, too many Japanese companies make phones. All major electronics firms sell them, mainly as a matter of corporate pride: not to do so would be a sign of weakness. As a result, 11 different domestic makers compete, most of them at a loss.”

Well, too many businesses try to write their own systems from scratch instead of reusing the globs of code written already all over the world. Standards and technology have existed for quite some time now that help put an ‘envelope’ around the code you want to reuse. This allows a black-box approach to ‘composing’ new arrangements of business-models. The value is in how the components are put together – and not always on the individual component.

“Second, Japanese manufacturers concentrated on the domestic market at the expense of global growth. Yet the national business model is unique: mobile operators design the features of the phone, and the manufacturers must comply. So the makers do not have a good understanding of what users want…” 

“Third, the manufacturers designed products around home-grown technical standards and special features that are not used elsewhere. “

This reminds me of IT shops in companies faithfully implementing every single enhancement request from business users without asking the additional questions, “Is this the standard way the industry operates? If not, then does this enhancement give you a unique competitive advantage?” The discussion should focus on reducing total cost of operations of industry-standard ‘utility’ processes and on investing resources in processes that create a competitive edge.

“Fourth, high-end customers who want sophisticated phones drive the Japanese market, but the main growth in the wireless industry overall is in emerging markets, which need cheap phones. The world’s top three makers—Nokia, Samsung and Motorola—focus on this segment.”

This is where the IT groups spend their annual budgets on high-end enterprise systems – ERP’s, CRM’s, SCM’s and similar ‘will fix everything and the kitchen sink’-initiatives. No money left over to analyze and improve the typical users’ workday  -better and more flexible productivity, collaboration and organization tools. No wonder the IT groups within business organizations are facing challenges from ‘mass-market’ technologies like Google Apps, Wordpress blogs, Linked-In Contacts and a variety of desktop and mobile gadgets that help with balancing work and home lives. The tech-savvy, gadget-laden, knowledge-worker – with an equivalent of an IT shop at home – is the new ‘emerging market’.

IT groups supporting business enterprises can add this chapter to their ‘Learning Book’…yet another set of rationale justifying the need to reinvent.