This is a guest article by Sebastian Haselbeck. Feedback, to someone my age, is everything, whether we are aware of it or not. Everything we do on the web has instant repercussions, creates immediate reaction, which prompts counter-reaction, back-pedalling or refinement: there is a feedback loop in most things we do on the web....
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Alex Schellong and I wrote down a longer conversation we have been having over the years and published it in the Harvard International Review: The evolution of modern society is marked by continuous rise of government size, obligations and market interactions. According to Juergen Habermas, the expansion of the state into more and more...
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Martin Reeves and his team at the Boston Consulting Group Strategy Institute have been working hard to regain BCG’s position as the world’s foremost strategic thinkers. A tough nut to crack in a time of uncertainty (world economic crisis) and a time of radical transformation (moving from contract to network society). If strategy is...
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over the last 20 years, we have internalized Marshall McLuhan’s insight “the medium is the message:”  whenever somebody comes up with something, we jump on the bandwagon and reduce our thinking to 140-character-aphorisms, even as, cultural critics are lamenting the demise of traditional media such the newspaper or the pop album, and the demise...
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By: Florian Buhl, Sophie van Huellen, Philipp Müller Two hours after the polls had closed on June 12, 2009 the re-election of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially announced. Soon thereafter the supporters of Iran’s opposition, especially those of Ahmadinejad’s rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, initiated a protest movement in order to get to...
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By: Philipp Mueller and Violetta Pleshakova In 2010, it has become a truism that culture, lifeworlds, and our political economies are transforming. It is obvious that the Web is impacting society, bringing in new lifestyles, attitudes, values, work patterns and relationships – it is now even officially (unofficially) nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize....
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Just in time for the EU minsterial conference in Malmö, John Gotze brought together some of the most prominent thought leaders, including Don Tapscott, Tim O’Reilly and Lawrence Lessig, in the emerging field of Government 2.0 (“thinking government as a platform”) in the book State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, which is...
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Guest-Blog by Ralf Leiteritz (now an international relations professor at the Universidad de los Andes). …on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I’ve come to think about my old country again. Seeing a short compilation of songs about the wall or more precisely its fall in 89,...
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As history unfolds it is often hard to distinguish the truly historical from the incidental. As someone who has lived through German reunification 20 years ago these days, I can attest to that. But the absence of political theorists following the debate about open source in general and open voting systems in specific seems...
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The trend in 2009 is to argue that in times of crisis, strategy needs to be more attuned to the changing realities of an organizations environment. As Stefan Stern argues in the FT: At BCG, Reeves and Deimler has produced a paper, “New bases of competitive advantage”, that looks at something they call “adaptive...
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