Mobile phone etiquette is interesting.  I think if people are constantly taking calls in your presence then this is excellent feedback to you about your relevance and your impact on them. But can we change the rules?

Perhaps we can.  I saw this on Authors@Google. The presenter, can't remember his name, was at the lectern. A phone went off in the front row - he strolled over and requested it. He proceeded to take the call. It was hilarious. "Sorry he can't take the call right now - can I help you?" Pause. "I am blah and I am giving a talk to a group here at Google right now" Pause.... "OK I will make sure he gets the message, yeah, sure he will get back to you as soon as possible....." Pause. He walks back to the lectern with the phone in his hand and puts it down next to his notes. "I will keep it here in case she calls back"...

I guess the message here is clear.  When speaking in public be relevant and if you can be remarkable - take the call!

My contention is that Brands are dying in the digital age because they were a construct of the analogue age. Brands are about exclusion not inclusion.

Obama won the mob over because he was inclusive. He presented an ideology - big government, more not less regulation, universal public provisioning (health, education, infrastructure, etc), communities formed as 'coalitions of interest', etc. His success was grounded in the fact that he identified a movement that was already alive and well across America (he did not create it as some pundits like to claim). Obama was quick to associate himself with this movement and thus he became the symbol and the mouthpiece of what had for four years of G. W. Bush remained obtuse and unarticulated. Obama gave the movement meaning to wider population who were all an active and inclusive part of it but could not describe its origins nor its goals.

The 2009 challenge for communities, businesses, governments, the White House, etc is to remain an active and inclusive participant in some very raw conversations being conducted by their consumers.

Conversations are simple. They are easy to join. They are easy to interpret. They are easy to act upon. So there is no great mystery here. Brands are being replaced by conversations between consumers about their wants and needs. This is not a new phenomenon but rather a return to what existed before the modern manufacturing economy of 'value adding' processes made 'push marketing' a valid pursuit. Brand equity was formed when consumers were excluded - by price - from their desires, wants, and needs. Today consumers are becoming part of the production, delivery, marketing, and sales process - they are no longer excluded. Thus there is no need for a Brand other than as a naming device.

Persig wrote about this in his famous book 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' as he explored the notion of "quality". Quality is a human experience more than a practical fact when it comes to motorcycles and cameras.

For example, if DELL wants to DESIGN a better quality computer all it has to do is to work very closely with my Facebook friend Lionel Menchaca Jr.to ensure the DELL tribe online add the experiential elements of good design when they use their computer.

And so it goes. Tupperware Parties added the experiential design to their home-based distribution of plastic products in the 1950s. These were home-based tribal gatherings were women had a good time and bought a lot of Tupperware products. At these parties they also commented on what they wanted or needed to see from the company in the future. All this can be done online today.

We are seeing the demise of the brand as we return to a referral system of product differentiation."

Inclusion or crowdsourcing is not a new concept or practice but a return to how things were done in Guilds and in the Barter economy. Then along came the auto industry and in particular Alfred Sloan at GM who gave the world the notion of “value adding”. Each person within an enterprise is “value adding” just by being at their workplace or workstation. Whereas with an inclusion business model the holly grail is “use value” - when you design workplaces around the notion of use value rather than value adding you will recruit and use people and their skills in very different ways.

Recently I have been trying to convince Recruitment Companies that digital technologies are about to seriously disrupt their industry. Digital technologies are a disruptive force to the current ways we design jobs, recruit people for those jobs, and remunerate people who provide use value or innovation for their enterprise. People can and will be afforded the opportunity to design their own jobs - they will do it with a gaggle of others who have an interest in a common purpose or outcome.

When I was at NASA working with the Head of the Shuttle Program I noted how each Shuttle Mission had a dedicated crew and a back up crew ready to go do only what was useful. We can learn more from NASA about how to organise work and workplaces as mission oriented teams than we can from most contemporary workplaces. NASA has a matrix organisational structure which has been both its downfall and its saviour at various times. Thus it is not the ideal model for all workplaces but there are important lessons to be learned from the way they do things around that workplace.

We will not change current workplaces unless or until we change the ways we design jobs, recruit people, and reward effort in the modern workplace/workspace."

The digital economy is a networked economy - amazingly this is not a new phenomenon because in the 1950s Tupperware built a "micro networked economy" with its home-based sales, customer service, viral marketing,innovative feedback loops, etc. Tupperware Parties were the core element in a devolved company structure. It worked then much as web-based enterprises like Threadless, Linux, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc work today but Tupperware worked long before the world wide web came to town.

The essence of difference between analogue and digital technologies as instruments for organising economic activity is the former is "exclusive" and the latter is "inclusive". The analogue economy builds value by excluding everyone who does not pay the price set in a long line of so called "value adding" processes. Most of these processes do little or nothing to enhance the product or service yet they add costs to the consumer. Value adding is a strange concept in today's world because it belongs to a bygone era of urban industrial production - auto manufacture being the prime example. Alfred Sloan (GM) built a management system for autos that later spread to banking (yeah banks) wherein each person who did something in the process of producing, marketing, selling, servicing, etc a product or a service was deemed to be "value adding".

In a digital economy "value adding" has been replaced by the simple and much longer lived notion of "use value". The process of exclusion - ie you are excluded from consuming until you pay a price for entry or for your consumption rights - is being replaced by the process of inclusion wherein the product, platform. or protocol (for example Google Wave) is free unless or until you have some remarkable or customised wants and needs.

The old analogue economy is dead - long live the new digital economy.