Wednesday, November 16, 2011

TED talk on the Bossless Organization

Back in June I had the opportunity to speak at TEDx Houston on the University of Houston campus.  It was a fantastic experience I really enjoyed.  Well, the professionally edited video of my talk is finally available: "What is Social Systems Architecture and why does it matter?"  It covers kind of a wide range of topics over 20 minutes, including material from my other blog, Houston Strategies:
  1. The Opportunity Urbanism philosophy of cities and how Houston is an exemplar of that model
  2. Branding Houston
  3. A transportation/transit solution for decentralized cities (like Houston)
  4. Organization 2.0 and the Bossless Organization model
  5. Reforming K-12 education with empowerment
As a reader of this blog, #4 is probably what you're interested in, and that starts at the 13:37 point if you want to jump ahead.

And yes, if you're wondering, I broke all the TED talk rules by packing way too much into my 20 minutes (and apologies in advance for the frequent throat clearing; lesson learned: no ice water before speaking).  But I got some very positive feedback from the audience, so at least some people appreciated the difference from the usual TED talk model.  The video does a decent job of capturing the slides too (use the bottom right-side arrows to make it full screen), but you can also download a pdf of the slides here.

Enjoy.  As always, thoughts and feedback are welcome in the comments.