NPR has been running a great series on the “war on terror”. In a recent episode, a guest of the series said something very wise:

“If we objectify terrorists, we open the door to allow them to do the same to us.”

To move this entry into the world of business, let’s translate the quote into something one might hear from an enlightened engineer:

“If we objectify marketing, we open the door to allow them to do the same to us.”

Unfortunately, this type of objectification happens in many companies, and it leads to some very negative side-effects such as individuals spending countless hours complaining about and working around their departmental counterparts, product schedules slipping, and poor quality products shipping.

Many companies accept the side-effects as an unsolvable cost of doing business. Some organizations try to treat the symptoms through process and procedure, which - similar to modern drugs - has side-effects. An enlightened organization devotes the resources necessary to create strong interpersonal and cross-departmental relationships.

Real relationships create common ground that obstructs dehumanizing and objectifying the people with whom one must work. Once people are viewed as individuals and not objects a major roadblock has been removed.

Imagine a world where intellectual property protection did not exist. The motivation of intellectual property law is to encourage innovation and development. What would happen if our existing legal protections were eliminated or became too difficult or expensive to enforce? Who knows exactly what would occur, but one thing is predictable: humans would not stop innovating.

How could people and corporations be encouraged to innovate if they could never develop something first and sell it later? With all the commotion around the music industry these days, it’s been impossible not to put some thought into it. Over the past two years, I’ve convinced myself that our current concepts of intellectual property should be abandoned. I’ve distilled my thinking down to a Death of Intellectual Property one-pager.

Now to find someone interested in building the infrastructure.

Are you a startup or small company who is trying to raise funding? If so, you’ve probably heard the “prove your market” mantra many times from many lips. Perhaps proving your market is a bit out of reach, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

A friend of mine from Blacksquare recently pointed me to an online survey service that seems easy-to-use and cheap enough for even a grad student to afford. I haven’t used this particular service, but their demo is to the point, and you can’t beat their name. Now there is no excuse to keep you from soliciting opinions from your potential customers!

Amazon led the way into a new online-shopping frontier with their Web Services initiative. They opened their product database and fulfillment engine and allowed creative folks to build new ways to shop online. Successful innovations will surely find their way into Amazon’s application portfolio one way or another. In addition, AWS further extended Amazon’s reach into the online shopping world by creating virtual Amazon’s everywhere. Brilliant!

It seems everyone thinks that this model may have merit. Yahoo, with their developer network initiative, and Google, with their Google Web API’s, are also giving open data a try. RSS has taken off over the last year. The examples are endless.

I think everyone is right. Although giving data away for free seems very similar to the drug dealer model of “free for now, pay later”, in the end, I think that these programs will be successful for their initiators, and they will not pull the plug on their resellers or even worse, start charging them.

I applaud these data dealers and am looking forward to following how their openness initiatives impact their businesses, and the rest of the World Wide Web, over the next year.

After discovering Creative Commons, I began to think about other areas where human readable licenses should be applied. Privacy policies, although evolving in the right direction, are complex, easy to misunderstand, and manytimes rife with legalese. They seemed to be the next logical place, so I threw together a one-pager called An Online Privacy Promise.

Now to contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation and see if they are interested.