Todd Pinkerton

I feel like it does little good to blog about events after they happen. But better late than never, right?

This weekend was Harvard Business School Cyberposium 13, a conference of technology and business leaders. It’s interesting in that the entire conference is organized by students, and draws a pretty diverse crowd of MBA-types, tech-types, and startup entrepreneurs.

The Philip Rosedale (founder of Linden Labs, makers of Second Life) talk was more interesting than I expected. His talk walked us through the virtual world of Second Life, as he described how the simple rules of the world led to some very interesting emergent behavior when the user population began to grow. For example, SL users can earn real money by creating and selling virtual goods within the SL world, to a truly global marketplace of buyers. Unlike the web there are no currency or language barriers, since SL has its own currency and a visual mode of interaction.
I didn’t stay for the whole conference, instead I wanted to see John Palfrey speak at the Leadership Institute on the other side of campus. Palfrey heads the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law school. He’s been involved with internet and intellectual property law, which is how I met him during the S-DMCA hearings on Beacon Hill. But he also does some interesting research with his group at the Berkman, which I would call “social media” — how the internet and related technologies are changing the way people communicate and interact. Blogs, social networks, podcasting, RSS — the Berkman examines how all of this is affecting and changing our culture.

So Palfrey gave a talk to the Harvard Leadership Institute, about some of his own personal leadership stories. One such story was about how he was elected co-captain of his squash team, even though he was the worst player, and how he had to lead by example (playing well). Another was the idea of “managing up” when he worked as a political campaign manager, and how to push back instead of trying too hard to please. These are very familiar concepts to me, as I’ve hit my head against them numerous times. He also mentioned the importance of selling, as that is often what a job entails (even when you think it doesn’t). I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and how beneficial those skills would be in many careers.
He segued from that into a discussion about his new book Born Digital , about the generational differences in how we relate to technology. It was a very interactive session, which I always prefer with such an engaging speaker. He was teaching Internet and Society: Technologies and Politics of Control” at harvard extension, but it looks like someone else is teaching that course this spring.