Beyond Peanut Butter

I recently posted a contrary perspective on Brad Garlinghouse's recent "Peanut Butter Memo",  which presaged and maybe influenced the recent reorganization at Yahoo.  My post suggested that placing lots of early-stage bets ("peanut butter") isn't a bad idea at all, as the Yahoo memo suggested.  Rather, it's a question of how you manage them -- "drowning kittens", as some graphically call it.

Scanning my prolific friend Bill Ives' blog recently, I came across this post on "Collective Intelligence Networks", and especially John Maloney's excellent comment on GE's internal "Imagination Markets".  This, on the same day that the NYT gave Intrade a huge plug (my colleagues and I have been tracking prediction markets for a while, as yet another really interesting form of "Structured Collaboration").

It occurred to me that running a prediction market internally, on the likelihood of success of early stage ventures in companies like Yahoo and Google among others, might be a really interesting complement to formal management reviews.  In such services, like in other media properties, the apps are frequently visible to highly-informed end users who can be excellent proxies for early-adopter, power-user consumers -- but verbal feedback from such users can often be unreliable.

The tools for doing this appear to be available, though we haven't installed and tried one yet.

Perhaps another idea illustrating a principle that if you want to  "organize for digital", you've got  to (with apologies to Nicholas Negroponte) "be digital".