Henry Blodget has just posted a slide deck detailing start-up financing and arguing against the Bubble hypothesis. Here it is:

http://www.businessinsider.com/state-of-startups-2012-5?op=1

Fair enough.

But as I have argued before, there is a core problem attaching to the mega-brands and, of course, on all our minds, at the moment, Facebook. Which is that disruption is the principle – not the replacement of yesteryear’s blue-chips with tomorrow’s. Sorry, I tend to giggle when I hear smart folk discussing when Facebook will hit X billion. And I guffawed last year as IBM celebrated its centenary and the blogosphere asked the question: What great companies will be around in 100 years’ time? Someone needs to go Google “exponential.”

Point is that as we look back we witness disruptive change at expo speed. Looking ahead? We smooth the curve. We live in the kink. If you like, here’s a definition of the present: Life in the kink. Here’s what I wrote a year ago. I’m sticking by my story.

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/where-the-past-meets-the-future-life-in-the-cosmic-kink

What astonishes me is that “digital” is seen as some sort of novelty. It’s been the core of our communications and the driver of business for nearly a generation. Bizarrely, it still looks like tomorrow. It’s today. Um, yesterday.

So: What we need is integration to the degree that digital/social is seen as the baseline like the USPS.

Of course, that entails leadership that will make the point. Mark Fidelman’s HBR blog polling Fortune 250 CIO’s was not encouraging – 4 had blogs, 25 were on Twitter. It would be interesting to know more about the personal digital engagement of these three digital leaders. Digital/social, as I keep saying, has to be personal. Like saying sorry, you can’t hire someone to do it for you.

How to Deliver With Digital: 8 Imperatives for CMOs – Velocidi.

“Prove It or Lose It”

I spent much of Sunday afternoon with Gunther Sonnenfeld (@goonth) in Santa Monica, and am delighted to read and recommend his rumination that picks up our conversation and takes it a lot further.

Yesterday was spent crossing the continent, and lunchtime today I was in DC at the Aspen Institute for its launch of a benchmark report on keeping the internet free by continuing the model of multi–stakeholder governance – and keeping it out of the hands of the ITU (the global telecoms regulator run by reps of every nation). Here’s the report: aspeninstitute.org/idea.

It would be totally old economy to speak of bottom-up versus top-down approaches to saving, shaping, working with and within, the internet. But just as we need to cultivate a multi-stakeholder approach to governance (top-down but from, as it were, a bottom-driven top), so in our creative engagement with the net we should be driven by analogical approaches that do not seek to replicate the IRL/analog online but grasp its extraordinary promise to refashion the goods and services that address our wants and needs in a manner that increasingly transcends and re-states them.

It’s when national leaders and those who shape capital markets begin to grasp that point that the economic argument for the net’s freedom will take root. And, just perhaps, that the old argument that we need political freedom in order to have successful economic activity – an argument that China has shown to be naive, like so many western nostrums – will be seen to return in a new and altogether more sophisticated form.

Brands Under Pressure – The Brand Lives in the Employees’ Voice | Networking Exchange Blog.

Cheryl Burgess’ (@ckburgess) timely discussion of humanizing brands in the voices and persons of employees looks to the Apple “genius bar” as a prime example. I’d assumed it was a reverse riff on Best Buy’s longstanding Geek Squad (not sure if they still use the somewhat off-color accoutrements it used to have – “we can’t get dates” et al.). They both seem to be working, even if Apple’s lacks quite the humor. But Apple has always taken itself rather desperately seriously (that’s another topic).

Never before have frontline representatives been so significant and, often as not, problematic. I’m thinking of airlines, and United in particular, and the very mixed experiences we have at the hands of the motley crews who combine their theoretical safety role with serving us meaner portions, less often, and often as not without much grace. (I had 2 out of 2 rude attendants on a flight yesterday, and I was in first . . . .)

Getting some sort of alignment between the image the people in corporate HQ are trying to present (ahem, the smiling Smisek greeting us on every flight) and the IRL people who follow has never been simple – and has become the hallmark of success for brands who succeed (GEICO’s famous telephone manner – I have in 20 years never had a bad experience with them).

The option here is to go further – to seek to co-opt the voice of those on the team, not simply have them parrot successfully a voiceover from marketing. As brands get weaker for many reasons (only one of which is the click that can send us to the competition) this offers the strongest incentive to build human organizations in which every representative of the company truly, organically, shares its values and transmits them from the heart.

It’s a tall order, and will stay tall for companies that slowly subside in the social-driven marketplace that is emerging. But for those who can align the corporate voice with the personal, competitiveness and job-satisfaction will go hand in hand.