Chris Cornell/Timbaland FAIL

OK, so Chris Cornell, the former lead singer of the 90s breakthrough grungy band Soundgarden, went solo back in 1998, released some lackluster albums, helped form the supergroup Audioslave, which, like so many supergroups, didn't overwhelm anyone but sold OK. But then someone had a genius idea: team up Cornell with mega-super-producer Timbaland. You can almost see record label executives salivating, with dollar signs bulging from their eyes. HERE is the breakthrough idea. This is going to be HUGE.

Scream is a disaster. The cover shows Cornell smashing his guitar ('cause the music is going to be all electronic - get it?). The album is rife with Autotune, and the songs are lackluster at best. It's an album that falls between the two stools without hitting either of them. Cornell fans (insofar as they exist) won't get the rockin that they want, and Timbaland fans couldn't care less about some rocker trying to make it commercial (and who ends up sounding like everyone else).

I'm sure Timbaland got paid a bundle and really doesn't care, but this will have a significant impact on Cornell, I'd think.

Hey, why not (1) write good songs, (2) find some creative partners who want to share their talent, and (3) have some fun? You know, the "formula" that helped you break out in the first place?

The Office of the Future!

Following closely on the heals of Jerry Davis's proclamation of a "Cambrian explosion of organizational forms" comes this story from the LA Times: Telecommuters Cut the Cord":

Gruber and Consalvo are digital nomads. They work -- clad in shorts, T-shirts and sandals -- wherever they find a wireless Web connection to reach their colleagues via instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook or e-mail and occasionally by voice on their iPhones or Skype. As digital nomads, experts say, they represent a natural evolution in telecommuting.

Really, LA Times? Really? Are all of us Knowledge Workers going to be floating around, working from coffee shops and mountain tops? Some of us just aren't cut out for that (I like working in an office, mostly), and, more importantly, some things are a lot easier to do when you have a real physical organization around you rather than a virtual one. Everyone's ready to discount meatspace [1, 2], but it seems to serve us pretty well.

A Cambrian Explosion of New Organizational Forms

That's the take-away from this interesting blog post at Org Theory by Jerry Davis (who teaches in the sociology program and business school at the University of Michigan).

The important paragraph:

If I’m right about the end of the “society of organizations,” or at least the end of the dominance of 20th-century-style encompassing corporations, then we may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion of new organizational forms. This time, however, we may be able to escape the utter dominance of shareholder value. It’s happened before — consider the explosion of cooperative forms created in response to the first wave of corporatization, documented by the estimable Marc Schneiberg. We still have a surprising number of such non-corporate forms around, even in the US: State Farm Insurance (a mutual), Land ‘o Lakes (a producer cooperative), REI (a consumer cooperative) and the 8000 non-profit credit unions that enroll an amazing 86 million Americans. (It turns out the US is already socialist, but doesn’t know it.) And how about Wikipedia, Linux, and the various social movements that generate spontaneous collective action in the absence of a profit motive (e.g., Iran’s “Twitter revolution”)?"

This all seems overblown to me, but his consideration of org forms is interesting and something we should consider. Even if Jerry is right (and he's both smarter and better educated than I am), then I think the organizational form that dominated the 20th century (the corporation) still has lots of gas left. And, even more pointedly, the logic that lies behind the organization itself will still hold