Will the Conversation Society rescue Wall Street?
I was wondering what the new Conversation Society could do to solve the financial crisis. You know, instead of what can they do to change the system and the culture of financial institutions, what can we do. Participate in the solution so to say. And then I watched Thursday morning breakfast show on CNBC and two initiatives were presented on a silver platter.
It started with a discussion about the new movie of Michael Moore who wasn’t in the program. And it ended with a comment mad by Don Tapscott, who was a host in the program.
The issue was that Michael Moore did a call to every Wall Street insider to come up with their dirty laundry. “I want your help” he said, to find the truth, to know what really went wrong. On www.michaelmoore.com you can read Mike’s letter. The start of his letter goes like this:
Friends,
I am in the middle of shooting my next movie and I am looking for a few brave people who work on Wall Street or in the financial industry to come forward and share with me what they know. […] I believe there are a number of you who know “the real deal” about the abuses that have been happening. You have information that the American people need to hear.
We shouldn’t underestimate the power of a good movie about bad things. An Inconvenient Truth goes Wall Street so to say, and the conversation society can start the engine.
What surprised me when I watched the show, were the comments of the CNBC anchorman: “Moore must be in it for the money” and secondly, they doubted whether Moore would succeed, since “The whole banking system is just too complex to put into a movie”. Well, using Obama’s words I would say: That’s the whole point. And that was exactly what the host in the show had to say, Mr. Don Tapscott.
Tapscott came with a call for action to all of us to help the banks to manage their risks. Instead of handling complexity on their own, banks should outsource the complexity to the crowd. Just like Linus Torvalds did with his operating system Linux. An open source solution for the banking industry implies that the society as a whole, and not the individual institutions, take the lead in solving the problems of complexity.
More about Risk Management 2.0 here, written by the Tapscott brothers Bob and Don.
The new Conversation Society can be part of the solution. By opening up and tell the story of what really happened, and by participating in the open source projects.
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