In case anyone is wondering if Social Media is having an impact on Wall Street, they need not look any further than the cover of the New York Times. Here is a story from the August 31st edition about banks that step away from no-brainer money making business venture because of the social risks to their reputations and therefore, their bottom line.
It is obvious that new sources of energy will be hugely lucrative in the future – except when strip mining pristine Appalachian mountains or releasing vast CO2 emissions cracking oil from Canadian sands – both perfectly legal enterprises.
In the past, the struggle between those in favor and those opposed to a Coal extraction project played out largely in private and was heavily biased toward those with the deepest pockets. The irony is that, in the past, the developers had an advantage of huge money reserves to wage legal battles, political wrangling, and public relations campaigns against the lowly community action members. Now, this fountain of money may dry up in the future if banks step away, politicians become wary, and the public becomes increasingly informed of the true value of all alternatives.
“We’re taking a much closer look at a much broader variety of issues, not all of which are captured under state and local laws,” said Stephanie Rico, a spokeswoman for the environmental affairs group at Wells Fargo.
These dynamics are converging on something called a “True Value” Calculation. The True Value Calculation is the expanded ROI of a business venture which includes the positive and negative impacts on a much wider body of stakeholders in the sum total of viability. In the very near future, we may find the the True Value Calculation will become the rational basis of our democracy as social media aspires to the role of social vetting mechanism and politicians become increasingly irrelevant to anyone but each other.
Tax payers expect police, national guard, and military to provide “real” security. Government expects the private sector to provide the lion’s share of security investment. Is there a business case that can help the private sector rationalize the investment and bridge the expectation gap?
A few days ago, 
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Once you identify the roles, then all the different “exchanges” between roles are catalogued and mapped. An effort is made to identify both tangible and intangible exchanges. Delivery of a product, document or money is a tangible exchange. An intangible exchange is something like the sharing of knowledge, an introduction to someone else or personal support. Generally, the tangible exchanges are more formal. The intangible, while less structured, can be critical in creating trust and facilitating better communication in an organization.
This is an excerpt of a Value Network map. It was developed to improve the process for handling complex technology repairs at a large utility company. The excerpt shows the sequence of activity that takes over once a problem has been reported and documented. Solid arrows show tangible exchanges and dotted line arrows show intangible exchanges. The first step is for the Service Coordinator to send the Field Technician a dispatch ticket (tangible) and suggestions on the potential solution (intangible) based on information the coordinator has obtained from the customer. The Senior Tech Advisor also gets a copy of the dispatch ticket (tangible) and provides advisory (tangible) to the Field Tech and the Service Coordinator. The Field Tech provides the service (tangible) to the Customer Tech Manager. If all goes well, the Customer Tech Manager and the Service Coordinator exchange completion documentation and the process ends. If not, the field tech informs the field manager that an escalation may be necessary and a new phase of the process kicks in.
