From Mckinsey & Company comes the interview below. In it, author and NYU professor Clay Shirky explains how web-enabled social media and collaboration have profound implications for how we live and work. Make sure to watch the final section of the interview (see transcript excerpt below) in which Shirky recalls how such web-enabled collaboration has helped create success from failure.

Creating success from failure
(Beginning at approximating 4:27 on the video.)

It’s very often the case that what people set out to do as Plan A turns out to be effective and important, not because it works, but because it shows them what doesn’t work. I use the example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia started as the Hail Mary play out of something called Nupedia, which was a complete disaster. Nupedia was going out of business nine months in, and the Wiki was Plan B…I use the analogy of a rocket ship: You can’t get a rocket to the moon just by aiming it. You also have to give yourself the ability to course correct. And when we look around at the landscape of really big successes, very often what we see is that the course correction turned out to be more important than the initial direction.

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