Etsy

Defining Thick Value in a Boost Economy

November 20, 2012

Thick value has many simultaneous kinds of positive meaning, that are stacked, nested, embedded, and fused with each other into layers that are weighty with significance. Thick value has more meaning and conveys more about why it’s valuable. When we pay attention to thick value, we make choices that help us maximize more than financial profit or system efficiency.

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Self-Reliance Versus Interdependence in The Boost Economy

June 15, 2012

Tweet Being independent and “going it alone” can feel very satisfying. Our culture prizes independent initiative, so much so that we often overlook the importance of working with each other to help each other. I see this bias towards independence when gurus talk about leaders as though followers don’t exist. And, I see this bias [...]

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Investigating The Boost Economy

May 24, 2012

Tweet For some time now, I’ve been trying to identify the thread that ties together all the different topics I write about here on AuthenticOrganizations. Other than the fact that they interest me, what is the underlying theme that links topics as different as: how social technologies change organizations, why meritocracies hurt women, action branding [...]

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“Add Women and Stir” Won’t Keep Women In Tech

May 16, 2012

Tweet How do we get and keep more women in technology-related careers? How do we increase the number of women creators, makers, designers, and coders? Why not just add more women to the mix, and go from there?  When all we do is “add women and stir”, without simultaneously and deliberately changing that system, we aren’t going to [...]

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Sharing Success in Etsy’s Community of Commerce

March 30, 2012

Tweet The most promising feature of a community of commerce is the way that members in that community work to ensure each other’s success, even if helping others costs them something. When members in a community help each other, we often don’t notice that there is a real cost in giving that help. Instead, because [...]

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Company Character Grows From Place Identity

February 16, 2012

Tweet What do start-ups and coffee beans have in common? For both, the place they grow shapes who they become. We don’t talk much about the role of place in shaping organizational identity, but the physical circumstance of where we are located as we do our work together helps to determine who we become as [...]

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Extended Organizations: Finding the Boundaries and Naming the Contents

February 1, 2012

Tweet Can you help me out with a messy research-related question? What are the best ways to set boundaries around subsets of an “extended organization”, and then give these subsets names so that they are easy to talk about? The problem seems on the surface looks like a question of semantics (i.e., what to call [...]

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Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place

January 11, 2012

Tweet Networks of people and organizations are usually either “markets” or “communities”. It bothers us that networks fit one or the other model of working together, because we envision something more –something both market and community –  in one network. We are often disappointed when markets don’t exhibit a commitment to any values other than [...]

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Connecting to the Company Story: Coding is Crafting for Etsy’s Engineers

November 21, 2011

Tweet Every organization has a story. Any group that wants to be an important part of that organization needs to craft a place for itself in that story. The story an organization tells itself and shares with others helps everyone make sense of who the organization is. For members, the organization’s story helps them articulate [...]

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Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless

October 27, 2011

Tweet “A deluge of vintage and artisanal products is now available online and through mass-market retailers. Has authenticity become just another fad?”   Here’s a quick response to today’s New York Times article by Emily Weinstein, All That Authenticity May Be Getting Old, about the flood of ‘authentic’, handmade and one-of-a-kind-ish items on the home [...]

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