About Us

What’s Your Google Strategy© constitutes a unique type of blog, what we call an interactive syncordance, that collates public speech acts of masterclass practitioners and innovation or thought leaders in fields related to or industries affected by Google.

We created this blog to catalog public speech acts - attributed quotations, snippets from telephone or webcast interviews, and passages in published works - that we found interesting, amusing, or provocative.

What’s your Google strategy? follows a line of era-defining essential questions. For example, the smart time-traveling executives would have asked…

In 1985, “What’s our PC strategy?”

In 1991, “What’s our Microsoft strategy?”

In 1997, “What’s our Web strategy?”

In each instance, asking an essential question evokes a strategic context: while underlying concern (how do we compete?) remains the same, often the answers may change over the span of just few weeks.

Let’s address this another way: Knowing what you now know, today, about Web and markets, what investments in people, processes, and technologies would you have made in 1997? Buy another mainframe or minicomputer? Build a huge data center? Allow IT to own your digital brand? Hmmm.

In 2008, we ask, “What’s your Google strategy?” as a way to frame which new investments will maximize your competitiveness in 2012? Hmmm…good question!

What’s a syncordance?

The word “syncordance” constitutes a rarely used term in the Queen’s English, and connotes the coming together of individuals who share great passions as well as the pursuit and satisfaction of one’s curiosity. Technically, syncordance derives from the Greek: syn- means a coming together or a confluence such as synthesis or symposium; cordance derives from the Greek word “heart”: kard as expressed in cardiac and accord. Thus, syncordance at its root means a coming together of hearts or people to share from the heart.

For those familiar with literary or biblical concordances, you will know that a concordance constitutes a book or database that provide an alphabetical list words or phrases from an important book or website, indicating the locations or contexts at which those words or phrases occur. A concordance differs from both an index and syncordance; in concordances, no one attempts to filter or edit the cite material.

So, concordances list all instances of a particular keyword or phrase from an important book or website - no editing.

An index lists key concepts and proper nouns found within a book or website - a useful way of summarizing the basic knowledge of a field or discipline. A thesaurus constitutes a type of an index, organizing like-meaning word and their opposites.

A syncordance organizes published quotations and snippets from telephone interviews into more cohesive groups and subgroups, inviting members within a community of practice to append (post) illustrative or interpretative remarks. With successive rounds of posted remarks, a richer and more meaningful article or commentary emerges, connecting many points of views to a larger, more cohesive whole. Students of the Talmud will see a parallel in our Syncordance: How the Talmud compiles rabbinic scholarship spanning thousands of years provides a powerful format for compiling speech acts of innovation leaders.

Socratic Method 2.0

Our form of syncordance borrows the format of the Talmud and applies a modern or creative reinterpretation of the Socratic Method to the open-ended possibilities of the Web and the power of the magnificent blogging platform, WordPress.

First, bit of context: The Socratic Method constitutes a way adults learn best: in small peer groups. Traditionally, the Socratic Method entails a leader-facilitator that asks questions while not imparting any explicit information or a position. Rather the leader-facilitator asks open-ended, probing questions, usually in response to what someone just stated.

Then another individual responds, offering a opinion or experience of fact. This of course prompts others to respond and, at a pregnant moment of possibility, the leader-facilitator asks another essential question, “penetrating the veil of tranquilized obviousness” and revealing a deeper and often more shocking insight or realization.

When successful, the Socratic Method evokes higher, more generalized and, therefore, more powerful realizations of the human condition and its affairs.

In the Socratic Method “answers” (however stunning or right) serve no other purpose that to reveal deeper, more incisive, and better questions to ask until…a thundering silence descends and everyone present and engaged experiences a transcendent insight: beauty, silence, alignment, unity.

In our syncordance (see Speech Acts) in What’s your Google strategy?, we start each posting with a question that a senior business executive, consultant, or entrepreneur might find useful, evocative, or a starting point for discussion within their organizations or among clients and partners.

I (Michael Moon as the curator) will published speak acts or quotations. Later, I (Michael Moon as the innovation facilitator) and other members will post illustrative or interpretative remarks to an individual speech act. In other cases that warrant it, I (Michael Moon as the CEO of GISTICS) will post commentaries relating to particular programs and services of GISTICS. In the collective, speech acts and remarks from a group engaged participants will recreate a dialog-like set of articles.

Or at least that’s the plan.