The Cafe

A group of us, few enough to sit comfortably at a cafe table, were having a dialog about how we're helping customers progress in this increasingly challenging world.


Web 2.0 was the hot button in learning and business, but few people seemed to be getting beyond grafting blogs, wikis, and social networks onto existing structures. It was like the early days of automobiles: they were carriages with add-ons. We wanted to go deeper, to investigate how people can adapt to rapidly changing business environments, how organizations can balance efficiency and flexibility, and how to prosper in the transition from an industrial era to the age of networks.


Believing that we should practice what we preach, we decided to collaborate. (Jay suggested we might call ourselves the Dogfood Cafe.) Collaboration is the crucible of innovation. We knew in our hearts that we would challenge one another to come up with great ideas -- concepts of a quality that none of us would have come up with on our own. We also figured we would have more fun working with one another than continuing to work on our own.