Starting with three connected insights from Umair Haque on humanity, redux…

Umair Haque, 2005, Is Content King?:

… eroded barriers to production … mean micromedia atomizes traditional value chains, exploding the content network at the edges, and massively creating new value…

Umair Haque, 2007, Research Note: The Death of 1%:

… assuming only x% of people will become active prosumers blinds us to a stark reality. That reality is this: almost everyone is a prosumer of something. Everyone has just a handful of things they really love. In the very near future, everyone will prosume the things they love. In this world, worrying about 1% or 10% audience/prosumer ratio is to utterly miss the deeper strategic lesson.

Umair Haque, 2006, Edge Patterns 7: Messy Beats Clean (Or, Why LinkedIn Will Never Be Myspace):

Today, streamlining is cheap, fast, and easy. … Which means today’s radical innovators are going in a very different direction. Fundamentally, deeply, in their very essence: they’re messy, not clean.

… In other words, in the post-network economy, (re)learning how to create value is going to be, in large part, about getting messy.

… Forget about economies and cost-cutting and trimming the fat – because that stuff’s a commodity. … What is a basis for advantage is exploding what was clean and streamlined yesterday: unlocking new possibilities for value creation which are messy because interactions at the edge are richer, deeper, riskier, and, ultimately, human.

But reading and accepting (or disagreeing) insights and lessons isn’t enough; think about how to apply them to your industry, business and life. Start asking questions rather than just looking for answers; start imagining, make a mess, start hacking, and above all, have fun. In a world beyond the massconomy organized by markets, networks and communities, “good beats evil”, love beats fear, and humanity “pays”.

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• I’ve been collecting some of my favorite posts and insights by Umair using delicious, tagged “umair101″; check it out if you’re interested in forward-thinking strategy, using core economic principles to construct strategies for a discontinuous future.
• For a more curated look at “Umair 101″ insights, check out the wiki on Core Edges with selections from (so far) Julien Le Nestour (@jnestour), Jake Kaldenbaugh, Ethan Bauley (@ethanbauley), Nicolas Gabard (@nicolasgabard) and Alexis Rodich…