Oops! Grok means ‘understand’ in internets.

Zappos is a good example, but they are 10 years old and still babies in terms of business longevity. I think Richard Branson and Virgin are a great example of a company nearing its 40′s with much higher revenue yet still gets a lot of love from the public.

BTW – what does grok mean?

You may like James Scott’s “Seeing like a state” which is a broad treatment of how organizational senses cannot see things that are not specifically made legible to them. The result is that complex realities are often made simpler just to make them more legible to the organizations that want to govern them.

Seems like money bears the same relationship to whuffie. Even though it seems to be a formal, definable currency in Cory Doctorow’s novel (which too, I haven’t read), it seems like the golden rule about whuffie is that “any attempt to measure whuffie dewhuffifies it.”

The other BIG difference is that money is primarily an instrument of anonymity and liquidity, while whuffie is an instrument of familiarity, barter and pay-it-forward dynamics. Money solves the economic problem known as “dual coincidence of wants” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_coincidence_of_wants)… until there is a way for the DCoW problems to be addressable by whuffienomics, it seems likely to remain a cute conceptual aha! rather than an operational construct.

Venkat