When I was younger I genuinely loved the game of baseball, especially Toronto Blue Jays baseball. All winter I would pine for the start of spring training and opening day was often one of the best days of my year. The Jesse Barfield, Lloyd Moseby, George Bell outfield will always have a special place in my heart. Almost every Saturday for $2 as a Junior Jay I'd be in the outfield grandstand at Exhibition Stadium cheering on my team.

However as I aged, my interest in baseball began to fade. It's not that the team let me down, in fact they won two World Series as I was drifting away. Rather I was the one changing, seduced by the internet into an accelerated lifestyle that had little patience for a pastime like baseball that felt more dragged out and boring every time I tried to re-engage.

Since those two championships the Jays in general have lost the love and passion that this city once gave them, which is not to say they don't have a loyal fan base, but rather it cannot offer the size and momentum that inter-division rivals in New York and Boston can produce. While it's easy to focus on money and payroll as the secret to a team's success, the true source are the fans.

Recently a newspaper columnist from Chicago wrote that baseball in Toronto is dead, a remark made partly out of spite, but also after covering the White Sox play a series against the Jays, a series played to a handful of fans in a largely empty Rogers Centre. While some rushed to Toronto's defense, there's clearly something wrong when the stadium is as empty as it has been for the past few years.

Blue Jays (and Rogers) management counter with the argument that the team has to play well to earn the support of fans, however the players also require the support of fans in order to be motivated to play well. It strikes me that perhaps the solution is not just spending money but also spending social capital? For example let's look to the internet for a business model the team could learn from.

What if the Blue Jays were to adopt a freemium model? For the rest of the season, make all seats on the 500 level free, for all games. First come, first serve. Then allow all other seats to be sold on an auction basis, allowing seat holders to resell their seats if they become more valuable than when they were first bought.

If you can't fill the stadium for each game using that system, then yes, Baseball is dead in Toronto.

However I think that by making the games fun again, by making them a place people want to go, that they can go, it would give the players motivation to perform and excel.

The problem with baseball, is a similar problem that businesses face across industries. Whether they want to admit it or not they are competing with the internet, someway, somehow.

For me it was an issue of attention, that in this case can only be solved culturally, with economics coming second. By adding a freemium model to baseball, you could culturally change the vibe in the stadium, and therefore increase the appeal and value of the overall experience. You adopt and appropriate a little bit of the internet to upgrade an old pastime to something that preseves the game while expanding the potential audience/market.

I love to be inspired by change, even the potential for change, and this is why the fall is tied with spring for my favourite season. Watching the world around me decay, knowing it will rise again, reminds me how important it is for the old to make way for the new.

This is why I rarely lament the decline of the journalism business, or any content-related industry, for that matter. Everywhere I look I see phoenixes ready to rise from the ashes.

For example, two of my favourite media outlets, both creations of internet culture, and also relatively new, are stumbling towards rather successful business models for online journalism. I say "stumbling" only because neither are waiting for permission or the perfect formula. They're embracing the embedded ethos of the online environment which is to "just do it."

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in the Brave News World Summit hosted and organized by The Centre for Creative Communications at Centennial College in Toronto's east end.

It was a great day spent with interesting people who work in the local and regional media industry. The keynote was Jeff Jarvis, who was unable to attend, so he presented his "What Would Google Do" rap via skype.

I participated in an afternoon workshop around the concept of a journalist toolbox, or what any aspiring hack needs to know to make it in this cut throat business. The picture above is from that session, which was organized by Ellin Bessner who wrote her own blog post about the event.

There was also a blog compiled by Centennial students during the day, as well as a blog post from Melissa Feeney.

As I started my day I tuned into to watch my friends on CBC News Morning and the lead story is about more massive cuts and layoffs at General Motors. While this is obviously an economic and labour story, Danielle Bochove at one point summed up the situation when she said, "It's become a story about speed."

GM had already made cuts and plans to respond to rising fuel prices, however they were clearly not enough. In fact GM found that the speed by which the economy is changing is far faster than expected, as is the speed by which consumers are buying smaller cars.

Unfortunately the Canadian Auto Workers had just concluded a new contract with GM, and these announcements effectively undermine it, showing the drastic measures GM is taking.

I work with organizations quite a bit smaller than GM, however my primary focus tends to be helping the client accelerate their corporate culture so as to be more responsive and capable of handling the pressures of our network age.

The ability for an organization to move quickly and respond to changing conditions is crucial, and yet there are many risks to speeding up, and I suspect increasingly we're going to see the wrong way far more often then not.

Take General Motors for example. While they definitely need to move faster in the direction of smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, they also have a commitment to their workers and their families. So their ability to respond quickly and increase their overall speed as a company must also include working with their unions rather than negotiating in bad faith which they've done.

The old and obsolete school of seeing your workforce as hostile and expendable will only result in slowing down your ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions.

Successful organizations will unite the leadership structure with the combined intelligence and labour of all the diverse employees and customers/constituents that are part of the enterprise.