Bob Johansen’s Get There Early is a very good read. Johansen’s message is that taking a long-term view helps make sense of the present, out of which comes learning how to act. There is much in the book to take in. The main trust of this posting though is in reference to Chapter 9 Flexing and Flexibility. Using connections within social networks – inside and outside of organisational boundaries – provides flex and response to change.
There is growing awareness about how innovation and value is created by moving from hierarchies to collaborative, autonomous networks. Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams, in Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything, say that online collaboration “can be mobilised to accomplish much more than one firm acting alone”. In
the digital economy, access to knowledge – within as well as beyond the firm – drives innovation and new value.
Mark Pesce has blogged about Web-enabled connectivity creating opportunities for people to develop new behaviour and techniques, and where these are successful, to have them disseminated widely and quickly.
Dave Morgan has bogged about the possible emergence of ‘people networks’ through the development of OpenSocial- a set of common APIs for interoperable social communication between social network sites and other web sites. Morgan suggests that while social networking would be distributed, organisation would be possible but largely through people networks.
It does not take long to realise that decisions about the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services could transfer to people networks. Seems to me that Facebook, Bebo and Google all realise that – and are getting there early. Those that are building large virtual connections between staff (such as IBM’s presence on Facebook) realise that, and are getting there early.
