CollaborativEye

Wikinomics (the book) quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "When you say 'collaboration', the average forty-five-year-old thinks they know what you're talking about - teams sitting down, having a nice conversation with nice objectives and a nice attitude." In the 90's this was called "empowerment". I firmly believe in this type of collaborative culture because senior managers don't have a monopoly on good ideas and command-and-control cultures only work in slow moving industries. There are still plenty of organizations who have yet to adopt a collaborative culture, who view "enterprise 2.0" and "web 2.0" tools with suspicion. Most companies will slowly evolve...

However, this is not what Wikinomics / Mass Collaboration  is about.  Mass Collaboration is about fundamental changes to business structure. "Coase's law" says that firms "will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction on the open market."  Technology is opening up a whole new set of possibilities for architecting business structures. Peer production is one example, where individuals combine in seemingly random ways to produce something. Wikipedia is the (already) classic example which needs no further description. Its predecessor, Nupedia, was a dismal failure. Why? It relied on command-and-control structures, and as a result after one year and $120,000, had only 24 articles. How many "Nupedias" are out there right now? Is YOUR business a Nupedia?

Adopting peer-production may be perceived as risky and quite radical, and it is certainly not right for all products and industries. But ALL management teams should consider its implications during strategic planning. Instead of determining why it is NOT right for your company, envision a competitor who starts from scratch and manages to pull it off in your industry. What does their business look like? If this competitor were real, what would it do to your business?

All elements of Wikinomics will require organizations to seriously rethink their business structures. New ventures will certainly be exploring these new business structures. Therefore established firms are perhaps most vulnerable to "surprise attacks" from upstarts who don't have the baggage of existing command-and-control structures and business models.

Tapscott and Williams' Wikinomics is a good book, but is their subtitle ("How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything") hyperbole? Is this just more Biz School BS? Let's explore it and find out. These posts won't be a straight book review, so I won't cover everything, and I'll put my own spin on things and freely intersperse with my own opinions. Ok, enough for the intro...

Wikinomics has two primary antecedents:

1) Top-down: the rate of change in the world economy is out pacing current business structures. Business is stretching and straining, and something new is emerging. From page 30 in the book: "...the organizational values, skills, tools, processes, and architectures of the ebbing command-and-control economy are not simply outdated; they are handicaps on the value creation process...the old hierarchical ways of organizing work and innovation do not afford the level of agility, creativity, and connectivity that companies require to remain competitive in today's environment." The result? We are witnessing a transformation not simply in business methods, but in the very structure of business. Organizations are becoming more like dynamic organisms and less like "companies" (notice the military imagery). The lines of the organization will also get fuzzy, as individuals or groups of individuals dynamically bind together to create value, and then re-bind to create still more value, and so on and so on... If you don't buy this, consider this dagger from page 45: "There are always more smart people outside your enterprise boundaries than there are inside." Are you going to leverage all of that energy and talent, or be content with your current recruiting and hiring processes?

2) Bottom-up: People are changing. Yes, technology is in the thick of it ("Web 2.0"), but fundamentally people are changing in how they think, behave, and feel. Whether you call it the Net Generation, or the Wiki Workforce, it is undeniable that the generation pushing into the workforce has been raised on social networking, sharing, and collaboration. The Net Gen is not content to just consume information or media -- they want to be involved in the creation. Such environments are the antithesis of "ebbing command-and-control" hierarchies : e.g Napster, MySpace, Wikipedia. But will this cultural change really impact business, or will these Net Gen'ers grow up eventually and learn how to work in traditional environments? Tapscott and Williams make a bold claim in regards to this: "As workers, this generation [the Net Gen] will transform the workplace and the way business is conducted to an extent not witnessed since the 'organizational man' of the 1950s." (page 53-54). But why???? "These N-Gen norms - speed, freedom, openness, innovation, mobility, authenticity, and playfulness - can form the basis of a revitalized and innovative work culture...the N-Gen work ethic gives this generation a leg up as inherent innovators." (page 54). If this later statement is true, then it becomes obvious that N-Gen values are more than a passing fad or something only appropriate for social endeavors. If the Wiki Workforce actually opens the door to increased rates of innovation, then organizations who embrace these values and norms will reap rewards many times greater than organizations stuck in command-and-control methods.

wikinomics