From time to time I have taken the opportunity to share with the readers here some the books that I have been found to be extremely interesting. I happened to pick up the book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, over the holidays and I could not put it down. I found so many parallels with what we doing at the Team office in 2008 and what Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady have been advocating for years. If you are interested in knowing where ecommerce is going in the future and how companies are going to thrive in that environment this is a book you need to read. I am going to post a few excerpts below in bold and my comments will follow.
“Throughout history corporations have organized themselves according to strict hierarchical lines of authority. Everyone was a subordinate to someone else – employees versus managers, marketers versus customers, producers versus supply chain subcontractors, companies versus the community. While hierarchies are not vanishing, profound changes in the nature of technology, demographics, and the global economy are giving rise to powerful new models of production based on community, collaboration, and self-organization rather than hierarchy and control.”
In this new economy that is forming the people or the “customer” has more power than ever. They want to be heard and their ideas and suggestions taken into consideration. With technology customers can now participate in multiple formats to help the companies who decide to listen.
“This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis….This new mode of innovation, anv value creation is called “peer production,” or peering – which describes what happens when masses of people and firms collaborate openly to drive innovation and growth in their industries.”
This is very important. Consumers are more informed than ever with the internet. They can research topics and many times are better informed of the economic landscape than so called business leaders in their ivory towers formulating decisions in the dark. It is important to listen and collaborate with the people on the ground. You need to get the customers insight and feedback and they need to be active participants with company leaders. Why is “peering” with your customers so important? Read the following text.
“A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated – cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating to create value.”
As networks and communities grow their power and influence grows as well and their ability to bring fresh new ideas and innovation to the table increases exponentially. Let’s look at a company that is harnessing the collective genius of its vast global network of customers. The CEO of Proctor and Gamble, A.G. Lafley, did the following.
“Lafley instructed business unit leaders to source 50% of their new product and service ideas from outside the company. Now you can work for P&G without being on their payroll. Just register on the InnoCentive network where you and ninety thousand other scientists around the world can help solve tough R&D problems for a cash reward. InnoCentive is only one of the many revolutionary marketplaces matching scientists to R&D challenges presented by companies in search of innovation.”
There is a reason why Proctor and Gamble is a global market leader. The leadership at the top of this company recognized the vast wealth of knowledge that they could use from outside their corporate walls and thus found a way to incentivize people to participate and help solve tough challenges.
This next paragraph I think really gets to the heart of the issue.
“Some of these grassroots innovations pose dire threats to existing business models. Publishers of music, literature, movies, software, and television are like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine – the first casualties of a revolution that is sweeping across all industries…Now, to great chagrin, industrial-era titans are learning that the real revolution is just getting started. Except this time the competition is no longer their arch industry rivals; it’s the uberconnected, amorphous mass of self organized individuals that is gripping their economic needs firmly in one hand, and their economic destinies in the other. “We the People” is no longer just a political expression – a hopeful ode to the power of “the masses”; its also an apt description of how ordinary people, as employees consumers, community members, and taxpayers now have the power to innovate and create value on the global scale….As with all previous economic revolutions, the demands on individuals, organizations, and nations will be intense, and at times traumatic, as old industries and ways of life give way to new processes, technologies, and business models. The playing field has been ripped wide open…”
We have all heard about Michael Dell's Three C's "Content, Commerce, and Community." He said the secret to the internet is community. Well this final quote is yet one more affirmation of that point.
"...what is the difference? The losers launched Web sites. The winners launched vibrant communities. The losers build walled gardens. The winners built public squares. The losers innovated internally. The winners innovated with their users. The losers jealously guarded their data and software interfaces. The winners shared them with everyone."
