29 Jan
2007

















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     Corporate Koolade

It is corporate koolade time again, judging by hype about Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio 2007), a new tract from Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams. And claims about the demise of the couch potato.

     the united states of amnesia

Thomas Frank's mordant One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday 2000) and Henry Mintzberg's Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management (New York: Simon & Schuster 1998) memorably questioned the enthusiasm with which gurus spruiked the corporate koolade during the 1990s.

It was a period in which pundits such as Tom Peters proclaimed that 'old business' models and structures were dead, research was irrelevant and spontaneity was all. In the age of Bill Gates' Business At Light Speed (New York: Viking 1999) - a reluctant acknowledgement that the "road ahead" involved the internet - there was no need to worry about fusty notions of cost and quality of service, as among the "wired generation" success was a matter of heeding the call to "build and they will come".

Tapscott in Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill 1998) warned the oldies to "listen to your kids", apparently repositories of wisdom unavailable to their parents or other members of Gidget Generation. Online kids were supposedly caring, creative, independent, responsible and oh so positive.

"Corporate geneticist" Charles Fine in Clockspeed: How To Survive & Flourish In The Age Of Temporary Advantage (New York: Little Brown 1998) and Davis & Meyer in Blur - The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy (Oxford: Capstone 1999) exhorted businesses to engage in corporate improvisation.

T.G. Lewis promoted The Friction-Free Economy (New York: HarperCollins 1997). Philip Evans & Thomas Wurster in Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy (Boston: Harvard Business School 1999) and Dave Siegel's Futurize Your Enterprise (New York: Wiley 1999) urged managers to forget everything they knew and surf the digital zeitgeist. Don't trust anyone over 30 (or was it over 20?). Don't remember the lessons of the past.

Some managers and investors presumably regretted the corporate amnesia when the dot-com bubble evaporated. No matter, it is yet another trip back to the future as Tapscott & Williams urge the reader to

Forget everything you know about the way we do business. Mass collaboration is revolutionizing the corporation, the economy, and nearly every aspect of management.

Wikinomics ("A brilliant primer on one of the most profound changes of our time") proclaims that

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success

... Wikinomics shows how the masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles.

And we thought that each jumbo jet was lovingly crafted by a single hand.

Wikinomics the book - you can experience Wikinomics the site here - is replete with buzzwords such as "ideagoras", "prosumers" and "the New Alexandrians".

As with preceding generations of such primers it warns that new business models "will empower the prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust".

Smart firms understand that harnessing mass collaboration in the workplace is about more than the company blog. They're getting a jump start on the wiki workplace by leveraging the same brand of self-organization that powers some of the Web's most exciting entities.

After all, some 16,000 people are actively peer-producing Wikipedia. More than a hundred million people collaborate on YouTube. Thousands of programmers contribute to the Linux operating system. While 140,000 independent developers build applications and businesses on Amazon. If these large-scale collaborations can transform the marketplace, surely they can revolutionize the workplace too.

Take away the enthusiasm for Web 2.0, one of those labels that signifies enthusiasm rather than analysis or a deep grounding in fact, and what have you got? 100 million people may well be using YouTube but being a consumer is not the same as being a creator. Why not speak of seven million people collaborating in watching the ABC or Network Ten, and one million collaborating by reading the Economist?

Works such as Andrew McAfee's 2006 'Enterprise 1.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration' in 47 MIT Sloan Management Review 3 suggest grounds for scepticism about corporate enthusiasm for 'Enterprise 2.0'. More broadly McAfee & Lakhani's new Harvard Business School teaching case on Wikipedia indicate concerns regarding arbitrary control by a handful of the supposed 16,000 enthusiasts, concerns earlier highlighted by the prescient Nicholas Carr.

     children are the future, doh!

The Toronto Globe & Mail twittered that Tapscott's 'Net Generation' are the future.

That conclusion doesn't require a crystal ball if a generation is defined broadly in terms of birth date rather than other attributes (and we ignore inconveniences such as gender, income, disability or failure to be born in a home without broadband).

By 2010, they'll comprise 40 per cent of the working public.
And already their influence — financial and social — has big business's collective attention. As a group they spend billions and influence their parents to spend billions more. But it isn't so much their size and financial clout that has Tapscott captivated. It's the way they think and what motivates them — things unique to this generation in large part because they have grown up with things like Napster, blogs and GameBoys. While the rest of us have had to adapt, they came pre-loaded.

Is that 'pre-loading' much different to the 'Radio Generation' or the 'Television' (or merely cable tv) Generation?

N-Geners are used to more choices in their everyday lives than previous generations, whether it's which of the thousand songs they want to listen to on their iPod, or which blog read. They thrive on the freedom to chose, yet are not naive when it comes to the boundless determination of marketers to sell them stuff. They are especially discriminating when it comes to evaluating companies and what they sell, and will not buy from - or work for - one with a poor reputation.

Rewind to pundit announcements from 1998 (or 1968, or 1928) and you'll encounter statements such as

The traditional approaches to planning, decision-making and information transfer are painstakingly slow to this group reared on instant everything. They are incredibly well-connected and can tap into a huge network of their peers, either through their instant messaging contact lists or through social networks. Nothing stays secret for long. N-Geners don't take well to the hierarchical and authoritarian management style; they like to work in teams, collaborate, so that problem solving becomes a communal task. They expect to be involved in decision making.

     don't worry, be wiki

Bizarrely, Tapscott has discovered that for members of the Net Generation

making money is not their top priority. Their concept of a happy career combines a number of things, including (gasp) having fun.

Presumably the appetite for sordid lucre is restricted to fossils in suits and gurus with a koolade concession.

     adios, couch potato

eMarketer meanwhile, in noting Informa's new Online TV and Video: Beyond User-Generated Content report, announces that it is time to "Say 'so long' to the couch potato" -

It had to happen one day. The "passive" television audience is standing up, holding their remote channel changers high and demanding, as if in one voice, participation and control.

Uh huh. We thought that the essence of couch vegie was that they sat down and stayed there, apart from trips to the bathroom and refrigerator.

The Informa report suggests that "legitimate online TV and video services" will generate worldwide revenues of US$6.3 billion in 2012, "almost 10 times the 2006 figure". Revenues in the US are forecast to rise from US$538 million last year to around US$4 billion in 2012 as part of yet another "virtual entertainment consumer revolution" with "a new breed of consumer".

Couch vegies may well demand but it is unclear whether "participation and control" will amount to much more than 'choice' among a greater number of similar channels and increasing use of multiple media (ie watching video while messaging while listening to music).

Elsewhere eMarketer forecasts that US consumer spending on digital music, movies and television will approach US$7.8 billion in 2010, up from US$1.3 billion in 2005.

The European Commission has meanwhile forecast that revenue in Europe from online content will reach €8.3 billion by 2010.

For the most advanced sectors, online content will represent a significant share of total revenue: about 20% for music and 33% for video games.

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