30 Books in 30 days – Remembering 15 years of the 1st Friday Book Synopsis – (Wikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams)

{On April 5, 2013, we will celebrate the 15^th Anniversary of the First Friday Book Synopsis, and begin our 16^th year.  During March, I will post a blog post per day remembering key insights from some of the books I have presented over the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis.  We have met every first Friday of every month since April, 1998 (except for a couple of weather –related cancellations).  These posts will focus only on books I have presented.  My colleague, Karl Krayer, also presented his synopses of business books at each of these gatherings.  I am going in chronological order, from April, 1998, forward.  The fastest way to check on these posts will be at Randy’s blog entries — though there will be some additional blog posts interspersed among these 30.}

Post #20 of 30

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Synopsis presented May, 2007
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.  (Portfolio Hardcover.  2006)

News item:  there are new kinds of shared office spaces (what we used to call executive suites) popping up.  In these new designs, people don’t get “offices,” they just move around in open space with their wireless laptops/iPads, doing their work, but conversing/collaborating with others who do not work “with them,” but, because they all work in close proximity, they help create the synergy for all of them.

So, if “we” are smarter than “me;” if the “wisdom of crowds is better than groupthink;” then how do we build a true “we” environment?  The answer is technology driven collaboration.  The answer is “Wikinomics.”

We all understand the idea of Wikipedia.  Get everyone to contribute to one vast storehouse of knowledge.  I consistently find the first paragraph of practically every Wikipedia article to be well-written, substantive.  I quoted two first sentences in a handout for a book synopsis presentation just this morning.

This book, Wikinomics, has so much to offer.  I know of one company that was wasting so much time, with person after person re-answering a question that had already been answered time and again.  The hours lost!  If only they could “store” their answers, if only they could recall those answers on demand.  So, what did they do?  They studied this book, built an internal wiki, and trained everyone to use it (to check it for answers to questions; to update answers, to add answers to new questions — and to share all sorts of other kinds of knowledge).  It has saved massive amounts of time, and made everyone smarter, and the company more “competent’ (and, made the company “seem” more competent).  They studied, figured out, planned, and implemented.  Pretty good approach to organizational learning, and execution.

“No company today, no matter how large or how global, can innovate fast enough or big enough by itself…  Wikinomics reveals the next historic step – the art and science of mass collaboration where companies open up to the world.  It is an important book.”  A. G. Laffey, CEO, Proctor & Gamble.  (from the front of the dust jacket).

The book begins with the story of Rob McEwen, the CEO of Goldcorp, Inc., a Toronto-based gold mining firm.  He was out of gold, out of money, and out of ideas.  But he took some time out for personal development (side note – this is such a good idea!!!), and at a conference at MIT he heard a lot about Linux.  He got back to work, and announced:  “I’d like to take all of our geology, all the data we have that goes back to 1948, and put it into a file and share it with the world.  Then, we’ll ask the world to tell us where we’re going to find the next six million ounces of gold.”   So they did.  And they did — find the next six million ounces of gold.  Actually, they found eight mllion ounces of gold, and went from being a $100 million company to a $9 billion “juggernaut.”  Pretty good idea!

Here is what this book is all about:

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 on hierarchy and control. 
Smart companies are encouraging, rather than fighting, the heaving growth of massive online communities – many of which emerged from the fringes of the Web to attract tens of millions of participants overnight.
Some critics look at successful “open source” projects such as Linux and Wikipedia, for example, and assume they are an attack on the legitimate right and need of companies to make a profit.  Others see this new cornucopia of participation in the economy as a threat to their very existence (has anyone bought a music CD lately?).
Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius. 
To succeed, it will not be sufficient to simply intensify existing management strategies.  Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call Wikinomics.  This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject.  Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.

Technology is absolutely driving this breakthrough, making it more and more possible, easier and easier to access:

In the past, collaboration was mostly small scale…  Never before, however, have individuals had the power or opportunity to link up in loose networks of peers to produce goods and services in a very tangible and ongoing way. 
Call them the “weapons of mass collaboration.”  New low-cost collaborative infrastructures – from free Internet telephony to open source software to global outsourcing platforms – allow thousands upon thousands of individuals and small producers to cocreate products, access markets, and delight customers in ways that only large corporations could manage in the past.  This is giving rise to new collaborative capabilities and business models that will empower the prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust. 

And for those behind the curve, they are making a big mistake.  This approach/method of working together is becoming a core competency:

Peer production is a very social activity.  All one needs is a computer, a network connection, and a bright spark of initiative and creativity to join in the economy. 
These changes are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history – a world where value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive.  A world where only the connected will survive.  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 knowledge to create value. 
Whether designing an airplane, assembling a motorcycle, of analyzing the human genome, the ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organizations is becoming the defining competency for managers and firms. 

It really is an “adopt this or else” world:

Conventional wisdom says companies innovate, differentiate, and compete by doing certain things right:  by having superior human capital; protecting their intellectual property fiercely; focusing on customers; thinking globally but acting locally; and by executing well (i.e., having good management and controls).  But the new business world is rendering each of these principles insufficient, and in some cases, completely inappropriate. 
In an age where mass collaboration can reshape an industry overnight, 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.  Every individual now has a role to play in the economy, and every company has a choice – commoditize or get connected.
We must collaborate or perish – across borders, cultures, disciplines, and firms, and increasingly with masses of people at one time. 

And, because we need the wisdom and skills of the many, we have to “go outside” to get what we need.

For Wikinomics, the subtitle, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, was chosen from the many submitted from an open discussion on the Web.

The book provides the four “Powerful New Ideas” —

1) Being Open
2) Peering
3) Sharing
4) Acting Globally

And the book identifies Technology, Demographics, and Global Economics as critical pieces of this new Wikinomics world.

The authors later published Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, which I presented in November, 2010.  But this is the book that provides the underlying philosophy, and helped me really understand just how this strange new world seems to work.  And, in many ways, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, blogs, and so many more technological connector tools — (the list can go on…) — are all part of this new Wikinomics era.

(A side note:  on the cover, at the top left, you will see the word MySpace.  It is a Wikinomics world, but the names and ventures may be replaced with a newer, better idea/version, in the blink of an eye, in this brave new world).

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You can purchase many of our synopses, with our comprehensive handouts, and audio recordings of our presentations, at our companion site 15minutebusinessbooks.com.  The recordings may not be studio quality, but they are understandable, usable recordings, to help you learn.

(And though the handouts for the first years of our event are simple Word documents, in the last couple of years we have “upgraded” the look of our handouts to a graphically designed format).
We have clients who play these recordings for small groups.  They distribute the handouts, listen to the recordings together, and then have a discussion that is always some form of a “what do we have to learn, what can we do with this?” conversation.  Give it a try.