How (5 page)

GETTING FLATTENED

This changed everything. Information, unlike land and capital, is not zero-sum; it’s infinite. The more I have, the more you can have, too. And, unlike money, it is elastic; a dollar is worth a dollar no matter how much you desire it. Knowledge, in contrast, becomes more valuable directly in proportion to your need or desire for it. If you were told that you had a disease, for instance, you would pay much more for the information to cure it than you would if you were healthy.

In the days of fortress capitalism, a professional class of lawyers, doctors, accountants, and other gatekeepers of knowledge took advantage of information’s elasticity and profited from it in two significant ways: They hoarded knowledge (like any other commodity) and meted it out in small doses for high fees (typically, to people who really needed it because they were in trouble, ill, or their metaphoric houses were otherwise on fire). Simultaneously, they built indecipherably specialized language and complex codes—like legalese, the tax code, and other “fine print”—as barriers to keep people from gaining easy access to what they knew. This increased their value. The more someone needed certain information, the more they were willing to pay a specialist to explain it.

The wired world, by conducting information so quickly and cheaply, in contrast removed the layers between individuals and knowledge, making the professional specialist somewhat less valuable and the information itself more so. The unit cost of information dropped dramatically, from the $300 you might pay a private investigator to locate a deadbeat dad, for instance, to the $50 or so you might spend to do a nationwide online records search yourself. Power and wealth shifted from those who hoard information to those who could make it available and accessible to the most people.

This simple fact makes the habits of fortress capitalism obsolete. With the ascent of information as the engine of commerce, power has shifted to those who open up, who share information freely. The young titans of the information economy—Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay—understand that it is no longer about hoarding, no longer about creating secrets, no longer about keeping things private; it is about reaching people. Google, now a company with one of the largest market capitalizations in the world, trumpets its corporate mission as nothing less than “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
⁵
Think about it: a multibillion-dollar enterprise organized around giving stuff away. Amazon.com also gives it away: not its products—it sells books and other stuff, just like thousands of others—but its knowledge. Its success lies in the novel and inventive ways it has developed to share information. Wish Lists, Search Inside!, and Listmania Lists use information to powerfully connect Amazon customers in common-interest communities. EBay takes this idea a step further, organizing its entire market into a self-governing community based on the free flow of information about its users. The new information-based economy affects everyone, not just those in the information business. Every business, in almost every industry, has undergone a major transformation in how it accomplishes its goals. Manufacturers no longer employ assembly-line workers; they employ trained knowledge workers who can keep the automated manufacturing systems running.

Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times
journalist Thomas L. Friedman, in his seminal book
The World Is Flat
, comprehensively details the global effects of this newly unfettered flow of information. He describes some of the unprecedented possibilities suddenly available to us, many of which are being exploited by the business world: new paradigms of collaboration, specialization, supply and distribution, and expansion of core competencies.
⁶
We can partner, “plug and play,” and work together in totally new ways because we can share information as never before. Collaboration itself—our heightened ability to
connect
—serves as an engine of growth and innovation. Sharing not only drives the relationships companies maintain with customers, it also drives the companies themselves. Friedman details many forward-thinking companies pursuing new business paradigms to exploit this new reality: UPS uses the efficiency of its shipping system to run the repair center for Toshiba less expensively than Toshiba can itself; call centers in Bangalore seamlessly provide Dell Inc. computer customers vital product support; housewives from the comfort of their own homes in Salt Lake City interface directly with JetBlue Airways’ central booking computers to take and process reservations. Clearly, the maglev bullet train of zeros and ones has left the station and no one knows where it will stop.

Friedman’s macroeconomic and social analysis of our newly “flat,” interconnected world presents a vision of the forces reshaping global business in the twenty-first century. The free flow of information significantly changes the way internal business units perform and are governed, and how individuals work together every day. Fading away are the days of the vertical silo model, when departments and programs within a corporation ran independent fiefdoms organized in top-down, command-and-control hierarchies in the spirit of feudal systems. Increasingly, our typical workday involves relating to people of relatively equal status in an ever-evolving array of teams and partnerships between units throughout the globe. Since knowledge allows people to act, companies that can instantly deliver more high-value information to their workers can enable more of them to act on it.

Companies are flattening, like our world, so that many activities that were once the province of one department are now everyone’s job. In 2005, for example, Computer Associates International, Inc., a company struggling to rehabilitate itself after being tainted by scandal, product deficiencies, and management problems, eliminated all 300 of its customer advocate positions worldwide.
⁷
CEO John Swainson explained that the goal was to make the company’s sales workers “more accountable,” but the underlying message was clear: Advocating for the customer is no longer the special responsibility of customer advocates; it is now a part of everyone’s job description.
⁸
In company after company, managers are eliminating so-called “Centers of Excellence” and “Centers of Innovation,” making these jobs the province of all workers. Everyone now must increase company excellence and everyone must innovate. How can you make a Wave of innovation if only the 20 or so people in your Skunk Works stand up?

As traditional job silos break down and become horizontal, command-and-control hierarchies begin to lose their relevance. A new model emerges: connect and collaborate. To succeed in this new model, workers and companies alike need to develop new skills and harness new powers within themselves. Companies—and the people who comprise them—need to recontextualize how they do business. Individuals must develop new approaches to the sphere of human relations. Both companies and employees must learn to share in whole new ways.

The world has become even more like the game of chess. Every piece on a chessboard is highly specialized, with virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, assets and liabilities. Some move diagonally and some move straight; some roam free and unfettered while others are tightly regimented. But, with a few exceptions, you can’t typically achieve checkmate with fewer than three pieces. Most accomplishments in chess are team-based; only when you position pieces properly—and in communication with one another—do they start to win. Two rooks, if communicating, are very powerful, even if they are very far apart; without close communication, rooks are far less powerful. Business is now much more like that. Success depends on how people of diverse backgrounds and skills communicate with and complement one another. In a connected world, power shifts to those best able to connect.

Six hundred years ago, people succeeded with barter arrangements on street corners. Today, most business takes place in formalized organizations; a corporation, for the most part, is nothing more than a society of individuals who share a common interest to get something done. (The corporation itself is for the most part a legal fiction. Many of them are incorporated in Delaware, but few of us commute to Delaware every morning, do we?) While not everyone works in a company—some people are independents: accountants, contractors, agents, consultants, entrepreneurs, and the like—everyone working in the world of exchange and commerce needs to connect with others, be they customers, clients, vendors, suppliers, team members within our companies, or subcontractors. No man or woman, as poet John Donne famously said, “is an island, entire of itself”; we are all part of a larger landscape of people, because most of what we do cannot be done alone.

I cannot accomplish anything by myself. I find myself a member of an organization. I find myself in a marketplace, competing, trying to do something that depends on other people
. That is quite a place to find yourself. It stands to reason that, in such a world, your success will depend on your ability to relate to others in powerful ways. The information economy places new emphasis on how we bridge the spaces between us. How do we reach out? How do we create strong synapses capable of making our action potentials real? With the fundamental shift from land to capital to knowledge and information as the currency of business, we’ve seen a concurrent shift from the power of command-and-control hierarchies to the power of collaborative, horizontal effort. The necessity to work together like pieces on a chessboard places a new premium on our ability to conduct ourselves successfully in the sphere of human affairs.

More profoundly than just getting things done, strong connections with others represent a value unto themselves. Relationships lie at the heart of who we are as humans; they give our lives meaning and significance. When we die our headstones seldom read SYLVIA JONES, 1960-2042, VP OF STRATEGIC PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION. MADE THE NUMBERS 16 QUARTERS IN A ROW. Instead, we write STAN SMITH, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, BROTHER, UNCLE. HE MADE THE WORLD WARMER WITH HIS SMILE. Though our jobs may make us wealthy, our relationships give us lasting value and enduring worth. Building stronger relationships, then, can lead to more than success: It can lead to a kind of significance.

CHAPTER
2

Technology’s Trespass

Computers are useless.They can
only give you answers.

—Pablo Picasso

R
elationships. Communication. Connection. Collaboration. This is how we fill the spaces between us.
Communicate
comes from the Latin word
communicare
, meaning “to share.” So it follows that as the nature of the way we communicate changes, so too does the nature of our relationships. Over the past decade, the intercession of technology into our interpersonal synapses has radically altered what goes on in the spaces between us, has changed the way we do business, and has given us easy access to information, creating a double-edged sword that cuts both for and against us.

THE TIES THAT BIND US

Back in the days of feudal capitalism, running a company like IBM was a far simpler proposition than it is today. Remember the blue suits? IBM used to be famous for its strong corporate culture, so impressed on everyone who worked there that the blue suit became the de facto uniform of the workforce. Everyone knew when Big Blue walked into the room. Their suits stood out as strongly as a coat of arms draped on the backs of a medieval lord’s archer brigade. If you worked at IBM, you knew what armor to put on every morning. Enforcing a companywide point of view was easier when the old fortress mentality still held sway. You could communicate policies, values, rules, goals, and perspectives to your workforce through vertical channels. You could post notices, hold meetings, and have retreats for managers, and your messages—explicit and implicit—would travel their way throughout the workforce. Strategies would shift in lockstep, and blue suits would be worn. Both corporation and employee benefited from this way of operating; orders were given and everyone knew where to march.

Few businesses have fortress walls that shield and contain their workforce anymore, especially the larger ones. Communication technology has replaced the concept of workforce with an array of laborers affiliated in myriad, open relationships. Full-time employees work hand in hand with members of joint ventures, colleagues in independently managed subsidiaries, on-site independent contractors, remote representatives of outsourcing companies, consultants working from their homes, and as many more creative interrelationships as you can imagine. Add to that a global supply and distribution chain and you get an organic tangle of human relationships difficult to easily control.

In place of the nice, tidy company-as-city-state, the population of corporations more closely resembles a Central American rainforest. Tall, old-growth trees define the greater geography while vines twist this way and that, connecting one tree to another, to a bush, to the ground. Lichen and moss grow in patches everywhere, often on top of one another. Bushes, fungi, saplings, and parasites abound. Flowers sprout, often in unpredictable places, as countless species of birds, bugs, and animals find a home in its dark, fertile recesses. The forest has subsumed the stone fortress of businesses, leaving in its place an organic ecosystem filled with possibility. Not only don’t your co-workers wear the blue suits, but some, who work from the privacy of their homes, work in pajamas. Traditional ways of categorizing people have gone away, along with the traditional ways of reaching out and communicating organizational goals and values to them. Few give or receive inflexible marching orders; many more of us must navigate day to day on our own. The workforce has become an
ecosystem
comprised of mutually reinforcing independent agents. An ecosystem, by definition,
interacts
or it does not survive. To thrive in a business ecosystem, you must be able connect with those in it—one way or another—as never before.