Category: Organization in the Collaborative Age

POD (print-on-demand) and 3-D printing

Did you hear about 3-D printing? Today there are printing machines that are able to print in three dimensions, complex shapes.

3D printing in action
3D printing in action

They use much less material than conventional manufacturing (which starts from a large chunk of material and removes most of it through machining).

They build objects layers after layers, using perfectly controlled materials.

An article by The Economist on 3D printing highlights the current development status and the potentialities of the technology. By the way, the glove above was 3D printed.

So, let’s now cross the potentialities of 3D printing of objects with POD (print-on-demand). When will be the day where you find a nice new object in a magazine, will download the file and get it printed at the next door 3D printing shop?

No more worries of having to search store after store for that unique object of your dreams. Design it and print it!

Well that might come a few years later than for books POD, but that’ll come. And then manufacturing, in the Industrial Age meaning of mass production, will shrink significantly. Because we want to have unique objects, 3D objects POD will be the response. Only those basic components which benefit greatly from the savings of mass production will remained produced that way.

Are you ready for the revolution of 3-D objects print-on-demand?

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The future of manufacturing and POD (print-on-demand)

Do you know POD (print-on-demand)? Well that’s quite easy: you choose the book you want and a machine produces it for you in a few minutes, cover, binding and all.

print-on-demand machine
print-on-demand machine

That’s not a dream: that’s today. As a self-publisher, Amazon and a number of others propose to put my book on display in their electronic stores. Should anyone buy it, a copy gets printed and sent.

No more stocks of hundreds of books that might not be sold. No more risk to produce stocks of no value. Just-in-time print-on-demand.

What’s visionary though is electronic bookstores just consisting of a print-on-demand (POD) machine. Because people still like to touch books and get a quick glimpse inside. But soon that will take off.

Think of it. Today more than 60% of the price of a book is distribution – manual handling, logistics, taking back unsold books etc. POD just does bypass this problem. It will remove distributors as intermediaries and create value by making more books physically available everywhere that a huge bookstore could ever contain.

POD will replace bulk manufacturing. Because it will also apply to everything else, not just books.

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What motivates the K.E.E.N.?

There is a great video from Dan Pink about motivation: the surprising truth about what motivates us.

It shows the incentive schemes of the Industrial Age corporation only work for mechanical skills. Once the task involves cognitive skill, rewards lead to lower performance!!

What then does motivate the K.E.E.N, the Knowledge Enhancing Exchanging Networker of the Collaborative Age? According to Dan Pink, there are 3 main factors: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

  • Autonomy like self-direction.
  • Mastery like getting better at something.
  • Purpose like getting up in the morning.
purpose maximizer
We are purpose maximizers

According to Dan Pink, we are purpose maximizers, not just profit maximizers.
So, when do you start maximizing your purpose?

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The bureaucratic entanglement (part 2)

Bureaucracy is pervading our mindset so much that when we are faced with a problem, our first reaction is to add another layer of bureaucracy.

Enron crash
Enron crash

Take the Enron scandal for example. What was the reaction? A book of new rules, also known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Voted by 99% of representatives and senators.

Add controls, permissions to ask before doing anything. Is that safer? That’s not sure at all. Is it stifling companies? That’s pretty sure – all the companies that can are fleeing the US stock markets to avoid the additional bureaucracy.

Anyone working on technical risk knows that adding new safety systems necessarily adds new risks. It introduces additional complexity, new types of failures. It generally lowers reliability. It often makes sure the widget does not work even if it could.

So, what’s the solution?

Bureaucratic approaches rely on removing the responsibility, bringing it higher in the hierarchy, splitting it between people looking at each other suspiciously. They rely on permissions to be asked before doing anything.

Make people irresponsible and they will certainly behave so.

The solution is to make people responsible. Entrepreneurs. Foster taking initiatives without asking for permission first. Give authority and accountability as close to the ground you can. Encourage people to multiply the value they create for the organization.

Let’s aim to remove everyday one bureaucratic itch in the organization. Within a few weeks you’ll see the difference. And more happy people that will be easier to retain in your influence zone!

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The bureaucratic entanglement (part 1)

Bureaucracy is stifling entrepreneurship. While it looks like rampant redtape is there for all the good reasons, it is stifling bureaucratic companies to death. Entangled in their procedures they will one by one topple over.
Open, fluid organizations based on decentralized accountability will take over.

Corporate bureaucracy
Corporate bureaucracy at work

In the industrial age, where communication was scarce and large companies based their competitive advantage on information management, bureaucracy was all about making the organization more efficient. Bureaucracy was the essence of the corporation.
Today where information management is inexpensive and can be done by anyone with an internet connection much more effectively than any bureaucratic organization, it is obsolete. The quest for efficiency of commodity production has been replaced by the quest for effective creative solutions.

As often with Fundamental Revolutions, what was the life-giving system of the previous age has become gangrenous.

Every day we meet bureaucracy: “sorry, that is not the standard operating procedure“… “I need to ask permission first higher up“… “that’s a good idea but it does not fit in the box“…

Sorry, but the game is over. Get rid of the bureaucracy or you’ll die. And slow death is generally the most painful.

Wake up. Reject bureaucracy. Do something today for others in your company without asking permission first. You’ll see. It’s great.

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Collaborative tools and catastrophes: transformation of the emergency response

Collaborative tools of the Fourth Revolution are reshaping the way we manage catastrophic events.

Examples from the Japan Earthquake:

If you are looking for information on people in the quake zone, Google has opened a Person Finder page.

Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing mapping tool, has set up a local platform for Japanthat allows people in the area affected by the earthquake to text the location of people who may be trapped in damaged buildings

And did you notice how Facebook is slow these days? That’s certainly because so many people use it to connect, give news to loved ones.

The full extend of how these collaborative tools will change emergency response is, I believe, not yet apprehended by Emergency Response Institutions. For example, this great video from TED shows how collaborative map making changed the response to the Haiti quake.

Emergency Response Institutions need to account for the Fourth Revolution. People are connected. They stay connected. And together they can greatly help themselves. When Emergency Response Institutions will know how to leverage this connectivity, their intervention methods will transform for the better.

Emergency Response institutions need to change. Let’s tell them.

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Deep learning from the “law of requisite variety”: practice your flexibility!

The “law of requisite variety” is a fundamental insight in our world. It is not well known. It should be recognized as a fundamental new insight that changes our understanding or the world.

The law itself comes from cybernetics – the study of systems controlled with feedback loops. Articulated in 1948 by Ashby, it states in its original form “only variety can destroy variety”. To be effective, the control system needs to have more variety than the perturbations of system it controls.

It has been taken up under a slightly different form in the 1970’s by the initiators of NLP – neuro-linguistic programming. In their words, “the actor with the greatest flexibility of behavior will ultimately control the system“.
In other words, the most flexible and adaptable actor will dominate.

We now know that most systems in our world – climate, biology, society – are systems controlled by feedback loops. This law should then apply to most of our world.

Darwin’s theory is but the application of this law to biology. Darwin’s theory is that the species most adapted to its environment will thrive. That does not just mean a static adaptation like the color of the bird or the shape of its beak. It also means, the level of dynamic adaptability, of flexibility.
That humans have come to dominate most of their environment and the rest of the ecosystem is not because they are the strongest or physiologically the most adapted – it is because they are the most flexible and adaptable thanks to their intelligence.

Let’s now take this insight into the field of economics and society. The most adaptable and flexible will eventually dominate.
For organizations it means that flexibility and adaptability is a primordial condition for success. For institutions and governments also. The natural tendency to create organizations and institutions that try to freeze a situation to their benefit is doomed in the long term.
The quest for success should be to seek to enhance the flexibility and the adaptability of organizations and institutions rather than devise all sorts impediments to change.

It is also applicable on a personal level. To thrive, you need to be more flexible and adaptable than the world around you.

So, when do you start practicing that fundamental skill – flexibility?

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The organization Revolution – the part 5 of the Manifesto is online!

Organizations – the core value producing institutions of the Industrial Age – will be fundamentally transformed. They will become OPEN and FLUID. Discover the new philosophy of organizations and how it will transform the world in part 5 of the Fourth Revolution Manifesto!

Fourth Revolution Manifesto part V cover

You can access the fourth part of the Fourth Revolution Manifesto – the ORGANIZATION REVOLUTION by clicking on the link. You can also read and share the document on Scribd – it has a great reader and can also be used as a backup if the above link does not work: the Fourth Revolution Manifesto – part V on Scribd .

Don’t hesitate to comment and bring in suggestions in the comments to this blog post!

Can’t wait to see the follow-up?

The next Part of the Fourth Revolution manifesto will be published around February 13.

We’ll dive deep into the consequences of the Fourth Revolution in institutions like government, education and intellectual property – the Institutions Revolution!

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The Fourth Revolution Blog on the organization revolution – retrospective

This is the week of the Organization Revolution. The Fourth Revolution Manifesto on the Organization Revolution will be published this week-end.

For those of you who might have missed earlier blogs, here are some links about organizations and the Fourth Revolution. May they inspire you to act today to help your organizations transform!

The organization needs to open itself

How can an organization mobilize the power of the ‘long tail’?

Management’s will to control everything needs to stop

A Revolution in organization management legitimacy

Why organizations don’t implement virtual social networks

Social networks is the foundation of organization’s value creation

The organization’s social network needs to become open to the outside

The organization tomorrow will be more compact. It will be open. It will be fluid. Are you ready?

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Harnessing the collective genius of the organization

“The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away“. ~ Walter Wriston, banker, former Chairman of Citicorp.

That’s exactly what the Fourth Revolution will do: release the collective genius of the organization, and of the world beyond. It is the inevitable direction of history.

When will your organization start harnessing the collective genius of its employees? Open up, and harness the collective genius of the world? Become fluid, and become a turbulent cradle of great innovations?

Such is the power of the collective genius, of the collaborative network, that it will crush any organization who stays rigid, hierarchical and closed.

So, you’d better start doing it before your competitors. Become an open, fluid and collaborative organization. It is not just a temporary fad. It is a necessity.

Why don’t you start today? And blow your competition away?

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Goldcorp story: creating incredible value by publishing the most secret data of the company

How a mining company created huge value by publishing the most secret data a mining company can hold: all the geological data of the mine.

The story is now classical and counted in most books on the new collaboration tools. But it is worthwhile mentioning it and the deep lessons it holds.

Goldcorp was struggling. Its mine in Canada was loosing money, prospects were dim. Hope of finding new gold was there, geological investigations ongoing, but nobody was sure where to drill. Geologists did not agree. A long and costly additional geological investigation program was yet to come.
The CEO did not come from the mining industry. Attending a seminar in a business school, he had the following idea: and what if I was putting all the geological data public and launch a worldwide contest to advise where to find the gold?

That’s a hell of an unconventional idea in the natural resources industry: geological data is the core of the value of the company. It is the most secret of secrets.
Still the CEO went ahead, against all oppositions. All the available geological data of the mine was put on the web – more than 400 Megabyte of it. People from various industries responded to the contest, coming up with incredibly innovative ideas, new 3D visualization tools. Some of these ideas even led to new ventures. Although the winners were compensated with some money, the main value for them was the exposure and the publicity which allowed them to pursue their own projects and ventures.

They allowed the company to save millions of dollars of geological work and indeed led GoldCorp to find new deposits of gold and ultimately become one of the wealthiest gold mining companies in the industry. The CEO was sitting on a gold mine!

What are the deep lessons of this story?

Value in the Industrial Age was often based on holding to intellectual property and other proprietary knowledge, and keeping it secret.
In contrast, value in the Collaborative Age is making this knowledge public and motivating the world to enhance and transform it for the benefit of the organization.
It is not just publishing proprietary knowledge – that’s easy. It is making sure that a network of followers is deeply motivated to crunch it, transform it, experiment with it, and create something awesome. That’s the hard part. That’s the differentiator.

Creating the network of followers is key. It involves giving away to receive later. It requires a compelling purpose that motivates the followers. It is a long term endeavor.

When do you start creating the network of followers for your company?

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