Platforms Are Not Created Equal: Harnessing the Full Potential of Platforms

Platforms are becoming increasingly central to business value creation.  Yet, not all platforms are created equal – some platforms have far more potential to trigger powerful forms of increasing returns that will ultimately marginalize other forms of platforms. In a rapidly evolving environment, it’s important to understand not just the structure, but the dynamics, of different kinds of platforms. I recently had an opportunity to step back and reflect on this issue as I prepared for a speaking engagement.

I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at the Platform Strategy Summit held at the MIT Media Lab a couple of weeks ago. This Summit was organized by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne and Sangeet Choudary – three guys who have spent a lot of time studying and working with platform-based businesses. There were great speakers and, perhaps equally important, the audience included a lot of people who have been building platform-based businesses.

What is a platform?

So, what did I learn? Well, first of all, that platforms, at least as the organizers think of them, cover a broad range of institutional arrangements. It was clear that they didn't simply view platforms as technology platforms. In fact, the definition they offer of business platforms is: “a nexus of rules and
infrastructure that facilitate interactions among network users” or, alternatively, “a published standard, together with a governance model, that facilitates third party participation.”

Just to get the semantics aside, I tend to prefer the term “performance ecosystems” to describe this space rather than platforms simply because, to me, the term “platforms” creates an image of a much more tightly designed and specified environment than the term “performance ecosystems.” For the purpose of this posting, though, I’ll defer to my hosts and use the term "platform" since it’s clear from their definition that they are talking about roughly the same domains.

So, are all platforms created equal? I argued in my talk that they are not. To make my case, I distinguished four different categories of platforms that are becoming increasingly prominent in the business world (and elsewhere).  

Aggregation platforms

The basic focus of these platforms is to bring together a broad array of relevant resources and help users of the platform to connect with the most appropriate resources.  We can think of data aggregation platforms, marketplaces and broker platforms like eBay and Etsy, and contest platforms like InnoCentive or Kaggle.  These platforms tend to be very transaction or task focused – the key is to express a need, get a response, do the deal and move on.  They also tend to operate on a hub and spoke model – all the transactions are brokered by the platform owner and organizer.

Social platforms

These are similar to aggregation platforms in the sense of aggregating a lot of people – think of all the broad-based social platforms we’ve come to know and love: Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Social platforms also include more tightly defined communities of interest that come together around specific shared interests like certain genres of music, types of sports or academic disciplines like history or economics. They differ from aggregation platforms on some key dimensions.  First, they end up building and reinforcing long-term relationships across participants on the platform – it’s not just about doing a transaction or a task but getting to know people around areas of common interest.  Second, they tend to foster mesh networks of relationships rather than hub and spoke interactions – people connect with each other over time in much richer and diverse ways that usually do not involve the platform organizer or owner.

Mobilization platforms

Now, we’re talking about something more than individual tasks or networks of relationships around common interests.  Mobilization platforms ultimately focus on mobilizing participants to engage in some kind of collaborative effort that will take considerable time to accomplish.  Here, we can think about open source software platforms like Linux or Apache.  There are also “process network” platforms that bring together participants in extended business processes like supply networks or distribution operations that help to select and orchestrate participants who need to collaborate in flexible ways over time.  We might also think of mobilization platforms that support social movements like the Arab Spring movement.  Bottom line, these platforms are not just about conversations and interests, they are ultimately focused on moving people to act together to accomplish something beyond the capabilities of any individual participant.

Because of the need for collaborative action over time, these platforms tend to foster longer-term relationships rather than focusing on isolated and short-term transactions or tasks. But the key focus here is to connect with, and mobilize, a given set of people and resources to achieve a shared goal.  The participants, in other words, are often viewed as “static resources” – they have a given set of individual capabilities and the challenge is to mobilize these fixed capabilities to achieve the longer-term goal.

Learning platforms

Now, it starts to get interesting.  These platforms have as their explicit goal to create environments where participants can learn faster and individually achieve higher and higher levels of performance as more and more participants join the platform. These platforms are what I've called “creation spaces” in some earlier work.  They have a distinctive configuration.  

Their primary unit of organization is a small team or work group that takes on particular performance challenges and where participants work closely together to come up with creative new ways to address the performance challenge.  The emphasis on small teams or work groups is essential because the focus is on a powerful form of learning that involves accessing tacit knowledge. This in turn requires the formation of deep, trust based relationships.  These relationships evolve quickly in small teams or workgroups but are very challenging to scale.

That’s where the second key element of creation spaces comes in – they provide participants with ways to connect with each other beyond the individual team or workgroup to ask questions, share experiences, and get advice.

To my knowledge, there are very few examples of these creation spaces in business, but we can find very large scale creation spaces in arenas as diverse as online war games (for example, World of Warcraft) and online platforms to help musicians develop and refine their remixing skills (ccMixter). They also have emerged in a broad array of extreme sports arenas, including big wave surfing and extreme skiing.

As with social platforms and mobilization platforms, learning platforms critically depend on the ability to build long-term relationships rather than simply focusing on short-term transactions or tasks. Unlike the other platforms, though, learning platforms explicitly do not view participants as “static resources.” On the contrary, they start with the presumption that all participants have the opportunity to draw out more and more of their potential if given the right environment.

Doubling network effects

Let’s be clear.  All four of these platform categories have the potential to create significant economic value for the platform owner and for the participants.  All four have the potential to tap into network effects – the value created by the platform accelerates as more and more participants join the platform. Of course, the flip side of this is that, until and unless the platform draws in a critical mass of participants, it will have only minimal value to participants.  That’s why the vast majority of platform initiatives end up failing – the very thing that creates value once the critical mass is achieved, diminishes value before that point.

But, the fourth category of platform offers a second level of network effect, one th
at is uniquely associated with that platform.  To understand this, it’s useful to go back to the somewhat outdated example used to describe network effects: the fax machine. If you only have one fax machine, it has negative value – you paid money for it and it does nothing.  The more fax machines that are connected, the more valuable each fax machine becomes.  But, in that example, the individual fax machine is a static resource – its features and functions are a given and don’t change as the number of fax machines multiplies. The increasing value comes from its connections with other machines.

What if we change the assumption, though?  What if each fax machine acquired more features and functions as it connected with more fax machines? What if its features multiplied at a faster rate as more fax machines joined the network? Now, we’d have a second level of network effect – we’d still have the network effects that come by simply increasing the number of fax machines, but now there’s an additional network effect that accrues as each fax machine adds more and more features as a result of interacting with other fax machines.

That’s the potential of learning platforms.  In a world of mounting performance pressure and accelerating change as described in our Shift Index, that learning potential isn’t just an opportunity, it becomes an imperative.  Those platforms that don’t help participants to learn faster and faster as they work together will tend to be marginalized over time, especially once learning platforms become more prevalent. And this also applies to the participants. If we choose to participate on platforms that are not explicitly driven to accelerate learning, we’ll learn at a slower rate than participants who choose to spend their time on learning platforms.

I also want to be clear that learning can and does occur on all four of the platforms, but on the first three platforms, it occurs as an unintended byproduct of participation on the platform. In the course of a conversation with someone on a social network, I'll often learn something new – but this is incidental and tends to be learning in the form of knowledge transfer.  Knowledge transfer is inherently a diminishing returns game – the more the knowledge spreads across participants, the more the rate of learning will slow down. The only thing that can turn this from a diminishing returns game to an increasing returns game is to shift the focus from knowledge transfer to knowledge creation.

Platforms that are explicitly designed to drive new knowledge creation through collaborative efforts offer the potential for increasing returns to learning – we’ll learn faster as more and more diverse participants join the platform, especially if we can combine the learning that occurs within high performing teams and workgroups with the learning that comes from connecting across a broader environment.

Bottom line

Which platform would you rather be on? In my book, The Power of Pull, I make the case that we're moving to a world where value creation will depend on harnessing the power of scalable pull platforms, where we can draw out the people and resources that we need, when we need them and where we need them.  The highest form of pull platform is the learning platform – one that helps all participants to learn faster as more and more participants join in.

The good news from a platform owner perspective is that any of the first three categories of platforms can evolve to become learning platforms over time. But, it will likely not happen on its own. It requires thoughtful observation of where the opportunities for learning might be and initiatives to create more functionality on the platform to support and accelerate learning processes.

Four questions become central to harnessing the power of accelerating learning on platforms:

• What is the primary design objective of the platform today – aggregation, social, mobilization or learning?
• Where are there opportunities to accelerate learning (especially through new knowledge creation) among participants today?
• What features or design principles could we deploy to help tap into those learning opportunities today?
• What are the metrics that we could track to determine the rate of learning and how can we monitor those metrics on an ongoing basis to refine our initiatives and accelerate learning even more among participants?

Where Do You Stand? The Shifting Ground of Strategy

We’re all trying our best to remain standing, but the ground beneath us is shifting at an accelerating rate. The implications for strategy are profound, but few have explored this terrain.

Strategies of position are back

Strategy was once all about position – all that mattered was where you were located and whether there were barriers to entry. As structural advantages eroded, this view of strategy fell out of vogue. In its place, we heard all about strategies of movement and capability – it was all about your “core competencies” and how quickly you could move across a changing landscape. Now, it looks like strategies of position will reassert themselves with a vengeance.

What do I mean by that? There’s no question that the ground is shifting – for more on that, see our Shift Index. But, here’s the paradox, at the very same time that the ground is shifting, it matters more and more where we’re standing.

We’ve just released a major new research report at the Center for the Edge – The Hero’s Journey through the Landscape of the Future – which focuses on one fundamental shift that will impact an increasing array of businesses.  Specifically, we look at trends towards fragmentation and concentration in the economy. What parts of the economy are fragmenting into smaller and smaller entities and what parts of the economy are concentrating into larger and larger entities?  The answer to this question is vitally important to executives yet few are explicitly asking this question, much less answering it in any systematic way.

Position shapes growth potential

If you’re an executive in a large company under pressure to achieve more growth or if you’re an executive in a smaller company seeking to achieve high rates of growth, where you stand matters hugely. If you’re in a part of the economy that’s fragmenting, growth will become increasingly challenging. Ultimately you’ll find yourself trapped in a spiral of shrinking share and eroding economics.  On the other hand, if you’re in a part of the economy that’s concentrating, growth can be amplified and sustained by riding the waves that are driving concentration. Position suddenly matters big time.

So, the choice of ground that you’re standing on matters.  But there’s a second way that position is becoming more important. In our research, we discovered that winners in the concentrating parts of the economy are increasingly determined by the ability to connect with, and build strong relationships with, the participants who are operating in fragmenting parts of the economy.  Look at Amazon. Its increasing growth – both in its online retail business and its newer cloud platform – has been driven by an ability to attract and support a growing array of smaller players who can benefit from the economies of scale and scope offered by Amazon. Or take Google. Its core economic engine – its advertising network – critically depends upon the value it provides to smaller merchants and smaller content websites.  

This suggests another dimension of position which will increasingly determine the ability to generate growing economic value.  Where you’re positioned in expanding business ecosystems matters a lot. If you’re on the periphery, with few connections to players in the fragmented part of the economy, good luck.  If you’re at the center of a growing cluster of relationships where more and more participants are seeking to connect with you, now you’re in a great position to drive the economies of scale and scope that will make you one of the winners in concentrating parts of the economy.

Position within ecosystems drives leveraged growth potential.  In a world of mounting performance pressure, growth alone is not sufficient.  The key is how much investment is required to drive this growth.  The two conventional approaches to growth – organic growth and growth through acquisition – are very resource intensive, requiring significant upfront investment, long lead-times and uncertain rewards.  Far better to explore leveraged growth, a third path to growth – connecting with, and mobilizing, complementary resources and capabilities that can add significant value to your customers.

And let’s not forget those who just want to make a living

By the way, position also matters if you have more modest aspirations and simply want to build a small and successful business that will support you in pursuing your passion. Far better to be thoughtful in picking a part of the economy that is fragmenting and that will support and reward smaller businesses providing distinctive and focused value. If you pick a part of the economy that is concentrating, watch out! You'll soon be run over by larger companies that will have distinct advantage over the small fry they crush along the way.

And, just as with larger businesses, you also need to be systematic in picking and participating in broader ecosystems that will help you to amplify the value that you deliver to the market. Just look at the growing array of small, niche product business that are emerging from platforms like eBay, Etsy and YouTube – part of their ability to sustain themselves comes from their participation in these platforms that help them to find and connect with customers around the world. Few, if any, of these businesses will grow to become large, public companies, but that’s precisely the point – they are homesteading fragmenting parts of the economy that will be fertile ground for small businesses but at the same time that make it challenging to grow into very large companies.

What about core competencies?

So, am I suggesting that position is everything and that movement and “core competencies” don’t matter? Far from it.  All I’m suggesting is that position is a pre-requisite for success if your goal is to deliver sustained levels of high growth.  If you’re not positioned in the right places in the economy, you’ll find growth more and more challenging, no matter how smart and agile you are.

If you’re focused on parts of the economy that are concentrating, there’s a fundamental challenge: concentration implies that there will be fewer and fewer winners over time – it’s a “winner takes all” proposition.  So, how do you prevail against all the others that have their eye on the same spot?

Here’s where core competency comes in.  You’ve got to be really, really good – distinctively good – at the skills and practices required to succeed in concentrating parts of the economy. But I take core competency to another level (see my article in Harvard Business Review on “Unbundling the Corporation”) – you’ve got to be so focused on your core competency that you would be well advised to shed all other activities from your company.  If you try to hold onto things that you’re just good enough in or even where you have parity with others, you’ll just consume resources and attention that could be better used in deepening and broadening your core competency.  

One of the great things about our evolving economy is that you can increasingly find and connect to companies that are world-class in whatever business activities you need to support your business.  If that’s the case, why would you ever continue to do things that others can do better?

And what about movement?

Here’s another reason to maintain a ruthless focus on your core competence. In our exponentially changing world, core competence is never static.  If you’re not totally focused on accelerating learning and performance improvement in your core competence, you’ll soon fall far behind, no matter how good you are at it today.  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, scalable learning becomes the key requirement for continued success.  

This is where movement becomes central to success.  You can’t just stand still. But, on the other hand, you’d better not fall into the trap of random, reactive movement that’s so tempting in a time of rapid change – simply sensing and responding to the latest event on the horizon.  The movement must be directed by a clear view of what capabilities will be critical to success and how those capabilities are likely to evolve in a changing business landscape.

That provides the context for driving learning, both within your organization and across a broader ecosystem.  And, make no mistake about it, if all you do is focus on learning within the four walls of your firm, you’ve already lost. The key to scaling learning is to be able to reach out beyond your enterprise and find ways to connect with world-class participants in a broad array of complementary domains in ways that will help all participants to learn faster.

And, that’s again where position matters. If you’re not positioned centrally in a broad array of relevant ecosystems, you’ll be at a disadvantage relative to those who are. But you need to do more. You need to build relationships that will make it easier for you to access the tacit knowledge that others have and then focus those relationships on addressing really challenging performance issues.  This requires movement, but it’s focused movement, driven by rapid iterations of effort and frequent pauses to reflect collectively on what’s working and what’s not working from the performance improvement initiatives. In an exponential world, if you’re not constantly moving in this fashion, you’ll soon die.

So, in the end, movement and core competency still matter.  But they’ll only matter if you have picked the right position on the business landscape – a position that will foster and amplify growth. Position is a pre-requisite for everything else. Ignore it at your peril.  

Bottom line

Here are four questions that should be on every CEO’s agenda:

• Am I focused on portions of the business landscape that are concentrating or fragmenting?
• Am I participating in ecosystems that will help me to amplify the value that I am delivering to the market?
• Am I sufficiently focused on the (few) core competencies that will drive competitive success?
• Am I doing everything I can to accelerate and scale learning so that I won’t be blindsided in an exponential world?

For a lot more insight into why these questions matter and into approaches to addressing these questions, please see our working paper available here.

A 21st Century Global Declaration of Independence

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for individuals to dissolve the institutional bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all individuals are created equal and are endowed with the right to be able to achieve as much of their potential as possible. History, despite periodic setbacks, has been marked by a rapidly accelerating trend towards providing individuals and communities with more and more opportunity to achieve that potential.

We find ourselves now at a crossroads in history. The institutions – commercial, educational, political and civic – that we created in an earlier era in an effort to expand our potential have now become increasingly significant barriers to progress. It is not surprising that our trust in these institutions is plummeting around the world. We see so much opportunity and yet the institutions that are supposed to be helping us are increasingly standing in our way.

In response to this impasse, we are coming together around the world to build a new set of institutional platforms that will help to establish our independence from the institutions of the past. These new institutions bear little resemblance to the institutions they are designed to replace, and they are extraordinarily diverse, but they share a set of common characteristics:

Goals

• They seek to draw out of each of us more of our true potential

• They actively seek to help us connect with our passion and view passion as a key to unlocking increasing opportunity, rather than viewing it with suspicion as something that is unpredictable and resists “getting with the program”

• They seek to connect us in richer and more diverse ways with others – both inside and outside the institution – who can help us to pursue our passion and to achieve more of our potential

Approaches

• They embrace diversity in all of its manifestations and create the conditions for productive friction by challenging us with aggressive performance goals so that this diversity can lead to more creative outcomes

• They nurture the feminine archetype that resides in all of us and encourage us to shed the masculine archetype that has driven our institutions to date

• They create environments where we can be vulnerable and focus on important questions, rather than pretending to always have the right answers

• They encourage us individually and collectively to experiment, tinker and innovate in coming up with new, innovative approaches to the problems and opportunities we see ahead

• They find ways to manage risk so that the consequences of failure are contained, thereby encouraging us to experiment with new and better approaches

• They encourage us to create – and reward these creations with social capital that becomes more and more meaningful relative to financial capital

• They focus on building reputation mechanisms that both recognize creative achievements and contributions and provide a way for others who share our interests to more effectively find and connect with us

Organization

• They adopt modular and loosely coupled approaches to organizing activity to provide the maximum space for creativity and innovation in all parts of the institution

• They decentralize and federate decision-making so that we each have much more ability to shape our local institutional environments

• They focus explicitly and aggressively on building and participating in ever expanding ecosystems of institutions and individuals that can help to leverage their own resources and help everyone to learn faster by working together

Bottom line, these institutions are designed around individuals – to help the people within them and around them to flourish. This stands in sharp contrast to our existing institutions that are designed around standardized tasks and that demand we conform to the institutional “boxes” that have been assigned to us.

We have no desire to confront existing institutions head on. We have no desire to engage in battle unless existing institutions seek to undermine or destroy the new institutional platforms that we are building. We prefer instead to focus on building parallel institutions on the edge of existing institutions and strengthening them to the point where our tired, old institutions will have no choice but to retreat into the dustbin of history.

But, just to be clear, we are declaring our independence from existing institutions. We have too much to lose if we remain prisoners of the outdated institutions that surround us.

The Disruption Debate – What’s Missing?

I admit that I’m mystified by Jill Lepore’s article in the New Yorker attacking Clayton Christensen and his theory of disruptive innovation. Not only does it have a meanness that isn’t warranted, but it leaves the reader with an unanswered question: if Clay's theories are not helpful (and I still believe they are), how do we explain the cascading disruptions that are playing out in markets and industries around the world?

Some of the commentators may be right: perhaps this article is better read as the most recent manifestation of the cultural conflict between the humanities-driven East and the technology-driven West.  The irony here is that the conflict is specifically between two professors at Harvard University – one based on the east coast of the Charles River and the other based on the west coast of the Charles River.

Clay Christensen has offered a rebuttal of sorts in an interview here. He does a good job of responding to some of the specific factual issues in his case studies highlighted by Jill Lepore and emphasizes that he continues to evolve his theory of disruptive innovation based on new research. But perhaps his best question is why she didn’t simply call him up or walk down the street to visit him before writing the attack to see if he might be able to clarify his position and his fact base.

I want to step back and use this controversy to underscore some key points that have been largely ignored in the recent discussion.

The systemic rise of disruption

First, while Jill Lepore might have issues with Clay’s specific theory and some of his case studies, she seems unwilling to acknowledge one basic fact of life: disruption is occurring with increasing frequency in the business world. Whether it is good or bad, it is happening and becoming increasingly widespread.

For the purpose of this posting, let me define disruption simply as the sudden demise of leaders or incumbents in particular markets or arenas. This demise is typically brought about by one or more players adopting a different approach to a market or arena that represents a significant challenge to the established position of existing participants. Disruptions turn the assets of incumbents into potentially life-threatening liabilities.

We all know the iconic cases of disruption casualties, including such large and well-known leaders as Kodak, Borders, Digital Equipment Corporation. But those are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s mounting evidence that disruption is spreading.

One of the issues with a case study approach is that it obscures the more fundamental and systemic trends and patterns that are playing out around us. When we pull back from individual stories and scan the world around us, it becomes clear that something very profound is happening – and it's largely escaped notice.

One of the metrics in our Shift Index looks at what economists call topple rate – the rate at which leaders fall out of their leadership position. In this case, we focused on the rate at which public US companies in the top quartile of return on assets performance fall out of this leadership position. Between 1965 and 2012, the topple rate increased by 40%.

OK, but the skeptic might reply that this is only about financial performance. Another more significant measure of fall from leadership position is provided by my old colleague and mentor, Dick Foster, who looked at the average lifespan of companies on the S&P 500.  In 1937, at the height of the Great Depression and certainly a time of great turmoil, a company on the S&P 500 had an average lifespan of 75 years.  By 2011, that lifespan had dropped to 18 years – a decline in lifespan of almost 75%.  At the same time that humans are significantly increasing their lifespan, large companies have been heading rapidly in the opposite direction.

So, the bottom line is that leaders are toppling with much greater frequency. Sure, some of that toppling may be the result of incompetence or mistakes made by senior management but, to explain away these trends, one would have to believe that management is becoming significantly more incompetent over time.

It's also clear that some of the toppling is the result of the natural process of market competition. As Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, markets are a powerful engine for "creative destruction" – they invite competitors with a better idea or a better approach to come in and challenge incumbents. It happens all the time. But the key question on the table from this more systemic view of disruption is: why is it increasing so dramatically over a long period of decades?

This is where I found Jill Lepore’s essay most wanting.  It’s easy to criticize an existing theory, but even assuming that this one doesn’t work (which I don’t), what’s the alternative? What’s going on? Jill Lepore certainly doesn’t venture an alternative theory and she clearly believes that the phenomenon of disruption is far too over-hyped. Without rushing to the defense of the disruption evangelists, I would suggest that she should have done more to at least acknowledge there is a disturbing trend here that needs to be explained. One gets the distinct impression that she believes that disruption is not all that significant

Forces at work in the Big Shift

So, what’s going on here? Based on the work that we’ve done on the Big Shift, let me suggest that the trend towards increasing disruption is a result of the convergence of two powerful forces that are playing out on a global scale.  First, we have the advent of digital technology as a disruptive force.

Yes, we've had major technology disruptions in the past – think of the steam engine, electricity and the telephone. But there’s one key difference that helps to explain a sustained and increasing pattern of disruption today.

In all those prior technology disruptions, we saw a dramatic burst of innovation in the core technology followed by a rapid stabilization with only modest incremental improvements in price/performance afterwards. Then one saw a burst of innovation at the infrastructure level in terms of thinking about how to most effectively deliver that technology to the broader economy and society – think for example of the insight that electricity could be more effectively generated in centralized facilities rather than on the premise of the user.  But once again, that was followed by rapid stabilization in terms of infrastructure deployment, giving firms an opportunity to think through how to most effectively harness this technology in their business.

Digital technology is different – in fact, it’s unprecedented in human history.  It’s the first technology that has demonstrated sustained exponential improvement in price/performance over an extended period of time and continuing into the foreseeable future (based on interviews with scientists and technologists pushing the boundaries of this technology).  

So, there’s no stabilization in the core technology components of computing, storage and bandwidth. As a result, there’s no stabilization in infrastructure – cloud computing is simply the most recent manifestation of this infrastructure and it certainly won't be the last.  And therefore there’s no stabilization in terms of how companies can use this technology to create and capture value.

But there’s more. This exponentially improving digital technology is spilling over into adjacent technologies, catalyzing similar waves of disruption in diverse arenas like 3D printing of physical objects, biosynthesis of living tissue, robotics and automobiles, just to name a few. The advent of exponentially improving technologies in an expanding array of markets and industries only increases the potential for disruption. We’ve explored this expansion of exponential technologies in a working paper here.

And this is just one of the forces at work.  There’s a second force at work as well – a long-term shift in public policy on a global basis towards freer movement of people, goods, money and ideas across geographic and industry boundaries.  Certainly this has unfolded at a different pace in different geographies and industries, but if one steps back and looks at the period from World War II to today, the trend is clear and significant.

Now, I will grant that this second force is a wild card.  There’s nothing to guarantee that this force will continue to play out in the direction of further economic liberalization.  In fact, there’s a growing risk that there will be a significant public policy backlash.  Incumbent players, whether they are taxi cab drivers in New York or global multinational companies facing disruptive attackers, will mobilize in an effort to use regulation and taxation to erect barriers and protect their positions from attack. While I acknowledge this risk, I'm an optimist and I believe that ultimately such protectionist efforts will be undermined by increasingly powerful consumers and by global technology infrastructures that will make public policy barriers difficult to enforce.

But, for the moment, these two forces – exponentially improving technology and economic liberalization – are combining to create environments that are increasingly vulnerable to disruption. In economic terms, they are doing two things.  First, they are systematically and substantially reducing barriers to entry and barriers to movement on a global scale. Second, exponentially improving technology is offering untapped capabilities that can be a catalyst to fundamentally re-think business models and institutional arrangements.

Bottom line, they are catalyzing more opportunity for players to adopt new approaches that can be highly disruptive on three levels:

• The approaches render obsolete a significant part of the existing assets/installed base of incumbents
• The approaches cannot be effectively addressed without significantly cannibalizing existing revenue/profit streams of incumbents
• The approaches are driven by a fundamentally different set of assumptions regarding the drivers of value creation/capture relative to the assumptions that have driven the success of the current incumbents – they challenge the mindsets/mental models of the incumbents

And, because they are reducing barriers to entry and movement, they are increasing both the motivation and ability of players to pursue these disruptive approaches.

So, at a macro level, I'd suggest that these forces help to explain why we are experiencing more frequent and widespread disruptions on a global scale. (And, by the way, while my focus here has been on companies, I believe that all institutions are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disruption as a result of these forces).

Some open questions

This perspective of course leaves a lot of open questions.  For example, can we predict where and when specific disruptions will play out? I for one don't believe that such predictions are possible but I suspect that we can better understand specific patterns of disruption that are likely to play out and, as a result, better anticipate which markets or industries might be most vulnerable to certain patterns of disruption. In fact, the Center for the Edge is about to embark on a research initiative in this area and I invite any of you who find this interesting to connect and contribute.

Another question is what incumbent players can do to more effectively respond to these disruptive approaches (short of resorting to regulation and other public policy measures). This is a topic for a much longer post. While I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers to this, I believe that one key requirement for incumbent players is to find ways to expand the horizons of their leadership team beyond the next quarter or next year and to challenge on a sustained basis the key assumptions, often unstated, that they bring to the table regarding what is required for business success. And, perhaps most basic of all, they need to acknowledge the growing force of disruption and resist the temptation to dismiss or deny that it exists.

The Cumulative Power of Narrative

Narratives have great power, but their power increases dramatically when building on other narratives.

What does that mean in practice? It means that we need to be thoughtful and deliberately make choices about where we choose to pursue our narratives. Context and location are critical to enhancing the power of narrative.

I’ve made a distinction between stories and narratives here and here. Briefly, I’ve suggested that stories are self-contained (they have a beginning, middle and resolution) and they're about the story teller or some other people, they're not about the listener.  In contrast, narratives are open-ended, they are yet to be resolved and their resolution depends upon the choices and actions of the listener.  As a result, they're a powerful call to action, emphasizing the agency that we all have to make a difference.

I’ve also suggested that narratives exist at three distinct levels – personal, institutional and social. Most recently, I’ve been exploring the power of personal narrative here and here.

Start with your personal narrative

Now, let's pull back and explore how these three levels of narratives can be connected to achieve even more impact. We need to start by reflecting on and refining our own narrative.  Few of us have taken the trouble to articulate our personal narrative, much less reflect on it.

Yet, if we look back on the major choices and actions in our lives, there is an implicit narrative, even if we weren'tt aware of it at the time. We owe it to ourselves to draw out that narrative and reflect on its usefulness in helping us to have the kind of impact we want in the world. 

Many of our narratives are limiting or even self-destructive. We have an opportunity to achieve much more of our potential if we evolve more effective narratives that tap into what we are really trying to achieve and that more productively engage others in helping us to achieve greater impact. It doesn’t matter where we are; if our narrative is limiting, we won’t be able to take full advantage of the resources that our environment provides.

But, if we are pursuing a more effective narrative, then location and context can make a big difference. Remember, narratives are ultimately a call to action for the people around us.  If the people around us are pursuing very different, and perhaps even contradictory narratives, we’ll be much less effective than if we can connect with people who are pursuing complementary narratives.  Yes, I know, digital networks can help to connect us, wherever we’re located, but I continue to believe that face to face relationships in physical space are ultimately the most powerful form of connections.

So, what should we do? Well, once we’ve reflected on our existing narrative and determined what personal narrative would have the greatest ability to achieve more of our potential, perhaps we should start reflecting on relevant institutional and social narratives.  I mean, start taking a hard look at the narratives of the institutions and societies where you are currently spending your time.  Are they consistent with the personal narrative you're seeking to pursue? Do they offer the potential to amplify the impact of your personal narrative? Or, do they undermine and subvert the personal narrative you're pursuing?

Explore relevant social narratives

The best place to start is with relevant social narratives. What city or region do you live in?  What's the narrative of that city or region? How does it map to your personal narrative? If it’s not consistent with your narrative, perhaps you might consider moving to a city or region that more closely maps to your narrative.  Then you’ll be more likely to find and connect with people who can support and amplify your personal narrative.  If the narrative of the city or region you live in is hostile to, or incompatible with, your personal narrative, you’ll find yourself constantly swimming upstream and drained by the effort, rather than energized.

And, by the way, if you don’t live in a city, perhaps you should consider moving to a city with a compatible narrative.  As I’ve indicated elsewhere, cities can be a powerful accelerator of learning, especially if the city has a narrative that's consistent with your personal narrative. Unless your personal narrative requires you to live in a rural area, you’re much more likely to be successful in pursuing your personal narrative if you live in a city.

Take a hard look at relevant institutional narratives

Once you’ve resolved that, the next question is what institution are you most closely affiliated with?  If you’re working as part of a larger group, does the company or group you work with have an institutional narrative that supports and amplifies your narrative?  If not, you’re likely to encounter the same issues I mentioned earlier with urban or regional narratives. You’ll be far more successful in pursuing your personal narrative if you're located in a city/region and organization that supports your personal narrative. 

I know we don’t always have the luxury of being able to make choices on these two fronts, but I’ve become convinced that we'd be well advised to make sacrifices when possible to get better alignment between our personal narratives and the urban/regional and institutional narratives around us. At a minimum, we should explore the potential to join together with others in the relevant institutions to evolve the insititutional narrative in a direction that's more compatible with our personal narrative.

My journey to Silicon Valley

How does this work in practice? Let me share a bit of my personal journey. I’ve discussed the evolution of my personal narrative here and here. As I’ve indicated, my personal narrative has evolved to something like: “let’s overcome our fear and feel the excitement that comes from exploring new frontiers on the edge together so that we can provide others with platforms to achieve more of their potential.” 

I grew up outside the U.S., living in a different country virtually every year, so I had no strong roots anywhere.  I went to college in the northeastern part of the US and England, two areas that are not particularly known as edgy.  But, during a summer in college, I had the good fortune to spend a summer in the San Francisco Bay area. I fell in love with the area immediately.  I knew this was the area where I was meant to live.

It took me about 15 years to finally make the move to this area but, once I did, there was no looking back.  Even though I had not yet started the process of articulating and evolving my narrative, I instinctively knew that this was an area full of edge frontiers to be explored. I was deeply moved by how friendly people were out here and how willing they were to connect and support each other in exploring frontiers together.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay area with a couple of friends to do a start-up in the computer industry.  At the time, I knew nothing about computers but I learned quickly by diving into the deep end of the pool.  It was an intense and deep immersion into an exciting frontier. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that this technology was an extraordinary platform to help all of us achieve more of our potential.

It was my first exposure to Silicon Valley, a region that has grown and evolved over decades, driven by a compelling narrative: “for the first time, we are in possession of a set of exponential technologies that have the potential to change the world but it won’t happen on its own.  Will you join us so that we can explore this digital frontier and change the world together?”   It has drawn people from all over the world who share a commitment to changing the world through technology innovation. It drew me and has held me captive for almost 35 years. 

I couldn’t imagine a more perfect alignment with my evolving personal narrative.  Over the years, I’ve met a dazzling array of people who, in one form or another, have joined me in exploring some very exciting frontiers on the edge of strategy and technology.

My journey through institutions

Over this exciting time in Silicon Valley, I've participated in many institutions, including start-ups, senior executive positions in tech companies and leading consulting firms.  Although it wasn’t explicit at the time, I've moved from one institution to another when I felt there would be an opportunity to have more impact on the edge frontiers that I was exploring. In each case, an institution with a complementary narrative provided me with far more leverage than I ever could have achieved on my own.  When our narratives started to diverge, I knew it was time to move on.

For an extended period of time, I was on my own, pursuing strategy consulting and business research as a free agent.  It was a wonderful and very rewarding time, but I missed the leverage that I achieved when I was able to participate in an institution that had a complementary narrative. 

When I was approached by Deloitte eight years ago to set up an independent research center that came to be known as the Center for the Edge, I saw an opportunity to build an institution with a narrative that would reinforce and leverage my personal narrative.  I’ve been able to gather a team of extraordinary people who have deeply bought in to our institutional narrative and who work together every day to achieve the opportunity that we see by engaging others in our journey.

One could say that I’ve been very lucky – serendipity has certainly played an important role in my life. But, on reflection, I would say that ny effort to make my own narrative explicit and then to evolve it in a more promising direction also played a significant role.  And, even more importantly, I’ve sought and found alignment between my personal narrative and relevant institutional and social narratives.

When these three levels of narratives are aligned, small moves smartly made can indeed set very big things in motion.  On the other hand, when these three levels of narratives are not aligned, even heroic efforts may only achieve marginal impact.

Bottom line

Don’t just focus on your personal narrative. Be aggressive in assessing the narratives of the institutions and cities/regions where you're most active. 

Start by asking the questions that I posed in a previous posting regarding your personal narrative:

• Given the choices I've made and the actions I've taken throughout my life, what's the personal narrative that has led me down this path?
• Is this personal narrative one that can help me to achieve the things that I really want to achieve or is it inhibiting me in some significant ways?
• How could others help me to achieve even more impact and what's in it for them?
• What specific choices can I make and what actions can I take in the next day, week and month that will start to evolve my narrative in ways that will help me to achieve more of my true potential?

Once you’ve addressed these questions, then ask a similar set of questions for relevant institutions and and cities/regions where you're most active:

• What narratives emerge from the choices and actions of these entities over their relevant history?
• Are these narratives consistent with the personal narrative I would like to evolve for myself?
• If they are not consistent with the personal narrative I'm seeking pursue, what can I do to shift towards institutions and cities/regions that more closely align with my personal narrative?

Personal Narratives (The Sequel) – Unpacking and Tapping Into Potential

In my last posting, I shared the evolution of my personal narrative to illustrate how personal narratives can both confine and expand our horizons.

A number of you reached out to me and questioned whether I was really talking about a narrative or simply a belief about how others could support me in achieving impact.  Once again, as in my early discussion of corporate narratives, I’m guilty of abbreviation in a way that can mislead.

Let me unpack my early personal narrative statement into something that maps more clearly to a narrative structure while still leaving it open-ended and ultimately calling the listener to action (for the distinction between a story and narrative, see my early post here).

As you may recall, I framed my early personal narrative as follows:  “I’m here to help you with my mind.” Now, as presented, it doesn’t sound much like a narrative.  But let’s dive into this in more detail and flesh out the narrative lurking underneath that statement.

The deeper narrative

It all began in my early childhood when my first memories were of my mother’s tirades of anger. She said many things in anger, but the ones that stood out most in my memory were: “You’re such a burden – I wish you had never been born” and “You have no consideration of me – all you care about is yourself.”

As you might imagine, those words were deeply painful. My only escape was to retreat into my room and try to block out her yelling by immersing myself in a book that would take me to a distant place, leaving my emotions behind and seeking refuge in the world of the mind and imagination.

My father was often away. Even when he was there, he was a mild-mannered man and would go into his study, avoiding my mother’s wrath. The message to me was clear: I was abandoned by both of my parents.

After each tirade, I would resolve to be better. I tried as hard as I could to be a good boy and to be more attentive to my mother’s needs.  But nothing seemed to work. Her rage would be triggered by small, unexpected things, things that I couldn't anticipate or control. When I first heard the term “walking on eggshells”, I knew immediately what it meant.

The only thing that seemed to win praise from my mother was my academic accomplishment. Both my mother and father were the first in their family to go to college (not to mention graduate school) and they both respected academic achievement.

So, as I grew older, I channeled a lot of effort into accumulating good grades and degrees. I began to write, both because that also won praise from my parents and because it was a way for me to express myself without having to engage in face to face interactions with people (because, God knows, I would possibly trigger rage from others).

When I was in fourth grade, I took an aptitude test and the results came back saying that I should either be a priest or a social worker.  At the time, I dismissed these results, since I had no particular religious inclination or desire to work with the emotionally troubled or the poor. But, as I look back, I now realize that the aptitude test might have been far more insightful than I thought at the time.

I ended up spending most of my career as a management consultant.  While one might not immediately associate management consultants with priests or social workers, they do share one thing in common.  They’re all driven by a desire to help people.  They’re all focused on the needs of others, rather than one’s own needs. As a management consultant, you’re taught from the first day that the client’s needs come first, that everything else is secondary. Your goal is to understand their needs and then do whatever you can to address their needs.

The key lesson that I took from my childhood was that my needs did not matter.  It was all about seeing and serving the needs of others. If I could only do that, I might win the respect and love of those around me. 

So, what’s your role in my life? How can you help me to achieve more of my potential? Tell me what you need and I’ll do anything I can to satisfy those needs, especially if they involve intelligence and analytic skills, because that’s something that I can provide. Will you do that? My ability to grow and to develop as a person hinges on that.

Now, that’s a narrative.  It has a dramatic arc involving encounters with challenges and obstacles and finding a way forward, but the outcome is open-ended. It’s not resolved and the resolution hinges on the choices and actions that you as the listener can take. What will you do? Will you help to shape the outcome?

The potential of personal narratives

As I indicated in my last posting, personal narratives can be very limiting and confining. They can shape powerful prisons offering little opportunity for escape. In a world of mounting performance pressure, I fear that most of us are falling into personal narratives that are dysfunctional and don’t serve us well.

But, by making these personal narratives explicit, reflecting on them and then making choices to craft a new narrative, we can evolve personal narratives that amplify our potential for impact. In my previous post, I shared some of my own experience in evolving my personal narrative, but the key first step was to identify my existing narrative.

If we get them right, what can personal narratives do? Effective personal narratives can help us to focus, increase leverage and accelerate learning.

Focus. In a world of mounting performance pressure, we all have a natural tendency to shrink our time horizons and fall into a reactive mode – scrambling to respond to the latest development and spreading ourselves way too thinly across too many things. Personal narratives are forward looking – they draw us out of the past and the present and focus us on the opportunities ahead. They typically define a domain where we aspire to have greater impact over time and give us an ability to prioritize all those short-term calls for our attention. By asking “what am I here to do?” personal narratives also foster a sense of agency. They focus us not just on beliefs, but actions that we must take.

Leverage. In a world of mounting performance pressure, if all we do is rely on ourselves, we are likely to feel increasing stress and diminishing impact. One of the keys to success is finding ways to engage and motivate others to help us achieve even more impact.  Personal narratives help us to connect more effectively with others by being clear both about what we are trying to accomplish and where and how others can help us. 

Accelerate. In a world of mounting performance pressure, fear tends to prevail. We jealously protect what we already know and we’re often unwilling to take the risks required to learn faster.  By bringing us together with others around inspiring opportunities for impact, we create fertile conditions for much more rapid learning and performance improvement. We are more likely to take on challenging quests together.

Personal narratives can also play a significant role in building trust with others, because they prompt us to articulate what we are still trying to accomplish and where we need help – in other words, they express our vulnerability. Trust based relationships are central to accelerating learning.  All of this is key to accelerating progress.  As we move from a linear world to an exponential world, acceleration is ultimately a key requirement for success. We certainly can’t afford to stand still and even linear progress is insufficient.

Personal narratives and passion

Now, for those of you who have been following my other writing, you might have noticed an interesting parallel.  The three elements of focus, leverage and accelerate map very conveniently to the three attributes of passion of the explorer – long-term commitment to a domain, connecting disposition and questing disposition.  Personal narratives can become a powerful catalyst to tapping into and amplifying the passion that resides within all of us. If you’re interested in the connection between narrative and passion, I’ve written more here.

Personal narratives and personal brands

I can’t resist. Let me also take a minute to differentiate personal narrative from one of the business buzzwords of the day – personal brand (which I’ve written about here).  Personal brand is all about communicating your accomplishments and strengths, packaging them in a powerful way so that we can influence others. Personal narrative, in sharp contrast, shifts the focus from what you have done to what you want to do, but have not yet done. It also highlights your need for help from others. In many respects, it’s the opposite of the notion of a personal brand, but ultimately far more powerful and satisfying.

Bottom line

Personal narratives shape our lives in powerful, yet often unseen, ways. We rarely take the effort to make these narratives explicit, much less reflect on them. We owe it to ourselves (and to others) to do this. Try answering the four questions that I offered at the end of my last post. You might be surprised by what you discover.

Personal Narratives: Insight and Impact

We all have a personal narrative, even though few of us have made the effort to articulate it.  That’s a shame because our personal narrative can be a source of deep insight as well as a great way to amplify impact. Done right, they can be a powerful weapon in helping us to escape from the dark side of technology.

I’ve written a lot about narratives, for example, here and here.  Narratives are different from stories in that they’re open-ended (they don’t yet have a resolution) and they’re ultimately about the people you’re talking to, not about you, the story teller, or some other people. Narratives are powerful because they are ultimately a call to action – they help people to see how they can have greater impact.

There are social narratives and institutional narratives, but we each have a personal narrative as well. At the end of the day, that’s the narrative that really counts.  It defines how we connect with the world and where and how we can have impact.

The elements of a personal narrative

So, what’s a personal narrative? Like all narratives, it ultimately answers three questions:

• Why am I here?
• What can I accomplish?
• What can you do to help me accomplish that?

The key is that final question – it defines how you will connect with people and represents a call to action for them.

Like I said, few of us have taken the trouble to articulate our personal narrative, even though we all have one. It’s usually an implicit narrative that can be made explicit by reflecting on the choices we have made and the actions we have taken throughout our lives. Even though our lives are usually very complex and often involve what appear to be very diverse activities and relationships, there's usually a thread running through all of that, a thread that, when made visible, can be very revealing.

Making our narrative explicit can yield a lot of insight about who we have been and gives us a chance to reflect on whether it is who we really want to be.

My early personal narrative

Take my own personal narrative as an example.  I grew up in a dysfunctional family environment and it shaped a powerful narrative, one that helped me to survive that childhood but one that became more and more limiting over time.

My early narrative could be summarized as “I’m here to help you with my mind.”

This narrative made me a servant of others.  The idea that others could help me was completely foreign to me – I was isolated in an environment where I was repeatedly told what a burden I was. No, my role was to help others, to be very attentive to what the needs of others were and to respond quickly and effectively in addressing those needs.  My needs were irrelevant.

Also, my childhood experiences had taught me that emotions were very dangerous and destructive. I was exposed on a daily basis to the deep anger of my mother. My only escape was into the refuge of books where I could engage in the world of the mind, and leave all those troubling emotions behind me.

So, it was natural that, in seeking how to help others, I would focus on harnessing my mind and intellect, rather than trying to engage with people on an emotional level.  It led me to focus on cultivating my mind – I excelled in school (even though I rarely went to class) and I stayed in school for a very long time (ultimately collecting my final degrees at age 28).

I also channeled a lot of my helpfulness to others in the form of writing to express ideas and insights that could be used by others. Writing was a particularly appealing way to help because it allowed me to avoid direct contact with people and kept me safely isolated behind my desk.

In my personal relationships, I was the caregiver (the father figure), taking care of every need of my partner and rarely, if ever, expressing my own needs, much less asking for help.  I would use my intellect to earn a good living so that I could be an even better caregiver.

I wasn't consciously aware of the narrative that was shaping my life, but it had a profound effect on me. All my major choices and actions in my early life could be explained in terms of this narrative.

My evolving personal narrative

The process of making this narrative explicit had a powerful impact.  It made me aware of how limiting and confining this narrative had been on my life.  It also made me aware that there was another part of me that was struggling to express itself, a part that was much richer and ultimately far more rewarding.

So I began to craft a new narrative, one that I'm continuing to evolve, but one that is far more satisfying. It goes something like this: “let’s overcome our fear and feel the excitement that comes from exploring new frontiers on the edge together so that we can provide others with platforms to achieve more of their potential.”

It starts with acknowledging fear, an emotion that had a profound impact on me as a child and one that still haunts me in so many ways.  But then it quickly shifts to the opportunity for excitement, something that I’ve increasingly felt as I’ve found ways to let go of my fear, especially by coming together with others who share my quests on the edge.

Now I’m not alone, but I’m inviting others to join me and share the excitement of exploration. By coming together we can more effectively overcome our fears and learn faster than we ever could on our own. Emotions, both negative and positive, are now front and center in my narrative.

There’s still a component of helping others, but now it’s a little more nuanced. Rather than simply helping others who are passive, it’s about helping others to take more initiative to grow and achieve more of their potential. Once again, together we can achieve far more than we ever could on our own.

Notice that, while the narrative is deeply personal, it's very much focused on communicating to others where and how they can contribute to my quest – and articulating what's in it for them. In fact, it now becomes our quest – we're coming together to accomplish something awesome.

Escaping the prison of limiting personal narratives

My early personal narrative was clearly shaped by my unique circumstances, but I’ve come to believe that this kind of limiting, perhaps even dysfunctional, personal narrative isn't unusual.

In fact, I believe that most of us, in a world of mounting performance pressure, have evolved personal narratives that don't serve us well.  Sure, they represent an understandable reaction to the pressures around us, but they dramatically narrow our ability to achieve our full potential. 

Only by making them explicit and reflecting on them will we be able to assess whether they serve our true needs and potentially evolve much higher impact narratives.

Bottom line

Here are four questions to ask yourself:

• Given the choices I've made and the actions I've taken throughout my life, what's the personal narrative that has led me down this path?
• Is this personal narrative one that can help me to achieve the things that I really want to achieve or is it inhibiting me in some significant ways?
• How could others help me to achieve even more impact and what's in it for them?
• What specific choices can I make and what actions can I take in the next day, week and month that will start to evolve my narrative in ways that will help me to achieve more of my true potential?

The journey shaped by these questions could be a very uncomfortable one, but it's a journey that could help us to become much more of who we really were meant to be.

Expanding Horizons Through Corporate Narratives

I’ve become increasingly interested in the role that corporate narratives can play in driving business success in more competitive markets – something that I've written about here and here.  While many people find the concept of corporate narratives interesting, they often struggle with what a narrative might look like for their company.

This isn’t surprising given how few effective corporate narratives there are out there. In fact, I’ve only found two that really serve as good examples of corporate narratives – the narratives developed by Apple and Nike.

The defining elements of a narrative

As many will recall from my previous writing, I view narratives as having two key attributes.  First, they’re open-ended – there’s no resolution yet, it’s all to be determined.  Second, narratives are about the intended audience, not the person or entity presenting the narrative.  In fact, the resolution of the narrative hinges upon the choices and actions yet to be taken by the audience – the resolution is up to them.

This is probably the most difficult element of narratives for executives to internalize.  There’s a natural tendency to think about corporate “narratives” that talk about the humble beginnings of the company, the obstacles it confronted, the amazing things it’s achieved and the great opportunities ahead. That’s an open-ended story about the company, but it’s not a narrative that identifies opportunities for the people outside the company to pursue on their own.

At their most fundamental level, narratives answer three questions:

• Why are we here?

• What can we accomplish?

• How should we connect in order to accomplish this?

To be clear, the “we” in these questions is primarily about the people the narrative is trying to reach, not the individual or company crafting the narrative, although of course the company can play a role in helping those people to accomplish what they were meant to accomplish.

So, what might some corporate narratives look like?  Purely as hypothetical examples, let me offer some ideas for what might work as narratives for companies in different industries.

A hypothetical narrative for a healthcare provider

Throughout history we’ve focused on treating disease – it’s been a reactive proposition. We wait until we get sick and then we seek out help to get the illness treated and get well again. But we’re on the cusp of a very big shift. We are now developing the technology and the science that will allow us to monitor our physical condition in real-time and give us much greater insight into what promotes our individual health and well-being through an expanding array of mobile digital devices. We can now take timely action to further improve our condition.

That action might be on our own or in collaboration with a growing array of wellness providers specializing in different dimensions of wellness. The exciting opportunity now is to tailor our wellness approaches to our unique individual circumstances and to evolve those wellness approaches as our circumstances change.

Of course, we’re all going to get sick at some point in our lives, but we’ll be in a lot better position to recover faster with fewer side effects if we’ve invested the time and effort to get to know our body when it is healthy and understand more deeply what it requires to be healthy.  Rather than simply being yet another patient with a particular disease, we now become unique individuals with distinctive requirements to achieve and maintain health.

None of this is a given.  It requires commitment and effort from each of us, but by working together we can achieve and sustain even higher levels of wellness. While we each are unique, we can begin to see patterns in terms of what drives wellness and more rapid recovery from illness. We can also help to strengthen our individual commitment by gaining reinforcement from others who are similarly motivated. This is just a high level summary of what a narrative might look like for a healthcare provider. Such a narrative might be captured by the slogan “Focus on wellness, rather than illness.”

A hypothetical narrative for a bank

For more than a century, our lives followed a similar script. We went to school to get a good job that would last a lifetime. It might not be the most satisfying work, but it would provide us with a reliable paycheck to support ourselves and our loved ones. We would then reap a nice pension for our efforts that would allow us to play golf or bridge with others into our (regrettably short) golden years.

But that’s all changing now. As science and medicine help us to remain healthier longer, we now have for the first time an opportunity to craft another chapter to our life, one that might last almost as long as our first career. We have a chance to re-orient our life around a passion that makes a larger and larger difference in the world around us – and we can have an even greater impact by connecting with others who share our passion. To take advantage of this new opportunity, we’ll need to think and plan ahead to make sure that our financial resources are sufficient. 

But that’s not all.  Why wait for retirement? Why settle for collecting a paycheck and being stressed by the uninteresting work we do? Digital technology is systematically reducing barriers to entry in market after market. We saw the effects first in media businesses like film making and writing. But digital technology is spreading and transforming other technologies like manufacturing technologies and medical technologies, making it easier and easier for someone with a passion to gain access to the means of production and start new businesses.

Given these new developments, why don’t we step back now and determine what we’re really passionate about and in the next few years craft a path that allows us to integrate our passion and our profession?  Why wait until retirement to pursue something we’re really passionate about? Why not find others we can connect with today to help integrate our passion and profession?

This is an exciting opportunity but it's not going to happen automatically or easily. To take advantage of it, we need to carefully assess the resources we have and find ways to augment those resources so that we’ll have more of a cushion as we go through a potentially challenging shift in jobs, and perhaps even start our own business.  Such a narrative might be captured by the slogan “Pursue your passion”

A hypothetical narrative for a battery vendor

OK, but healthcare providers and banks naturally have the potential to address some larger and more motivating opportunities. What about companies involved in more mundane activities or products? Let’s take the example of a company that sells a very mundane item like batteries.  What might their narrative look like?

Well, their narrative might begin by observing that throughout history we’ve been prisoners of our technology. From the earliest days when we settled down to grow crops through the industrial era, we were tied to the means of production. And it got worse over time. As electricity made its way into our lives, we became prisoners of our homes – if we wanted to watch a movie or listen to music, we could go only as far as the electrical cord plugged into the wall socket would allow.

But that’s all changing now.  We now have a growing opportunity to go anywhere anytime, to free ourselves of physical constraints and yet stay connected and be able to enjoy all the benefits and comforts of our home. As we can venture farther afield without compromising comfort or convenience, what might we accomplish?

We could enjoy a greater diversity of experience, learn faster and have an even greater impact on those around us. That’s the real opportunity – it’s an opportunity to take ourselves to a new level of impact, to make a difference that previously would have been impossible when we had to choose between staying tethered to an electrical outlet or dramatically expanding our freedom of movement.

Now, we can take everything with us, regardless of where we are. Instead of people coming to us, we can go to them and bring all of our resources (e.g., information and applications) with us to do whatever needs to be done. The ability to have much greater impact is now available.  Where and how will we choose to have that impact? Once again, we might be able to capture this rich narrative in a slogan – “Expand your horizons”

Narratives for companies in the business to business space

The examples I’ve given above are all in the consumer space because they’re easier for all of us to relate to, but there are equally powerful narrative opportunities in the business to business space.  In this domain, the narrative still speaks to people outside the company framing the narrative, but they are people in the context of their jobs.  Typically, the people to be addressed in these narratives are people who would use the products and services of the company offering the narrative. 

Just as in the consumer space, the challenge is to pull back from the narrow product or service we’re offering. We need to understand much more deeply the context of the people we’re trying to reach to be able to identify broader opportunities that might be available to these people in their work environment, opportunities that would motivate them to achieve even greater impact and, in the process, take their own companies to a new level. The goal is to excite them about the possibilities and help them to think and act in a much more powerful way.

What makes a strong corporate narrative?

Let’s pull back from these specific examples and reflect on the attributes of a strong corporate narrative.

• They align with powerful forces at work in the broader economy and society. They gain additional power by leveraging desires and capabilities that are emerging and shaped by forces that extend far beyond any individual company.

• They invite open-ended participation. They frame an opportunity for action and impact at a very high level, but leave enough room for individuals or small groups to be creative in figuring out what specific actions and impact might be achieved in specific contexts. By staying at a high level, narratives can evolve to accommodate changing circumstances.

• They are realistic about the challenges and obstacles that will confront the individual or small group as they pursue the opportunities. It’s a fine line but a strong narrative excites people about the opportunity while also alerting them to the challenges – it’s all part of the message that the opportunity is not a given or pre-determined. People will need to make an effort to achieve it.

• They present positive sum opportunities. What I mean by this is that strong narratives create incentives for people to come together to address the opportunity. If we’re in a zero sum world where either you win or I win, it is much more difficult for us to collaborate.  On the other hand, if we’re in a positive sum world where we can expand the total value created by working together, then we have much more motivation to seek each other out and collaborate.

• They invite participation at the outset with relatively low investment of time or effort and provide some tangible and relatively quick benefit from that effort.  This reduces barriers to entry and offers quick reinforcement of the benefits of participation which can then cascade into much more significant efforts. 

The competitive advantage created by corporate narratives

So, why does all of this matter?  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, corporate narratives offer some powerful benefits in an increasingly competitive global economy. They help to provide compelling differentiation and leverage by pulling people to us and building long-term relationships, but they also catalyze distributed innovation as the people we attract begin to venture out in pursuit of the opportunity we have framed.

They also have a central role in motivating the employees within the company. Even though narratives do not explicitly speak to them, they help the employees to understand how they can have an impact on people outside the company far beyond selling them more products and services.

Those who master the art of compelling narratives will have a much stronger competitive advantage than those who ignore this opportunity.

Bottom line

No matter what businesses our companies are in, they’ll derive a significant advantage by finding ways to craft a narrative that speaks to relevant people far beyond our companies.  There’s a much deeper question about how to craft a compelling narrative which I’ll save for a future posting.  Let me just caution for now that this isn’t something that can be handed over to a marketing department or a PR firm.  Powerful narratives emerge from sustained and widespread actions by the company that demonstrate the commitment of the company to act in ways that are consistent with the narrative.  A successful narrative therefore requires the deep understanding, commitment and engagement of the entire leadership of a company.

The Big Shift in Influence

Influence is becoming more and more challenging.  It’s hard enough to attract attention, much less retain it or use that attention to shape the behavior of others. And yet, in a world of scarce resources and mounting pressure, the ability to influence others becomes more and more central to the ability to set big things in motion.

In my last blog post, I talked about the increasing strategic importance of influence points for institutions.  Now, let’s shift focus and talk about the changing nature of influence at the individual level – how do we achieve more influence as individuals?

The old way

In the old days, it was simple and straightforward.  We built influence by having answers. The focus at that point was to master ways of communicating those answers so that we were able to persuade others that our answers were better than anyone else’s. We built influence by demonstrating strength, carefully crafting a presentation of our accomplishments and impact so that those answers we were trying to communicate became a lot more credible because we had a strong track record of being right in the past.  Finally, we built influence by becoming the hub of an ever-expanding network of like-minded people who embraced our answers and helped us to persuade others of the value of our answers.

Those days are increasingly behind us.  Sure, there are still some who are looking for reassurance and security. Those people may still be influenced by this conventional approach. But this is a very static approach to building influence in an increasingly dynamic world. Answers can be helpful but they only have a fixed value. And answers, no matter how good they are, tend to become obsolete at an accelerating rate.  As conditions evolve, those answers that only a little while ago seemed so compelling and helpful now begin to seem stale and worn.

The new way

In an exponential world, answers have rapidly diminishing value. The greatest value in this kind of environment comes from questions, questions that no one had even thought to ask but that help to focus attention and effort on promising but previously ignored areas. Questions invite a different and more powerful form of participation. It’s no longer just about spreading the word and persuading others.  It’s about inviting others to explore a new domain and help to generate new ideas and insights.

Framing the questions

In this context, not all questions are created equal.

• The questions that have the greatest potential to influence are broad ones that create space for many people across many different domains and disciplines to participate.
• They are questions where there’s a lot at stake, where enormous value and wealth can be generated by those who are most successful in generating insight.
• They are also deep ones that call for sustained effort over a long period of time to generate insight. They are the questions that will keep a growing number of people occupied for many, many years.
• But they are also questions that can be tackled without massive investment of funds and years of effort before any insight is generated. The best kinds of questions are ones where early “a-ha” moments can occur so that early participants in the questions can get positive reinforcement for their efforts and yet at the same time realize that there is so much more to be explored. 

Questions like these do many things.  They attract and excite a growing number of people who can see the opportunity for impact.  They spur the imagination since the territory is yet to be explored. They invite experimentation, tinkering, innovation and discussion as people strive to move beyond imagination to test potential approaches.

Vulnerability and trust

But questions do something else that’s absolutely vital for influence – they rapidly build trust with the person posing the questions. The person posing these kinds of questions has just done something very important – s/he has expressed vulnerability.  S/he has acknowledged there’s something really important that s/he doesn’t know and needs help to solve. 

The fact that the person posing the question does this from the outset invites all those who are attracted to the questions to do the same.  It’s OK to admit we don’t know something – in fact, it’s a pre-requisite to make progress.  Expressing this kind of vulnerability early on builds trust and provides a strong foundation for trust-based relationships. Rather than showing strength, the most effective way to build influence may now paradoxically be to show vulnerability.

This is important for a lot of reasons but let’s just focus on one: it enhances our ability to access the tacit knowledge that each participant brings to the question.  Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that exists in our heads and that we have a really hard time expressing to ourselves, much less to anyone else.  If we have trust-based relationships with others, we’re far more willing to make the effort and risk some embarrassment as we try to express this tacit knowledge. And, in new frontiers of exploration, that tacit knowledge is often the most valuable knowledge, containing far more insight than the stuff that’s already expressed in papers and books.

Mobilizing mesh networks

So, questions are really, really valuable in expanding influence. What are other mechanisms to build influence? In the past, as mentioned earlier, we were advised to aggressively build our networks of relationships, becoming a hub in a growing network of people who were persuaded, or at least could be persuaded, by the answers we were seeking to disseminate.

That kind of approach is less productive if we’re focused on new questions rather than answers. If the goal is to effectively explore and discover new insights, we need a different kind of network. We’d want to encourage much more of a mesh network where there’s a rich and complex set of relationships connecting all participants with each other. This kind of network increases the potential of all participants to connect with each other in unexpected and evolving ways as they embark on their exploration. We can become mobilizers, helping to draw in new people and creating environments where people can connect and explore an evolving agenda of questions.

If we insist on remaining the sole channel for all interactions within the network, we’ll soon become overwhelmed by the task. Very quickly, we’ll become a bottleneck to robust exploration of the terrain ahead. We’ll be far more successful in extending our influence if we create environments that encourage all participants to connect with each other and provide the mechanisms to facilitate both systematic search and unplanned serendipity. The most powerful networks would take the form of creation spaces that support the formation of tightly knit teams and then connect these teams in a broader space where they can seek out help from each other.

But what about the influence that comes from having privileged access to knowledge flows? Won’t we undermine that by moving away from hub and spoke networks to mesh networks? Not to worry, by posing the questions that excite and motivate everyone to embark on their exploration, we’ll still have privileged access to the knowledge flows occurring within the network.  Whenever someone comes up with an insight that they think is important, they’ll want to reach out and vet it with us. And if we continue to refine and evolve the questions as new insights become available, participants will continue to connect with us to get the most up to date framing of the questions that matter.

Influence in action – the Santa Fe Institute

OK, now this can all seem pretty abstract. Are there any examples of influence being generated through questions and mesh networks? There are many, but let me point to one that I am personally involved in.  It’s the Santa Fe Institute (SFI).  SFI was founded 30 years ago by a group of leading scientists, notably led by a chemist, George Cowan, and including David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, and Peter A. Carruthers.

They were all very prominent in their fields at the time but what brought them together was a set of questions about potential common themes regarding complex adaptive systems that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. They certainly didn’t have any answers, but the questions were exciting.  Were there patterns that could help us to better understand everything from sub-atomic particles to the universe, with the human brain and society thrown in the middle? How do new elements emerge within these systems? How do these systems evolve? What are the elements that make some of these systems more adaptable and resilient than others?

They decided to set up an institute to pursue these questions. But they were careful from the outset to think in terms of catalyzing and growing a network of inquiry.  Yes, they had a few resident researchers but they put much more emphasis on identifying and connecting with people from around the world and from many different disciplines – for example, archaeology, anthropology, biology, chemistry, economics, mathematics, physics, and sociology – who were intrigued by these questions. 

They created programs that helped to connect these people with each other and shared the research that these participants were pursuing. Early findings led to even more questions and SFI has evolved as an orchestrator of inquiry, expanding and evolving its network as the questions evolved. In the process, it has had influence far beyond its core staff, penetrating virtually every academic discipline. The influence also extended out into the business world as businesspeople began to explore how their firms and their markets might demonstrate the behavior of complex adaptive systems. What had begun as a few curious scientists meeting over lunch at Los Alamos has evolved into a highly influential global network of people excited and motivated by a common set of questions.

Bottom line

Influence can be amplified by passion and distributed learning. These in turn can set into motion powerful increasing returns dynamics where, the more people who join in, the faster everyone learns. Traditional approaches to influence are diminishing returns games where we have to work harder and longer to get that next increment of participants to embrace our answers.

By focusing on questions rather than answers, showing vulnerability in the process and helping to connect people together in ever richer mesh networks, we have an opportunity to exercise influence far beyond our initial domains or resources. We can draw out the potential that resides within all of us so that even modest resources can quickly cascade into movements with ever increasing impact.  Small moves, smartly made, can indeed set very big things in motion. 

Resist the temptation to fall back on conventional approaches to influence that were more suited to a linear world. Step out to a promising edge and see what questions surface. Use these questions as a catalyst to pull in others who are excited by the opportunity to pursue these questions. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish.

Next steps

Ask the following questions:

• What are the two or three questions that most excite me and that have the potential to excite others?

• What have I done to make others aware of these questions and the potential impact that they might have?

• How could I become even more effective in reaching out to and mobilizing others in exploring these questions?

• Are there ways that I could help to connect these people with each other so that they can increase their own effectiveness in seeking answers?

The Big Shift in Business Strategy

Business strategy has evolved dramatically over the past four decades in response to the Big Shift that is re-shaping our global business landscape. We’re on the cusp of yet another shift that will determine who wins and who loses in the years ahead.

We’ve recently been exploring some key elements required to escape from the dark side of technology: passion, institutional innovation and movements shaped by narratives.

Today, we’ll look at the importance of new approaches to strategic advantage. These new approaches offer the potential to learn faster in ways that will be very difficult for others to copy. In a world of mounting performance pressure, this is a powerful advantage.

A brief history

Business strategy emerged in full force in the 1970’s and 1980’s with a strong focus on structural advantage.  The essence of structural advantage was simple: find barriers to entry that will protect a company from competition.  These barriers could take many forms: for example, geographic, economic, technological (patents) or regulatory. This made sense in a push based world: the key was to build walls to prevent others from pushing you out of your leadership position.

But here’s the problem.  The Big Shift is ultimately about the convergence of two powerful forces: digital technology infrastructures and long-term shifts in public policy towards economic liberalization. These two forces together are systematically and significantly reducing barriers to entry and barriers to movement on a global scale. The structural advantages that used to provide safe havens became less and less effective. If you’re an incumbent, welcome to the dark side!

In response to these developments, we saw a first big shift in strategic thinking, one that could be broadly framed as a transition from strategies of position to strategies of movement.  The key thrust was that, if you couldn’t rely on position to protect you, you had to focus on moving faster. Strategy was reduced to execution, hustle and adaptation.  Move more quickly and efficiently than anyone else and you could still stay ahead of the pack.

But this also has a problem.  The dark side of technology offers the trifecta of all challenges:

• increasing competitive intensity,
• accelerating change and
• growing uncertainty, often taking the form of extreme unanticipated events, sometimes known as “Black Swans” (per Nassim Nicholas Taleb). 

In that kind of environment, movement quickly becomes a treadmill that moves faster and faster and, when you least expect it, lurches to a stop and throws you against the wall.

Don’t get me wrong. Execution, hustle and adaptation are all necessary for survival. But movement alone, no matter how efficiently executed, may no longer be enough for us to escape the dark side of technology.  Instead, it may just suck us deeper and deeper into the abyss of the dark side.

So, what is to be done?  Perhaps it’s time to execute yet another shift in business strategy. One that helps us to harness the capabilities of the Big Shift to accomplish things that weren’t even possible before.

What would this new form of strategy look like? John Seely Brown and I started to reflect on this in some earlier writings here and here. But let me offer a brief update and synthesis here.

We now have an opportunity to take strategy to a new level, one that integrates position and movement in a profoundly new and powerful way.

The growing importance of position

Let’s start with position.  What if we expand our thinking about position?  In the past, position was all about protection – how do we build bigger and more secure barriers to hold off the hordes seeking to unseat us?

In the world of the Big Shift, the most valuable positions help us to influence events and achieve greater leverage by mobilizing the resources of others – we’re able to accomplish far more with a lot less. Let’s call these strategic positions “influence points”.  Control is less and less feasible in a turbulent world, but if we play our cards right, we might be able to significantly influence or shape the evolution of the world around us.  Through influence, we can motivate others to invest and act in ways that reinforce and amplify our own efforts.

The Big Shift is creating a much more richly connected world. Platforms of various types are making it easier for us to find and connect with each other on a global scale. Business networks and other kinds of business ecosystems are emerging on top of these platforms to help us move from short-term transactions to long-term relationships. And we’re able to scale these relationships in ways that draw in increasingly diverse participants from across the globe. Connections proliferate, but they don’t expand evenly.  They increasingly exhibit power laws where a few nodes concentrate an extraordinary number of connections and a very large number of nodes have very few connections.

Influence points tend to emerge whenever and wherever relationships begin to concentrate. Think about it.  In a world shaped by knowledge flows, you want to be at the intersection of as many flows as possible. These influence points bring some awesome advantages:

• By having privileged access to flows, you’re in a better position to anticipate what’s going to happen by seeing signals before anyone else does.
• By being in the middle of more flows, you have an opportunity to shape those flows in ways that can strengthen your position and give you important leverage in a world of mounting performance pressure. When you’re in the flow, small moves, smartly made, can indeed set very big things into motion.
• Third, by concentrating information and knowledge flows within a broader system, these influence points drive more rapid learning by offering privileged access to a growing and diverse set of information or knowledge flows.  In a turbulent world, this is perhaps the most significant advantage of all. If my firm or institution can learn faster than anyone else, it will have a significant advantage relative to those who are scrambling to catch up.

OK, now all of this can sound pretty abstract.  Let’s make this a little more concrete. We can explain a lot of the evolution of the personal computer industry by focusing on who established a leadership position in the key influence points of that device – the microprocessor and operating system components. Why were these such important influence points?  Because they shaped the functionality and options for all the developers of all the other components of the device. 

As a result, all the participants in the personal computer ecosystem had a strong motivation to connect with the owners of the leading microprocessor and the leading operating system – they were trying to anticipate how these components would evolve and what the implications might be for their own development efforts. The companies owning these two critical components became a concentration point for knowledge flows as more and more participants reached out to them and shared their own business plans. They had privileged access to knowledge flows that no one else could match.

What are some of the criteria for anticipating where these influence points might emerge? 

• First, they tend to provide significant and sustainable functionality to the broader platform or ecosystem. Again, think about the critical role that the operating system plays in the personal computer – almost all of the activity in the device is governed in one way or another by the functionality of the operating system. 
• Second, the functionality of these influence points tends to evolve rapidly over time – think once again about the evolution of the personal computer operating system. 
• Third, the influence point benefits from network effects that drive consolidation and concentration of participants at the influence point.  Lots of participants vied to provide operating systems for the personal computer but at the end of the day only one or two players remain in this space. 
• Finally, these influence points encourage fragmentation of the rest of the platform or ecosystem.  It’s not an accident that the operating system promoting both fragmentation of device manufacturers and application developers won the battle for the personal computer. This fragmentation of the rest of the system reinforces the advantage of the company occupying the influence point.

Influence points emerge and evolve by harnessing the power of pull. They attract more and more participants through the value they provide. Equally importantly, they pull participants to act by creating positive incentives that shape action.

But is this limited just to technology platforms? I don’t think so. I’ve spent a long time studying the structure and evolution of social networks and business ecosystems.  These systems also tend to develop influence points driven by the dynamics of the interactions and network effects.  As mentioned earlier, social networks and business ecosystems tend to develop power law profiles – a very few participants aggregate the largest number of interactions while there’s a “long tail” of participants with very few interactions.

Often, the organizer of an ecosystem or network becomes a natural aggregator of interactions because the organizer meets the four attributes of an influence point described above.  This isn’t to say that these ecosystems or networks are hub and spoke, where all interactions must pass through a central hub. But often a very large number of the total interactions concentrate at these points, often far more interactions than any other aggregation point.

So, position may once again become a significant source of competitive advantage.  But note that the value of the position has profoundly shifted from one of protection to one of leverage and learning.  Rather than trying to build walls, these positions seek to connect with others in ever richer ways in order to expand influence, leverage and learning.

Integrating movement into position

But position alone will not be sufficient to create lasting strategic advantage.  The key is to develop the capacity to move rapidly to reap the most benefit from influence, leverage and learning. Firms and other institutions need to cultivate the ability to participate in an expanding range of knowledge flows effectively.  They must also find ways to effectively filter through this expanding range of knowledge flows to extract the insights and approaches that have the potential to create the most value. Finally, they also need to quickly turn around and apply these insights and approaches both within their organization and across a broader range of participants in the system. In sum, the winners will be those who master the techniques required for scalable learning.

Ultimately, the true winners of these new strategies will not just be those who find ways to occupy influence points, but those who also are adept at building the only sustainable edge – the capability to learn faster by working effectively with others. By effectively combining position and movement, these players will be able to tap into the power of network effects, attracting more and more participants, drawn by the potential to learn faster.

So, strategies of movement have a prominent role to play but it’s a very different kind of movement.  Now, we’re not just talking about reacting and moving quickly. These are proactive strategies of movement – designed to strengthen influence points by harnessing their learning potential. If done right, it creates a powerful virtuous cycle – more effective learning attracts others and expands influence which in turn increases the potential for further learning.  To borrow a favorite phrase from my colleague, John Seely Brown, we trigger a generative dance between position and movement that takes us to unforeseen levels of impact.

Bottom line

We’re on the cusp of yet another fundamental shift in approaches to business strategy.  In the place of the raging battles that have occurred between advocates of strategies of position and strategies of movement, the Big Shift will reward those who can find effectively integrate new approaches to both position and movement.

In thinking about potential influence points that can focus these strategies, don’t just look at what exists today, but what could exist.  Often, the most powerful influence points are not yet in play but instead could emerge from a deep understanding of the unmet needs of participants and unexploited capabilities of new generations of technology.  If an influence point already exists, it’s likely to be occupied by incumbents that may be difficult to unseat.  It’s likely to be far more effective to identify and target influence points that haven’t yet emerged and to design shaping strategies that will help to coalesce these influence points.

I’m not by any means suggesting that all institutions must occupy influence points to be successful – that clearly would be an impossible task.  The good news is that you don’t need to occupy the influence point itself, but you do need to understand where the influence points are and find ways to connect to them so that you can learn faster as well and participate in the opportunities to expand value creation that come from leverage and learning.

Here are some key questions you should be asking and answering:

• Who occupies influence points today within my market or industry?
• What are potential new influence points that might emerge from the fundamental forces reshaping my market or industry?
• Who is working to build and occupy new influence points?
• Have I built robust relationships with these players?

If we shift our strategic focus to this new opportunity, we may indeed be able to craft strategies that help us to escape from the clutches of the dark side of technology.  But we may accomplish far more. We may become the catalysts for those collaboration curves that help us to unleash increasing returns opportunities. These increasing returns may ultimately benefit not only ourselves but many others.

One final thought – what if we applied this strategic notion of influence points and accelerated learning to our individual lives? How could we increase our personal impact?