A few days ago, I spent some time with James Powell at the Thomson Reuters offices on Times Square. It was just the kind of conversation I enjoy: we covered a lot of ground in a relatively short time, rarely had to explain anything to each other while we went off on tangents and random walks, yet kept largely to subjects of mutual interest.

One of the key topics that came up was that of consumerisation. During our conversation, James raised an intriguing issue: Enterprises have understood that consumerisation is here to stay; lessons are learnt daily, and the learning is applied within firms like ours. So we see the march of smartphones and tablet devices into the enterprise, and the emergent freeing-up of the historically locked-down desktop. We see the adoption of social network/messaging tools like Chatter, Yammer and Quad. [Disclosure: I work for salesforce.com, which makes Chatter]. We can see the learning being applied from hardware and from software per se, but what about the rest? What about the privacy and confidentiality issues faced by the consumer? What about the data portability aspects? Are we learning from them as well? If so where is the evidence? How is it being applied? Corporations have tended to believe that they’re a bit like Vegas: what happens there stays there, and is owned by the corporation. Both James and I agreed that maybe not enough is being done in this respect, and that we would compare notes as we went along, something I’m looking forward to.

illustration courtesy of Idiots’ Books

I couldn’t get the topic out of my mind as I boarded the plane back from New York to London, and I guess this post is the result of those mullings over.Things I’ve perceived while observing the Maker Generation, things that I feel will become important in tomorrow’s enterprise. [If you want to know more about the Maker Generation, I’d recommend you read Cory Doctorow‘s Makers, which I reviewed in the post linked to earlier in this paragraph.]

Image courtesy of Stephane Guegan

For much of my life, my attitude to post-facto regulation has been somewhat Oliver Hardy-ish, a sense of “here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into“. I tend to prefer principles we can debate and improve and refine before we hit problems, so that the regulations are truly fit for purpose.

So, when it comes to the entry of the Maker Generation into the workplace, I’d like to propose five principles:

1. The person will select the “task”, rather than be given the “task”. Ever since the inception of the modern firm, people were given tasks to do in a prescriptive, deterministic manner. Initially this made sense, since firms were built on industrial-revolution models, and linear workflow was the norm. But that was for a different time, and the environment has changed completely. Talent is at a premium. There’s no point in hiring smart people and then telling them what to do, that makes no sense whatsoever. The most precious asset of the knowledge-worker enterprise is the knowledge worker, her human and social capital, her relationships and her capabilities. It makes more sense to expose knowledge workers to problem domains and then giving them the resources and tools to solve those problems.

2. Tasks will be non-linear in nature, rather than assembly-line. When someone new joins a firm, the experience is going to be very similar to that of playing a modern video game. The new joiner will spend time in some form of sandbox or training ground, learning a number of key things: the “game mechanics“, the values, rules and principles by which the firm operates; the “game controls“, how you navigate around the workplace, how you discover things, how you acquire learning and other assets to deploy, how you “save” your work, how you “replay” or “continue”; and the “game dashboard“, the tools that let you see the environment, your powers and authorities, feedback loops on position and progress, primarily team rather than personal, though both are visible.

3. True team-based work will become the norm, not the exception. For decades we’ve been talking about teamwork in the enterprise, but that’s what it’s been for the most part. Talk. For teamwork to become part and parcel of everyday enterprise life, small, self-organising multidisciplinary teams must be allowed to exist, crossing many historical boundaries. Teamwork is meaningless unless the team is given work to do that is suitable for doing as a team. There’s no point in calling a bunch of individuals a team, just because they report hierarchically to the same point in the organisation, or because they have the same broad skills. Work is normally carried out by people in multiple parts of the organisation, belonging to different departments, putting to use their disparate skills. The “team”, in practice, is distributed across different departments, functions, locations. And the very structure of the firm militates against teamwork, since these departments, functions and locations tend to optimise within the department, function or location. That optimisation is often underpinned, even accelerated, by the reward system in place, which places a premium on the results of such local optimisation. Interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration is, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes very much on purpose, made difficult.

It’s actually much worse, since the teams spoken of so far are all within one enterprise domain. The teams of the future will include members from trading partners, the supply chain, and (perish the thought) real, live customers. It’s no longer just a question of misaligned incentives: we haven’t really figured out how to do this. Collective intelligence and crowdsourcing will have nothing more than a small number of hackneyed poster children to show if we don’t learn from this and do something about it.

4. Cognitive surpluses will be put to use sensibly, rather than discarded. We have to get away from the idea that knowledge work is smooth and stable and uniform and assembly-line in structure and characteristic. Knowledge work is lumpy. Period. There will be peaks. And there will be troughs. The current thinking appears to go something like this: “If we have troughs it will look like we don’t have enough work to do, so we need to pretend to work. Let’s fill our days up in advance with things that don’t depend on market or customer stimulus, things we can plan well in advance. And let’s call these things meetings. Then we can look busy all the time.” Such thinking has produced some unworthwhile consequences: layers of people who excel at meetings, who know how to game the process of meetings;  the agendas and minutes and presentations and whatnot. Which then leads to the creation of a class of signal boosters, who summarise meetings and fight over who can carry the signal to the next level within the organisation, who slow work down by constantly asking questions designed to boost their signal-booster reputations, who work as the enterprise equivalent of K Street, unseemlily knocking each other over as they rush to “brief” their superiors in the hierarchy.

The solution to all this lies in recognising that cognitive surpluses can and do exist, and should be put to sensible use. Investing in wikipedia-like projects, dealing with definitions and jargon explanations and data cleansing and question-answering and the like.

5. Radically different tools and processes will be needed as a result, time-shiftable, place-shiftable, multimedia. Because, as Einstein is reported to have said, we can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created the problems. Tools that view privacy differently, that view confidentiality differently. Tools that recognise the existence of the individual within the firm, the existence of multidisciplinary, sometimes multi-organisational, multi-location as well. Tools that are intrinsically multimedia, allowing text to be augmented with image and voice and video. Tools that are platform and operating system agnostic. Tools that are mobile, self-examining, self-healing. Tools that can be replaced with ease, using the synchronisation power of the cloud.

Albert Einstein at the age of four.

Exciting times. Times when we have to make radical changes to concepts we have held for a long time. Concepts like identity and privacy and confidentiality. Concepts like teamwork and sharing. Concepts like sinecures and benefits and contracts of employment. Concepts like the theory of the firm and scarcity economics and rational individuals and linear workflow. Times that celebrate diversity, that celebrate divergent thinking, that celebrate the creative.

And how are we going to know what to do?

We won’t.

Isn’t it good that there’s a new generation who can solve that for us? A generation who aren’t as hidebound as their predecessors and their predecessors and their predecessors.

The Maker Generation. Choosing what they do. How they do it. Whom they work for. What do they look for? Choice.

So what should an enterprise do?

As I said in the kernel for this blog, six years ago:

One, make a clear stance on values and ethics.

Two, allow relationships and collaboration to take place, rather than control the relationships.

Three, intermediate to enable trust and fulfilment rather than channel towards lock-in.

Four, recognise that the customer wants to create and co-create value rather than just receive.

Use what you stand for to attract the customer. Use what you do to retain the customer’s trust. Ensure that the customer is always free to leave, and paradoxically he or she will stay. Who is this customer? Your family. Your friend. Your employee. Your business partner. Your client. Your citizen.

As we put the principles in place, as the Maker Generation enters the workplace in volume, as the values and ways of working evolve, we will know what policies and guidelines we need, what laws we need. It’s a matter of time.

Over the next few weeks I intend to flesh this out and write a series of posts on the Maker Generation in the Enterprise, looking at the issues from a number of perspectives. Your comments will help me make this a more valuable exercise.

A whole generation of people grew up in the belief that using the C-word in public was just not done. So they avoided doing so. A good thing.

At the same time, unrelated to the original C-word, they’ve managed to obscure and obfuscate a number of other C-words. Not a good thing.

This post is about those other C-words.

Let’s start with “convergence”. Ever since I first saw the 1972 Steven King video, Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing, and absorbed it in the context of an earlier, 1968, Doug Engelbart video, often referred to as The Mother of All Demos, I’ve believed in the convergence of computing and telecommunications. Yet, forty years after those events, and at least 20 years since I was being told convergence is happening, we still live in a world where behaviour suggests otherwise. People still try to analyse and regulate this converged world as if computing and communications were distinct and separate. At least that’s the impression I get when I see misguided, often impractical, attempts to regulate aspects of the internet and the web. When are we going to see convergence take place more holistically?

Then let’s move on to “collaboration”. Ever since I left university and started work, the idea that teamwork and collaboration are important have been drilled into me, even drummed into me. Yet, thirty years later, it is still rare for me to see objectives, processes, systems and incentive schemes that reflect this. Yes I’ve seen team objectives and scorecards, but team behaviours remain singularly singular and attempts at team bonuses and reward structures are usually greeted with sniggers and derision. Ricardo Semler wrote Maverick in 1993, chronicling events that took place in 1981, nearly 30 years ago. Yet collaboration, openness and transparency are largely buzzwords in most enterprises, and a culture of secrecy, behind-the-scenes lobbying, whispering campaigns and “briefings” tend to be the norm. Much of what we’ve seen in the wake of Wikileaks suggests that cultural acceptance of collaboration and sharing is low amongst the powers-that-be. So how long before collaboration stops being a concept and moves towards becoming reality.

Which brings me on to “community”. Something that goes back a tad more than the thirty or forty years I refer to in earlier points. Somewhere along the line, many of the concepts of community: shared ownership, collective empowerment, joint accountability, these have somehow become attached to concepts like communism or at least anti-capitalism, and as a result there are regular outbreaks of pseudo-McCarthy-like behaviour, as if belonging to a community should have you investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. You only have to look at the tirades that were launched against opensource; you only have to witness the behaviours exhibited against sharing-related tools like Napster or BitTorrent; you only have to gape at the porcine beings wearing the lipstick of “intellectual property rights”. At which point did individual rights become so much more important than community rights? What will it take to reverse that process?

Let me move on before I get too much on that particular high horse. Next word. “Consumerisation“. Something that’s been around for at least a decade. But not if we are to look at how our corporations behave. With the advent of the millenial generation, consumerisation is no longer theory. It has happened. Yet we still try and convince ourselves that consumers are different from businesses, that staff are different from partners, that partners are different from customers. These distinctions are just not tenable any more, it’s like saying “IT” and “business” are distinct and separate, that “living” and “breathing” can be treated as isolated things. When will we realise that people are people, that putting labels on people doesn’t change that fact?

I could go on and on, but won’t. The point is, things are changing all the time, and the pace of change is itself accelerating. The edges of many things we held as distinct and separate are blurring: the borders between countries, the lines between market segments, the boundaries of firms, the separation of consumption and production in a world of service, the distinctions between staff member, partner and customer. The devices we use are blurring. The professions we follow are blurring. The definitive differences between political parties are also blurring.

Everything is blurring, and at a rate of knots. This is not a new thing: over fifteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae referred to aspects of this in The Borderless World, five years later Chris Meyer and Stan Davis kept with the theme in Blur, and more recently, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison took it yet further in The Power of Pull.

People don’t know what a country is any more. People don’t know what a political party stands for any more. People don’t know where a company starts and where it ends.

There is some confusion out there. Because the rules for so many things are changing.

But some things are not changing, some things are resolutely refusing to change. The way we account for things. The way we try and manage things. The way we report on things. Stuff like that.

Predictable, in a way. Because we cannot solve the problems of new paradigms using the tools of the old. And we haven’t yet built the tools of the new. Because so many of the things that are changing attack the very basis of power of so many people in incumbency.

So they try to hold on. Not by paving over the cowpaths, which would be inefficient and wasteful, but by trying to make cows out of cars.

A very confused state. One full of opportunity, and of pitfalls, as a result.

Which is why we get valuations like we get for Facebook. The truth is, no one knows what the real valuation of Facebook, or of any post-Web firm for that matter, should really be.

At times like these, there’s a tendency to go back to first principles. Where the behaviour of markets are based on momentum, confidence, fear and greed.

Exciting times.

There has been a lot of debate as a result of recent announcements about Goldman Sachs investing $450m in Facebook at a valuation of $50bn, and planning to raise another $1.5bn at the same valuation, apparently by attracting wealthy private investors into a special purpose vehicle at high speed.

Much of the debate is about the valuation, with talk of Bubble 2.0 (and even 3.0, I lose count nowadays).
The valuation doesn’t surprise me, however dark the art of valuation may have become. Why? Because Facebook is the new new telco.

What do I mean? Let’s start with the original telco, which comprised of the following components:

• A population of subscribers, aggregated into a directory, with relevant personal contact information (addresses, telephone numbers)
• Reduced search costs within those directories as a result of classifications and groupings: alphabetical (A-D, E-H and so on) geographical (London, Birmingham and so on) and functional (white, yellow and so on)
• Multiple modalities of communication between the subscribers (post, telegraph, telephone)
• A record of changes, published regularly as errata and addenda

Original telcos provided services via fixed devices and spent vast amounts of money on infrastructure. They sought to justify monopoly positions by pointing to the infrastructural expenditure required.

For over a hundred years, all we had was original telcos.

Then, just over two decades ago, came the new telco. The best-known member of this class is Microsoft.  And the new telco extended the componentry:

• Personal contact information now included e-mail and IM addresses
• Directories became online, searchable and downloadable (personal and public address books)
• Modalities of communication now included email and IM
• Changes were now applied continuously to the directories, but were not published.
• And some new components were added: it became possible for subscribers to schedule meetings between each other, and to use general-purpose devices like computers and smartphones to do all this.

New telcos provided services via fixed and mobile devices, delivered principally to corporates, and everyone spent vast amounts of money on infrastructure, much of it on-premise. Personal customers were nibbled at via email and IM, but the thrust of the new telco was at the corporate.

For a few decades now, all we had was original telcos and new telcos.

Then, six years ago, Facebook arrived, the leader in a new class of telco, the new new telco. Again, the componentry was extended:

• Personal contact information became enriched to form profiles, user-editable
• Classifications and groupings of people within directories were enriched as well, user-creatable networks and groups emerged
• Modalities of communication now included, or will soon include synchronous and asynchronous audio and video
• Scheduling of meetings now became more pub-sub in structure, via the use of open and closed events
• Changes weren’t just applied continuously, they were published continuously. This record of changes was called a News Feed.
• All this was done on a user-creatable, user-editable, personalised-access-and-view basis
• And the whole shebang was then carefully bundled and exposed as a platform upon which other people could build services, viral, social, mobile

New new telcos provided multimedia services across multiple types of device using multiple modalities of communication. And they did everything “over the top”. No infrastructure costs. No on-premise software.

And to top it all new new telcos had new new assets, information about relationships and flows. What Facebook call the Friend Graph.

So let me see. Facebook has more customers than most original telcos put together, more customers than most new telcos put together. It offers more modalities of communication with lower transaction costs, higher end-user empowerment, personalisation and customisation. It does not have to invest in communications infrastructure, in customer premises equipment, in devices, in on-premise software.

600 million active users. A “subscriber base” larger than any country bar China or India. Revenues growing from $777m to $1.2bn between 2009 and 2010, with net income up from $200m to $355m.

The new new telco. Now think of the valuations of old telcos and new telcos, then look at the difference in costs, in scalability and globalness, in revenue and profit opportunity.

Let’s put this into context.

I have a lot of time for a Boston professor I’ve known since the nineties, N. Venkatraman, Venkat to his friends. Around a decade ago, across a number of conversations, Venkat convinced me of a critical change that was taking place in business as a whole:

He said that businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products; that they are changing into networks of business units whose assets were called relationships and capabilities.

New new assets. Relationships and capabilities. Social capital. Human capital. Assets we have carefully avoided learning how to value. Assets we have refused to value, however much we speak of the importance of talent and knowledge and collaboration.

That’s where the new new value is.

New new telcos are not just for consumers, there is immense value to be created by and for businesses as well, from the sole trader through to the megalith. And with the continuing growth of consumerisation, the distinction is blurring more and more anyway, there’s a singularity approaching in this context.

Facebook is concentrating on the pure consumer play, and that’s fine. They can afford to experiment with their market and learn from their experiments: the profile, the news feed, Beacon, the privacy settings, there’s been a powerful suck-it-and-see mentality, coupled with an excellent responsiveness and adaptiveness to feedback.

Businesses are social as well. Markets are Conversations. As Doc Searls immortalised in The Cluetrain Manifesto (Disclosure: I count all four authors as my friends, and contributed a chapter to the 10th Anniversary Edition of the book).

So companies need better ways of evolving, enhancing and exposing their capabilities and relationships, making it easier for their customers to do business with them.

The Rolodex was the tool of the trade in the times of the original telco.

The on-premise customer information system was the tool of the trade in the times of the new telco.

What I could see was the potential for Chatter to be CRM on steroids, cloud-based, community-driven, multimedia, both synchronous as well as asynchronous, extending beyond the enterprise and supply chain to the customer.

What’s happening is that the stuff we called CRM is blending subtly with the stuff we called knowledge management, accelerated by the publish-subscribe mechanism of collaboration tools like Chatter, enriched further by the multimedia mobile, social, viral aspects of all this and delivered at speeds and price points made possible by cloud technologies.

All just in time for a generation who cannot remember a time before the web, a time before the mobile phone.
All just in time for a generation for whom “rent” means more than “buy”, for whom “share” means more than “own”.

All just in time for a generation who have rediscovered community.

That’s why the Facebook valuation does not surprise me.
That’s why I jumped at the chance when Marc Benioff asked me to join Salesforce.

New new times.

Exciting times.

[Incidentally, some of my posts are now cross-posted into The Cloud Blog, where I write alongside my colleagues at Salesforce. Here’s a link to the first post I wrote there.]

[Note: this is a follow-up to my post a few days introducing the theme of un-nationalness.]

Krosno Odrzanskie, Poland. Dakar, Senegal. Greenwich, London. Uzice, Serbia. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Cardiff, Wales. Praia, Cape Verde. Edinburgh, Scotland. Derry, Northern Ireland. Blaegoevgrad, Bulgaria. Guadalajara, Mexico.

These are the birthplaces of the 11 who took the field in today’s Barclays Premier League soccer match between Manchester United and Stoke City, two venerable English clubs. The starting line-up were born, on average, 1896.56 miles from Manchester. Which is the distance between Manchester and Ankara, Turkey. Which is in Asia.

Not one person born in Manchester made that starting line-up.

The goals were scored by men born, on average, 4106.32 miles away from Manchester, one from Cape Verde and one from Mexico.

Why is all this important? Because until 1982, when Arnold Muhren transferred to United, they’d never really fielded a “foreign” player, from beyond the UK and Ireland. [While some claim Carlo Sartori in 1967 as the first, I am led to believe his family moved to Manchester while he was a young child, and he came through the junior ranks as any other domestic child.]

Talent knows no borders, and Manchester United have done a good job garnering and harnessing global talent. As far as the club was concerned, it did not matter where they were born, or what nation they represented. What mattered was how they played football.

So the Manchester United of today is quite different from the Manchester United of a few decades ago. All made possible because of the relatively free flow of capital, and of labour,  across borders, not just in Europe but beyond: at least four of the players aren’t European; and the owners of the club are American.

For some decades now, it has been getting easier and easier to move money around the world, with the unintended consequence of making terrorism and tax avoidance easier. For some decades now, it has been getting easier and easier to move around as an individual, as the relative cost of travel has dropped and the need for talent has grown unabated. So labour and capital have moved more freely than ever before, creating an environment Ken Ohmae described vividly over two decades ago in his seminal book The Borderless World.

But it’s not just labour and financial capital that move freely nowadays; knowledge or “human” capital, along with relationship or “social” capital, also have this ability now.

Which gives governments a real headache. Because they want to lock in their “customers”, the people and companies that pay the taxes that allow them to exist. The traditional swords and ploughshares of government — regulation and taxation — are fashioned into the flowers of freedom, as companies migrate between regulatory and tax regimes at will.

This erosion of “national” power is happening at all levels: the state, the company, even the individual, as the tools of lock-in get diminished in scale and quality.

In choice there is power; the continuing evolution of the tools of communication and transportation have increased “customer” choice significantly, and out of this choice has come about the growth of un-nationalness.

In some ways it’s what I have been saying for some time now: many of the lock-ins of the past are being eroded: every artificial scarcity is opposed by an equal and opposite artificial abundance; over time the abundance wins.

As a result, new institutions, organisations and ways of working continue to emerge, built on un-national principles. Facebook, Skype and Twitter would all appear on a list of the top ten “countries” of the world; virtual currencies continue to grow apace, despite not being issued, underwritten or guaranteed by countries; money is borrowed and lent at micro levels; political funds are raised on the internet; soon, even law will be drafted on a collaborative basis.

New, un-national fora are taking centre stage, ranging from the World Economic Forum to TED to the Web Science Trust.

New un-national tools like the internet and the Web are entering their golden age, enabling amazing levels of communal activity and collaboration.

Historical lock-in models practised by governments and monopolies and monolithic hierarchical institutions are being dismantled while they sleep; the movement from analog to digital has shattered the erstwhile peace of the news, publishing, music and film businesses; education and healthcare are in range; and government will follow.

For many years now, people like Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold and Esther Dyson have been writing about these changes. More recently, Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott and Doc Searls have been documenting the changes and explaining the rationale behind the changes.

But these are hard changes. So there is a reluctance amongst the changed to accept the change. Puerile pieces of legislation litter the landscape, as governments and incumbents seek to hold on to what they had.

But it’s over. Over. Because the tools of choice are in individual hands. And there is no master switch. By design.

Which means it’s time for all of us to understand more about the principles behind un-nationalness, underpinning the statelessness of today.

For starters, I think we should be considering these:

The Principle of Simultaneity: Un-national things happen at the same time everywhere; an un-national film is released everywhere and in all format in the same instant.

The Principle of Unownability:  Un-national things are owned by no one. In Doc Searls’ words, they’re NEA. Nobody owns them. Everyone can use them. Anyone can improve them.

The Principle of Emergence: Un-national things standardise through market adoption rather than by diktat or decree or regulation. There are no standards bodies to game, no lobby mechanisms, no palms to grease.

The Principle of Federability: Un-national things have to be built on the DNA of federation rather than the toxins of monoculture and monopoly.

When humans have real choice, they choose where they work, where they live, where they pay their taxes, where they raise their kids, where they die.

These choices are increasing, despite the efforts of some governments and some corporates.

Historical structures, built on hierarchical principles, had choke points where control could be established.

Today it’s like trying to control air or space or the oceans. Un-national things.

Of course new toxins emerge, new dangers become apparent. Which is why we need the work of people like TED. Like the WEF. Like the Berkman Center. To delight us with what is possible. To warn us of the risks. To give us a forum for debate. And to ensure we have the freedom and the choice to be part of those debates.

Incidentally, if you want to see what happens at Davos, why not try and get invited there? Take part in the Davos Debates, there’s still time.

A coda. If you have the time, read The Kernel For This Blog, something I wrote nearly six years ago. It’s how I visualised un-nationalness at the time.