The S.O.A.P Principle of new age competition

The traditional Business principles were to differentiate, compete, think globally and innovate. To do things right, focus on customers and have a great management with all its complexities and hierarchies. But the new WMC wave is proving those traditional thoughts as a passe now. The new age business should run on 4 important principles fuelled by which it is making deep impact and threatening to change the entire structure and modus operandi of the corporations and economy. I term it as the S.O.A.P principle maybe because i come from that IT background :) These competitive principles are:
1) Sharing
2) Openness
3) Act Globally
4) Peering

Sharing is what copyleft is and copyright isn't. Its the opposite of vaulting and treasuring information and knowledge and let it feed and grow on other minds available outside. Today sharing is not just restricted to intellectual property but has extended to bandwidth, processing power etc. too which in true sense is what we can call utilisation for overall social welfare.

Openness here talks about transparency, freedom, flexibility, access etc. in a much more broader and true sense than the ones prevalent in today's organisation when one says that "we are an open organization!" / "We have an open door policy / culture.." A basic underlying distinction between the two is the power to self-organize (the seed of disruptive creativity) and undeterred thought exchange. Infact even the traditional firms have been compelled to take a few steps towards this openness by opening up to their value chain partners atleast for supply chain efficiencies.

Act globally (not just think!) is what Friedman brings out in his book. 'The World is Flat'. Monitor international happenings and changes, source all your resources globally, manage assets across cultures and boundaries.

Peering here means a community of equals and breaks the hard coded tenet of hierarchies. Peering means giving each and everyone a common platform. It is difficult to imagine a firm without any hierarchy, hierarchy has become synonymous with order! We create hierarchies and then the management gurus sit and ponder how to get people equally involved, creative and to contribute productively. The Gurus then give management styles that would then foster participation within existing hierarchies whereas hierarchies inherently deter the same. Peering is pure play participation, participation for various reasons like fun, challenge, altruism. Peering might need a structure but its not command-control hierarchy.

So the question a firm should ask itself today is, "Are we using the S.O.A.P daily?" :)

The Worm's Eye View

Read a document at MIT's website in the morning it had a Sr. Executive of World Bank describing their illusionary yet evolutionary (or may be in the reverse order) efforts for human welfare. He remarked that when they started off with the welfare thing they thought 'education' for all was the right answer to bring that much needed growth at the bottom of the pyramid... then they pondered upon exploding population vs much lagging capacity so then they focused on 'population control'... then they queried that government policies hinder growth and they pumped 'loan' money into their economy... then when they found that governments can't repay them they then introduced a policy of 'Loan amnesty'!

It rightly went on to point out that the approach till now has had a skewed point of view at the bottom. It looked at poverty in a top-down way symbolic to a bird’s eye view dealing with the lives of worms as if the poor is a target, not a resource. They felt that better life is something that needs to be provided to the people down there. All the time they forgot that traditionally wealthy societies were built bottoms up by empowerment from below. It occurred when the poor started contributing to the economy and thus earning their righteous meal.

So the approach should actually be a Worm's eye view. It said instead of seeing billion mouths to feed, better think what can be done to make those billion brains to think for themselves, those billion eyes and ears to keep watch on governments, those billion hands and legs to move things!!

And if we put that in the perspective of my earlier post on WMC that's exactly whats happening billion beings at work... participating in a horizontal collective economy!!

Weapons of Mass Collaboration

Even before the net age barged in with all its might and gusto the concept of "six degrees of seperation" was a prevalent thought! It says that everyone of us is no more than 6 individual away from each other! So this implies

1. World is just 6 ppl wide!
2. I am just 6 people away from all influential who's who of the world (that should be such a reassuring thing, divine gift for a person who is looking out for BIG favors :) )
3. Any company is just 6 people away from all their customers
4. I am at max 6 ppl away from my soul mate, so on and so forth...
   

The concept reflects the potential of all the collaborative efforts we are experiencing today. Its the potent force over which the collaborative tech wave has been riding. The collaborative techwave has been happening, churning, taking shape, moulding and remoulding the virtual biz environment. This wave has actually made a big dent in many areas like eComm, socializing, marketing etc. and thus bending a few traditional existing rules and creating new ones. A few have termed the force as 'Wikinomics' - the theory and practice of harnessing the power of mass collaboration and a few even call it the 'weapons of mass collaboration' and 'crowdsourcing'. There are umpteenth example today a few we all know and a few might be lesser (and many new are coming up with brighter ideas) known but all of them are riding on the same wave. GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, Google, youtube, SmartMobs, innocentive, Human Genome Project, Second Life, MySpace, Blogosphere etc are all the successful manfistetations of the same thought!

More on 'WMC' in my next blog...

yet another thing that transpired!

Yes.. wouldn't call this blog space has a genesis or a beginning because that would not be appropriate. 'Kitchen n Cup' just transpired out of nothing but would be wrong not to mention and apreciate the contribution of all those management theories and concepts packed and parcelled in our heads at college. And because it transpired in canteen while we discussed ofcourse on kitchen and cup (yeah that may sound weird for two MBA grads in an office canteen to talk about... but believe me we made a lot more sense in that talk than we made in any of our official talks :) ) we decided to name it so.

As this would be co-contribution blog where in one might look wise whereas the other may not and vice versa (this was necessary to avoid conflicts between the authors ;) ) hence it has been titled, 'Wise and OtherWise'. hoping that all you readers will have good time reading our musings on the Kitchen n Cup.. :)