Reading List: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
We have written about Web 2.0 in recent issues of Trekking (Issue 36 and Issue 37). This book sets out to show how the collaborative technologies that led to Web 2.0 will lead to wholesale changes throughout the business world. I have to admit that I almost put this book down after the first chapter. It begins with the story of a failing gold-mining company that opened maps of its holdings (normally considered a highly valuable secret) on the internet. They received input from (and compensated) a diverse group of collaborators that helped the company find rich new deposits of gold that its own geologists had failed to find. This example is all or nothing. This CEO took the risk of a lifetime. While compelling, it was hard to swallow at first.
Then I took the book on an airplane and gave it another try. New examples and ideas in later chapters begin to show how the technology of Web 2.0 can and will fuel wholesale changes not just in software and communication but in production as well. We all know about Wikipedia, Amazon’s open API’s, mashups with Google and other web-based technology plays. But the three stories in “The Global Plant Floor” chapter take this idea to the manufacturing world. One story is about Boeing’s 787—a plane that was designed together with a thousand engineers at more than one hundred suppliers, all collaborating in real-time. This full collaboration led to Boeing’s final specification document for the 787 taking up 20 pages versus the 2500 for the predecessor plane, the 777. With the 777, Boeing told its suppliers what had to be done in “excruciating detail.” With the 787, Boeing let its suppliers figure it out for themselves. This would not have been possible without collaborative technologies connecting suppliers around the world.
Similar stories are told for BMW’s production processes and the success of the totally distributed Chinese motorcycle industry. Other fascinating examples are the “internal decision markets” that HP, Eli Lilly, Siemens and Microsoft use to let stakeholders run a virtual futures market on ideas. HP finds that this market is more effective at forecasting annual workstation sales than their internal corporate forecasts.
Since we are talking about personal branding in this newsletter, it’s worth mentioning that in the “open source” worlds described in the many examples in this book, you are an individual, not an employee—your brand must be genuine in order to earn a seat at the collaborative table.
Even with all these examples, it is not necessarily obvious where and how to take advantage of the opportunities presented by collaborative technologies. Ultimately, this book is better at showing us the problem and the opportunity than it is with showing us how to succeed in this new world. But we all know that recognizing a problem is the first step to solving it. I recommend this book because it will help you see the world and your business in a new way.
