Shaping Network Society

For 30 years competitive strategy (the five forces, portfolio analysis, learning, new market development, blue oceans) has determined how we think strategy. Competitive strategy was built on the 19th Century Prussian military understanding that business could be described through strategic interaction of rational players in environments that stay relatively stable over time (stasis in Heraclitian terms).

The world has changed. Today’s strategic environments are determined by complexity, post-human intelligence, networks, fuzzy boundaries, communicative rationality: flux, as Heraclitus would say. Web 2.0 is the shortcut for web-technologies (xml, self-publishing, collaboration platforms, social networking) that once intertwined transform economic production, society, and public governance. However, this change did not start in 2006. Over the last 30 years, we can observe a move from production (defining the value chain), to co-production (manging the supply chain), to peer production (enabling user-generated outputs). This means that strategy in business changes from competitive strategy to communicative strategy. This is big. The closest historical analogy, to this radical transformation of collective production is the emergence of print capitalism in the 16th and 17th Century.

What will post-competive strategy look like? What are the core strategic ideas of network society? What does strategy advice look like in such a world? Who will be the strategy gurus of tomorrow?

We still live in the infancy of peer production as a mode of collective action, in a sort of 1770s Great Britain. Therefore, we are still easily surprised and have not lost the sense of wonder, when we look at collective outputs like Wikipedia or the twittering global thought stream. We smile gleefully when we notice that journalists are reporting on (or using the vocabulary of) peer production in ways we do not expect: Today, the NYTimes writes about Beer Lao (not as in “free as in beer“).

Lao Brewery is building a network of fans-turned-distributors who import and sell the beer in select markets. Some distributors are former travelers who see potential in a brand with little international exposure. Others just really like the beer.

In Hong Kong, the brand is in the hands of Jerry Cheung, who has a love for lager and an affinity for the laid-back pace in Laos.

Mr. Cheung first tried Beer Lao while living in Cambodia in 2006. “It was the most unique beer I’d ever tasted,” he recalled. He flew to Vientiane, where the beer is made, soon afterward…

Forms of collaboration that seem natural online (think Ubuntu or Trent Reznor) still surprise us in the material world. However, is beer actually material? Is the material-virtual, online-offline dichotomy helpful when we want to frame peer production as a mode of collective action? Or should we call it online collaboration, enhanced collaboration, massive collaboration? Is it just technological? Or a new legitimatory practice (in)dependent of technology?

Massive/enhanced collaboration is such a new phenomena that we still do not know what it can really do for us. Are Wikipedia and Couchsurfing a small organizations because they have very few staff? Or big, because many people collaborate? Is  the authenticity of peer production a value in itself? Can we mine local knowledge, by creating p2p call centers? How can we build trust/reputation online? What else can we do? Watch Banyak‘s US Now and participate in the discussion!

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.