I was lucky enough to be invited to Media 140 in Perth recently to discuss what the ‘big idea’ is with social media.

The idea was for a context setting discussion about social media and how it is changing business and society.

DIGITAL REVOLUTION

I was lucky enough to be invited to Media 140 in Perth recently to discuss what the ‘big idea’ is with social media.

The idea was for a context setting discussion about social media and how it is changing business and society.

DIGITAL REVOLUTION
We are living through a digital revolution that is changing the world we inhabit as absolutely and as irrevocably as the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

That previous industrial revolution changed our relationship with time, with money, and with people. It created the wage labourer that we know, and the unions whom we’ve to come know encapsulated by the term ‘organised labour’. It created a society governed by the mechanical clock and the notion of work versus non-work time.

The digital revolution is on a similar scale, and this scale is based on a remarkable shift in the means of production. The digital revolution has at its roots a democratization of access to the means of communication.

EXPECTATIONS AND ACCESS TO COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
As a result we are seeing a shift in the expectations of ordinary people about communications technology and their access to that technology. Further, we are seeing a rapid evolution of behaviour in relation to communications technology – mainly in the use of smartphones and tablets.

All of this is leading us to significant shifts in society, and it is all fuelled by innovations in communications devices. The smartphone and almost ubiquitous access to the internet have created a new baseline expectation in people that they will always be connected. I have often argued that with Twitter we are seeing the genesis of the hive mind of humanity.

The digital divide is no longer about access to technology – as my friend Mark Pesce notes, even poor fishermen in Kerala have access – it’s about your willingness or desire to be connected.

However, people are finding enormous utility in being always connected. For example, the number of ereaders in the hands of people is growing enormously, doubling since July 2011. And an example of a behavioural shift afforded by the technology is the growth in women’s erotic fiction sales. Romance novels have always been a big business globally, but a recent sales data indicates a substantial growth in sales of erotica (the so-called ‘guilty pleasures’ factor) that has been fuelled by the anonymity offered by ereaders.

As long ago as 2008 Australia mobile phone subscribers outnumber people according to ACMA data. This means that individuals have more than one device connected to the mobile phone network.

SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL BUSINESS
Along with this embrace of ubiquitous mobile connectivity we have seen the growth of social media and social networking. This growth of social media is part of the landscape that makes up the digital revolution. Social media is revolutionary because it empowers the populace with access to the means of communication that were once the province of rich media barons.

This growth in social media fuelled by mobile connectivity has also changed the business landscape in important ways. There is a shift from command-control and pipeline driven businesses to social business that is focused on continuous engagement and conversations.

The kind of new business opportunities enabled by this digital revolution include:

• the ability to compete in a new geography without even opening a local store (like Amazon);
• the opportunity to reduce complexity for customers and remove friction from business operations (like Telstra);
• subverting traditional models like recruitment where businesses build online talent banks of people who are interested in working with them (like Deloitte).

However, the shifts in society are not limited to business and consumers. They are also changing some things that we have always accepted. For example, we have always assumed that there is a just and valid separation between the domains of public versus private, or between business versus personal. But now those verities are being shaken by social media and social networking.

Social media is blurring the boundaries between the public, private, business, and personal. We are still working out how to negotiate this new territory. But already we see reports of people turned down for jobs because their online reputation score was too low.

We are now seeing a world where reputation is created, maintained, and mediated by online channels. There are increasing tools for measuring reputation online, such as: Kred, Klout, and Peer Index. Bouncers are even reportedly using Facebook as an identification check for entry into nightspots according to the BBC.

SOCIAL WORKPLACES
Workplaces are changing too, partly in response to the digital revolution. Open plan offices with collaboration spaces and hot desks are enabled because of wifi and portable connected devices like laptops and tablets.

SOCIAL EDUCATION
Our schools and places of education are being swept along by this digital revolution as well. With schools handing out laptops to all students and wifi in schools, libraries, and on public transport our children inhabit an always connected landscape. A teen boy said to me recently of my complaints about the poor wifi in Sydney: “but it’s just in the air, it’s everywhere”. It is a good example of the world that our young people inhabit. They live in a world where the connectivity is just ‘in the air’ around them.

The physical changes in workplaces are being reflected in schools too. They are becoming focused on collaboration rather than rote learning of facts. Students are learning how to discover, assess, and synthesize information rather than memorize facts.

WTF?
When we put together the shifting physical nature of the workplace and schools together with the blurring boundaries between public- private-business-personal, and the always connected devices in the hands of individuals many opportunities and challenges arise.

It is an exciting time to live. We are living through a revolution. The real question is will we drive the revolution or let it just happen to us?

While trawling around on YouTube recently I came across a 1980s video of Tim Finn’s There’s a Fraction too much Friction and it got me thinking about the things that annoy me  in dealing with businesses. I concluded that [...]]]>

While trawling around on YouTube recently I came across a 1980s video of Tim Finn’s There’s a Fraction too much Friction and it got me thinking about the things that annoy me  in dealing with businesses. I concluded that the source of my irritation is friction.

I have long observed that business has many things in common with war, and friction is probably the thing that most comes to mind as significant in both business and war.

The problem with friction is nicely put by Clausewitz:

“Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.”

This description of the effects of friction in war are eerily reminiscent of dealing with a large business (say for example, one of our large telecommunications companies).

The huge opportunity that the digital revolution offers is to remove friction between different parts of businesses – between customers and staff, between operational silos within the organisation, between groups who are internal and external to the organisation.

Organisations that see and act on this opportunity are the ones that will triumph in the hyperconnected future.

People who see a dedicated niche that they can service seamlessly and effectively will grow their businesses almost without trying, and customers will flock to them.

In this milieu the one-stop-shops that try to do everything – those who previously leveraged scale and centralization – are likely to suffer.  This is because scale creates and does not reduce friction. Only in the past when the friction in having services and products delivered from many smaller suppliers was so great did the one-stop-shops have an advantage.

But now even small organisations can remove friction and deliver seamlessly to their customers using web and mobile applications.

Now organisations are liberated to serve customers in ways that were impossible before ubiquitous internet connected mobile devices.

Big companies that are not already offering effective online services are the new dinosaurs.  It will take only the slightest change in their terrestrial trading conditions for them to sicken and die. Two examples of this phenomenon  worth keeping an eye on are Harvey Norman and David Jones . It will be very interesting to see if they can evolve their business models sufficiently fast to survive.

Reduced information asymmetry is another opportunity offered by this reduction in friction.  In the past companies, especially retailers, had better information about pricing of the good they sold.  Now this asymmetry in access to pricing information is dying. A recent tweet from my friend Mark Pesce exemplifies this new trend:

And US retailer J.C. Penney recently launched a new pricing model:

“J.C. Penney (JCP) is permanently marking down all of its merchandise by at least 40% so shoppers will no longer have to wait for a sale to get the lowest prices in its stores.

Penney said Wednesday that it is getting rid of the hundreds of sales it offers each year in favor of a simpler approach to pricing. On Feb. 1, the retailer is rolling out a three-tiered strategy that offers “Every Day” low pricing daily, “Monthly Value” discounts on select merchandise each month and clearance deals called “Best Price” during the first and the third Friday of each month when many shoppers get paid.”

Source: Daily Finance, 25 Jan 2012 

The results of this pricing experiment are just starting to flow in.  There has been an initial drop in sales revenue but analysts note:

“We believe our findings demonstrate that the strategies announced to transform (Penney’s) business are the right actions to take and will resonate well with consumers over time” (Source: MSNBC, Penney’s pricing strategy takes a toll on sales, 30 Mar 2012)

Against this backdrop it is amusing to see an Australian retailer’s response to market conditions – “David Jones Outlines Strategic Plan to Cut Costs” along with their very late in the day online shopping initiatives. It is especially amusing when one observes one of their chief competitors, Net-a-Porter – saying:

“It’s very easy to copy the look and feel, which people have helped themselves generously to,” Massenet said. “But we have 12 years of building ahead [of other sites] and we are sending out 5,000 orders a day as opposed to 20 orders a day and I think it’s very difficult for a business to keep up with that operationally.”

Source: Sydney Morning Herald, How to create an e-empire, 29 Mar 2012

Net-a-Porter is an excellent example of an organisation that has nailed servicing a niche, delivering good product, and ensuring a good customer experience supported by excellent customer service.

The bar has well and truly been raised for traditional organisations. And only those who work out how to reduce friction and deliver seamless service will survive.

As companies embrace the notion of a reputation economy fueled by the power of social platforms this brings a new set of challenges for management and employees.

I was at the Salesforce #cloudcrowd event in Sydney recently and we were discussing this issue with guest speaker

As companies embrace the notion of a reputation economy fueled by the power of social platforms this brings a new set of challenges for management and employees.

I was at the Salesforce #cloudcrowd event in Sydney recently and we were discussing this issue with guest speaker Peter Coffee.

The issue is that companies increasingly require employees to interact online on behalf of the company but using their own persona.

Upon consideration, it is not much different to offline where one meets with business contacts using a real name.  But the difference is that those meetings are mostly written on the wind.  Online interaction is forever. It is an almost permanent record of where you were, what you said, and to whom it was said.

Thus for the employee, the private conversations and meetings of the past have transformed into public online interactions, potentially geotagged and with accompanying photo.

What this is doing is tying the individual’s personal reputation very closely with that of the company in a very public and well documented way. In the past it was relatively easy (especially in a big city) to gloss over a former job and what you really did in it.

But now this will become increasingly difficult as more and more of our business interaction is transacted in public and online.

It will also become increasingly difficult for companies on several levels:

• Firstly, they will find it more challenging to repudiate the activities and actions of employees, since these will be well documented online.
• Secondly, they will find their public reputation increasingly tied explicitly to employee behaviour as played out in various online forums.
• And thirdly, there is the risk that employees will use online forums to share their feelings (both positive and negative), as per the very colourful  examples of Goldman Sachs’ former employee Greg Smith Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs or Google’s James Whittaker Why I Left Google.

Problems for employees include:

• Their online personal behaviour as private citizens can mean missing out on a job. For example, How Facebook could cost you your job! One in five bosses has rejected a job applicant after checking out their profile on social media sites.
• We will continue to see blurring between personal behaviour online as private citizens and our behaviour as employees. For example, Blurring the Lines Between Work and Personal Life on Facebook.

Rawn Shah’s October 2011  presentation gives a nice overview of the issues involved in The Blurring of Job Loyalties, Social Collaboration and Personal Freedom.

One thing is certain, the boundaries between private citizens and their online activity as representatives of a company is starting to blur and this is likely to increase.  It also means that we individuals will increasingly be subject to ongoing and continuous surveillance from companies as well as the government.

Privacy is truly dead.

This video of Dr Deming discussing the state of management in the US from 1984 is strangely prescient. I think this is rather important!

Definitely worth watching and pondering for all of us …

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This video of Dr Deming discussing the state of management in the US from 1984 is strangely prescient. I think this is rather important!

Definitely worth watching and pondering for all of us …

Seth Godin wrote about the the attention economy. But it seems to me that we are also seeing the evolution of an online social recommendation economy.

When we all lived in villages there was a strong recommendation economy, and it was fuelled [...]]]>

Seth Godin wrote about the the attention economy. But it seems to me that we are also seeing the evolution of an online social recommendation economy.

When we all lived in villages there was a strong recommendation economy, and it was fuelled by the fact that everyone knew each other and their reputation. Word of mouth drove choices about which business to patronise and which individuals with whom to socialize. Reputation was everything, and it was protected fiercely on olden days.

With the shift of population to large cities we became disconnected from the hyperlocal reputation economy. But with the digital revolution and the growth of social networking platforms we are seeing a return to the reputation economy for both individuals and businesses.

There is also a growing recommendation economy developing via social media and social networks. This growing recommendation economy is no longer volitional. Instead you are a participant even if you never signed up (refer to my previous post on Klout for some examples).

We are now seeing the growth of explicit social recommendation networks. However, a number of other social networks serve to provide insight into the influence of individuals or brands but these recommendation networks aim to aggregate and rank user’s influence.

Some of the players in this space include:

• Kred
• Peer Index
• Klout
• Empire Avenue
• Linked In

These networks are all aimed at measuring online influence, and this need is largely driven by marketing needs. As traditional media continues to fragment marketers are seeking to identify those influencers who can help them to connect with audiences.

As Mashable summarised back in 2009, mostly these platforms use metrics to assess influence:

“Incoming Traffic – Pageviews, Incoming traffic from search engines, rss subscribers
Incoming Links – Primarily manual links such as blogrolls, in-post deep links
Reader Engagement – Internal searches, time on site
Recommendations – Retweets, share stats
Connections – Number of mutual connections, number of mutual connections on multiple sites
Track Record – Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement
Engagement – How often and long a person has engaged with a service online”

Source: HOW TO Measure Online Influence, Micah Baldwin, 2009

This means that everything we do online is potentially subject to analysis of this nature. And, even if we are participating in ‘private’ social networks, there is the chance that our activity can also be subject to this kind of analysis.

Even if we do not choose to participate in the recommendation economy it is happening, just like it used to happen to everyone in a village.

Along with all of this we are seeing the development of recommendation markets, where people connect and exchange information about the quality of information, connections, work, etc of people or businesses within their networks. Increasingly this kind of recommendation network is driving job search, new business, business connections, and innovation.

This means we need to work out how to benefit from this new environment.

WHAT TO DO

Probably the best advice about managing one’s reputation comes from Maslow via Wayne Dwyer:

“Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.”

And he goes on cite Dr Seuss:

“Be what you are and say what you feel, because those who will mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

From my point of view the only practical response is to keep doing your thing, whatever that might be. To analyse results and take feedback from reliable sources.

But, as I know from experience, if you try to please everyone then everyone ends up unhappy (I’m sure Oscar Wilde said something along those lines too).

Above all we need to accept that we now dwell in a panopticon, and like the villagers of old, we are always under observation in the digital world. This new reality has implications for our comportment online. It means that we need to monitor responses to our activity and adjust our own responses to the current situation.

It also means that even those who do not choose to play in the online arena are playing (whether they like it or not). Reputations are no longer a private matter, instead we live in a digital global village where our reputations are common currency and we rise or fall on the recommendations of others.

This new environment means that we need to remain vigilant, stay connected, and build up social capital to enable us to survive when things do not go well. Just like in a village it is the quality of our relationships that will make life easier.

READING

Some other interesting analyses of this phenomenon include:

• Bertrand Duperrin, Is reputation a new currency?

• Sidneyeve Matrix, Social Job Search

As we move away from the power structures and ways of thinking that governed the twentieth century we are seeing a desperate rearguard action from the power elites who ruled that time.

A good example of this is the film and music [...]]]>

As we move away from the power structures and ways of thinking that governed the twentieth century we are seeing a desperate rearguard action from the power elites who ruled that time.

Dying Dinosaur Industries in their Death Throes

A good example of this is the film and music industries, whose centralized model of creation and distribution is breaking down.

The proposed US anti-piracy legislation to protect film, music and other intellectual property from unauthorized distribution – SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate – has shown deep divides between modern hyperconnected businesses and old world centralized, command-control industries. And it is now reported that the SOPA bill has been shelved after global protests from Google, Wikipedia and others.

The rearguard action by the old industries is also clear in threats against those who fail to support the old industries:

“Consumer group Public Knowledge on Friday accused the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its head, former Sen. Chris Dodd, of trying to intimidate lawmakers into supporting a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills.

In recent days, Dodd and other top Hollywood figures have threatened to cut off campaign donations to politicians who do not support their effort to crackdown on online copyright infringement.”

Source: The Hill: Consumer group accuses Hollywood of ‘threatening politicians’, by Brendan Sasso, 01/20/12 04:08 PM ET

We are seeing increased efforts from the old guard to control people and their communication. But the genie of a hyperconnected populace is out of the bottle. And it cannot be put back. Even if they remove the internet as we know it – free flowing and accessible to all – we will invoke Gilmore’s Law and route around that damage

The Economy and the Death of the Western Middle Class

The death of these old industries has important implications for society. These industries enabled the creation of a well-off middle class in the latter half of the twentieth century.

But with the digital revolution many the economic drivers that created the twentieth century middle class have disppeared, as outlined in this article about Apple and US jobs.

And even in Australia we are seeing the gradual shift of middle class jobs overseas, as in this recent example from Westpac, Ultimate insult: Sacked Westpac workers forced to train replacements.

It is becoming apparent that even new businesses no longer guarantee jobs like they used to. For example: ‘No new jobs, dollars’ in bulk stores.

The truth about job creation is only now beginning to dawn on us, and we are seeing the inevitable social and economic consequences of transferring work from high cost to low cost economies.

People are even starting to ponder which jobs will disappear next – for example Will these 10 jobs disappear in 2012?

The old industries employed sufficient numbers of the western populace to keep them in comfortable consumerist peace. Their children could afford an education and thus improve their lot in life. The idea that each generation would be materially better off than the previous seemed unassailable.

But now it seems that truth might no longer hold. The #Occupy movement is seeking to bring attention to the economic bifurcation of society between the the very well-to-do and the strugglers.

Embracing the Future

Those who are not trapped in the old model are embracing the evolving world that is fuelled by the digital revolution. They are accepting the dispersed, decentralized, and peer-to-peer future.  The old intermediaries are dying (or are in their death throes), and in their place new ones are arising.

The future is about human beings  connecting with each other. It is about collaboration and cooperation. It is about sustainable growth. And it is about making space for people to create new possibilities unconstrained by the behemoths of centralized command and control.

Author Paulo Coelho summed it up nicely on his blog recently:

“As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not.

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey.

Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall.

The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature.

The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.”

Source: My thoughts on S.O.P.A. by Paulo Coelho on January 20, 2012

The old style company, that is the company circa 1880-2000, had firm boundaries and fixed hierarchies in order to function efficiently. But with the advent of digital technology and the consumer social computing revolution there is a seismic shift in how technology is used within companies. There are also [...]]]>

The old style company, that is the company circa 1880-2000, had firm boundaries and fixed hierarchies in order to function efficiently. But with the advent of digital technology and the consumer social computing revolution there is a seismic shift in how technology is used within companies. There are also significant changes in worker expectations and, as a corollary, companies are changing their demands upon workers. Huge power shifts are underway and it is important that we start analyzing them now.

The Past

The technology that enabled communication and control of large and dispersed groups of workers was inefficient and required supplementation by human resources in the form a supervisory and managerial hierarchy. Computer resources were initially tightly held by a few individuals within an organisation due to their high capital cost to acquire. And companies had access to much better technology resources than the average individual could ever hope to acquire.

For example, in 1956 a 5MB hard drive from IBM cost US$50,000, and in 1981 a 5MB Apple hard drive cost US$3,500. At prices like these the average person had little opportunity to acquire such technology.

It was this technology asymmetry that also contributed to the non-porous boundaries of the firm. Information stayed inside the firm and was not easy to share. Instead companies were in charge of their information and shared it only on their own terms. And usually that sharing of information occurred through bought or earned media and through ‘official’ news media channels.

The Present and Near Future

Today companies are grappling with the huge shifts in communications. Newspapers and other news media no longer hold the preeminent position they once held. Corporate communications are no longer about faxing out a press release.  Companies are developing their owned media resources and learning to use the diverse earned media opportunities available now via the internet.

Increasingly companies are requiring workers to develop their own social media and social networking personas on behalf of the company.   Also workers are being required to manage corporate social media channels as part of their jobs.  One challenge with this shift in work to social media channels is that they often need tending 24×7. Thus other workers are beginning to feel the operational demands of 24x7x365 operations that those of us in the IT department have felt for many years now.

Another shift is the control over technology within an organisation. In the past centralized control of technology resources was easy due to high cost and complexity to implement. But now with cloud computing as a commoditized service we see the real risk that other departments can go around centralized procurement and IT to implement whatever takes their fancy.

Gartner has just released their vision for 2012 and note that in 2012 we can expect more cloud and consumerization, less IT control.

Increasingly we are seeing workers bringing their own technology into the workplace – smart phones, tablets, and social computing. And articles directed at CIOs are saying: IT’s future: Bring your own PC-tablet-phone to work.

Thus we are at the beginning of a technology revolution in the office that will see the centralized control that was necessary to achieve economies of scale in the last century wane.

Instead we will see the growth of decentralization driven by cost and user demand pressures.  We will also see increased attempts to control behaviour through data and  monitoring due to the growth in the panopticon as I’ve discussed previously.

The Dangers of Digital Serfdom

My buddy Ray Wang posted recently on the right to be offline. We are facing a world of hyperconnectedness in which we can evolve into digital serfs tethered by our digital devices and an un-free as a slave in ancient times.

The risk is that the boundaries between work and personal time become so blurred that they cease to exist. The risk is that employers consider that, with a wage, they have bought our time as and when they choose to consume it any time of the day or night.

The moves to remove penalty rates for IT workers and others also support this trend. Once the unit cost of a worker is standardized an employer does not care what time of day or night they work.

I cannot articulate the concern we should have for retaining this right to be offline any better than Ray:

“There is one thing that I am very worried about actually, is I think it is of the uttermost importance that we preserve the right to be offline. If we don’t preserve that we’ll loose all our freedoms. It starts with ability to be able to escape … of being offline. And so we can be punished for not being offline. For not being online we cannot be punished. It’s happening right now. We are recreating Skynet, we are recreating Matrix, we are recreating all the things that we would fear on our own. And if we can’t protect that basic right of being able to be offline, and being able to conduct a life offline, we’re in trouble. We are in big trouble.”

I commend Ray’s thoughts to you, check out his video:

I came across an article in Wired Science by Jonah Lehrer titled Do Nice Guys Finish Last?. It had plenty to get me thinking.

Apparently:

“… levels of ‘agreeableness’ are negatively correlated with the earnings of men”

Then:

“There are [...]]]>

I came across an article in Wired Science by Jonah Lehrer titled Do Nice Guys Finish Last?. It had plenty to get me thinking.

Apparently:

“… levels of ‘agreeableness’ are negatively correlated with the earnings of men”

Then:

“There are six facets to agreeableness: trust, straightforwardness, compliance, altruism, modesty and tender-mindedness. ”

Also:

“Women were slightly less likely to get picked for promotion regardless of their personality.”

But:

“Agreeable women weren’t nearly as bad off, earning only 1,100 less.”

This research seems to be anchored in personality trait theory (Costa & McCrae, 1992); and there’s been a lot of theorising around trait theory and leadership over the years. That the facets of agreeableness – trust, straightforwardness, compliance, altruism, modesty and tender-mindedness – might not be considered helpful in some contexts sounds bad.

Why wouldn’t high levels of agreeableness be a good thing?  But when it comes to getting things done being agreeable is not always helpful.

For example, scientific advances rarely come to light from agreeing with everyone else. Instead they come from fighting against the current flow of ideas and consensus.

Getting a new business or new business model off the ground requires something different to agreeableness. It requires passion and vision, it calls for team-building and collaboration, it requires dedication and persistence. And, while some of the facets associated with agreeableness are helpful, they alone will not drive the change through to fruition.

Think about many of the leaders of history, for example: Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Margaret Thatcher, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Theresa, or Winston Churchill.  Not one of them was reputed to be easy to get along with.  They were each, in their own way, not very agreeable. But, love them or not, they got things done.

But perhaps the agreeable people, who didn’t get promoted, are happier?  Where’s the research on that?

However, it is interesting to note that women displaying agreeableness are less badly off than those not displaying it. Thus it seems powerful women remain undervalued, unlike powerful men.

Friction is one of the more important concepts in the world. Many things are either made possible or impeded by friction.

Strike a match and the friction creates a flame. Yet that same kind of friction stops other things from flowing smoothly.

Perhaps the best description of the challenges [...]]]>

Friction is one of the more important concepts in the world. Many things are either made possible or impeded by friction.

Strike a match and the friction creates a flame. Yet that same kind of friction stops other things from flowing smoothly.

Perhaps the best description of the challenges that arise from friction is from the well known military strategist, Clausewitz:

“Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War . . . in War, through the influence of an infinity of petty circumstances, which cannot properly be described on paper, things disappoint us, and we fall short of the mark.”

From: Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Ch. VII

Recently Mark Pesce asked “What happens after we’re all connected?“, and he came up with the answer: “hypereconomics”.

Economics, fuelled by hyperconnectivity and enabled by the removal of friction in processes between people, equals hypereconomics.

And it is this removal of friction in processes, enabled by the internet and mobile technology, that creates the next frontier of opportunities for business.

The combination of mobile accessible applications and peer-to-peer social networks offers an astonishing array of new business opportunities.

In the Arab Spring and Occupy movements we have already begun to see the social and political shifts that are enabled when citizens can communicate and organize effectively through use of mobile technology coupled with social media.

The impact of these political and social movements will necessarily flow on to economic structures. This will create a gap for development of new business models based on removing friction and leveraging peer-to-peer capabilities offered by mobile devices.

Also people are getting used to helping themselves and each other, and the technology is enabling them to act collectively without a great deal of effort. This is the big shift.

We can now collaborate and act collectively even though separated geographically. No longer do we need to meet face-to-face to act. Collective action is enabled and made more efficient with mobile technology in so many hands. And it even facilitates better face-to-face meetings and action (viz. Occupy and the Arab Spring).

I am expecting to see a lot of disintermediation – shifts in the supply chain that that remove some existing intermediary players.

One of the first areas I expect to see this in is new mobile and online peer-to-peer payment models. Another area is aggregation of service providers and potential customers. Up until now aggregating those types of services required large capital investment, but now it just needs a peer-to-peer smart phone application.

If you are an existing economic or financial intermediary it’s time to start planning for this new reality. If you don’t then the dispersed peer-to-peer linked mob might just eat your lunch.

This week I spoke at the Recruitment Technology Evaluation Convention in Sydney. The topic was navigating the hyperconnected world from a recruitment and human resources perspective.

The key issues facing businesses now include: