According to JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design, there is a genuine war for talent.
JP Ranagaswami
(Credit: Dan Farber)But the way to attract talent isn't with the most money or best perks but through openness, he said, speaking at Supernova 2008. Companies need to be open to competition, such as partnering with competitors in some areas; open to innovation in terms of creating an environment that encourages new ideas; and open to changes, Rangaswami said.
The talent pool comes from both inside and outside a firm. "Open, multisided platforms are the only way to get to the talent pool," Rangaswami explained. "Once you assume you are in a war for talent, the root to competition is network-based and multisided in terms of supply chain, partners, customers, competitors, and employees," Rangaswami said. "It means you have to set up an environment where all can participate, which is exactly the sort of thing that works without lock in. The way to keep an ecosystem in balance turns out to be the value a community brings."
As part of the value of openness, BT is exposing its assets to the market openly, with widgets, SDKs, and Web services, and investing in open-source projects. BT acquired Osmosoft, the maker of TiddleyWiki, in 2007. It had one person and no assets, but an open community laden with talent, Rangaswami said.
"The issue is being able to connect to people, and to lower transaction and repair costs. The market is about network-based competition...about institutions and relationships, not about businesses and portfolios. We have to be able to reengineer who we are," Rangaswami said. "The talent coming out of schools today will make choices based on which firms have the most open and transparent set of values. Openness means having no place to hide...it is changing the way we think. It is no longer an option. It's an ecosystem rather than a set of hierarchical things."
"We are not really wired to grok massive networks of billions of people and billions of connections." That's how Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School kicked off Supernova 2008 in San Francisco. The new study of network science hasn't evolved to a point where we understand enough about the properties of networks to apply the learnings to everyday life and social action.
Clay Shirky
(Credit: Dan Farber)Clay Shirky , adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, talked about collective action as a network dynamic. It turns out most of the examples of real world collective action are about stoppage, Shirky said. "Protest is a normal form of coordinated action," he said.
The challenge is supporting collective action in an easy way for cultural, social, political or any other domain beyond stoppage scenarios. Shirky outlined how density and continuity, as well as reciprocal altruism, are important, but typically not applicable on a large scale. "You get barn raisings in small towns, not in large cities unless small social networks are embedded in larger networks," Shirky said.
"If density and continuity are precursors to social action, how do we invent them?," he asked. "Our job is to do by design a lot of things where we used to get value from inconvenience," Shirky answered. An example of the role of inconvenience is the fact that in past generations people didn't move around much, and were concentrated in smaller groups. The Internet allows for networks to be highly distributed and composed of millions of people.
As an analogy, the development of the GPL (GNU Public License) by Richard Stallman took a few decades to be viewed as a useful idea that could be broadly applied. Some early examples of designs that enhance larger scale networking exist, such as the Virtual Company Project, which is building online tools for helping groups create and implement governance rules for collaboration.
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