" The very highest leader is barely known Then comes the leader they know and love Then the leader they fear Then the leader they despise.
The leader who does not trust enough will not be trusted. When actions are performed without unnecessary speech
The people will say, ”we did it ourselves.”
Lao Tsu


 

Thought leadership
Don Tapscott

If you are CEO of a specialist company whose success and for that matter survival depends on your intellectual property, knowledge and expertise would be willing to share it globally? This is the basis of the story that begins Chapter 1 of Don Tapscott’s book on Wikinomics. The story relates to the radical action taken by Rob McEwen CRO of Goldcorp Inc who having no real experience in mining, found himself as the majority owner. The company was facing disaster and McEwen was determined to turn things around. At a meeting with his mining team, he remarked that “ we are going to find more gold on this property and we won’t leave this room tonight until we have a plan to find it”. At the end of the meeting he injected some $10 million dollars to fund further exploration. And yes they did discovered more gold but were unable to estimate the size or exact location of the deposit.

At a time when you would expect him to stay at base and encourage his team to get on with the task at hand, McEwen took some time out for personal development. He ended up at a conference at Massachusets Inst. of Technology and heard the story of how Linus Torvald and a of random set of individual soft ware developers created a world class operating system over the internet. The system is Linux and McEwen was even more fascinated to hear how how Torvald was able to make use of thousands of anonymous programmers to test and enhance the programme through their own individual contributions.

McEwen on returning to base promptly instructed his head geologist to publish every scrap of data about their operations going back years ] to share it globally on the web. . “ We will then ask the world to tell us where we are going to find the next six million ounces of gold”.

Employees at Goldcorp wondered whether McEwen was going crazy as mining was a secretive industry and the last thing that you will want to do was to share all your prized data and trade secrets. A year later the Goldcorp Challenge was launched in which McEwen was offering prize money for the best technical advise. Within weeks scientists, engineers, mineralogist, consultants, mathematicians, military personnel bring to bear expertise across a range of disciplines.
To cut a short story even shorter the data and information received from this open collaboration took his $100 million company to one worth $9 billion and boosted his mining yield to eight million ounces [ twice as much as he had predicted].
So what is the message from this story and studies by Tapscott and his team of researchers at New Paradigm. Tapscott research has led him to conclude that “the corporation is going through its biggest change in many decades”. He has identified 4 new forces which are combining to create a perfect storm for change”. These forces are viz:

  • The impact of Web 2:0
  • The rise of the net generation
  • The impact of a social revolution in which web services are used to create platforms for people to self organize and co-create with their peers and
  • An economic revolution.
“ Thanks to the internet and a new generation of users, companies are beginning to conceive, design, develop and distribute products and services in profoundly new ways. The old notion that you have to attract, develop and retain the best and brightest inside your corporate boundaries is becoming null. With costs of collaboration falling precipitously, companies can increasingly source ideas, innovations and uniquely qualified minds from a vast global pool of talent”.

Don Tapscott is an internationally acclaimed thought leader on business strategy and organisation transformation. For over 30 years he has been studying IT and business strategy and has served as a Consultant to numerous corporations. Over the past 5 years his company has carried out several large scale research projects focusing on topics such as transparency as a new force in the economy, the impact of the new web on competitive advantage and the implications of the Net Generation. His latest book WIKINOMICS [2006: Atlantic Books: London] will change the way you think about knowledge transfer and the role of R&D. It will force you to think about the potential value of social networking, generation y and the role of social innovation for service improvement. It is also a demonstration of the capacity and power of self organisation, and mass collaboration.
Tapscott’s work resonates with some of the implications derived from OPEN SPACE thinking and takes it to it’s logical conclusion; individuals are self organising and through the harnessing of Web 2.0 technology can both enrich and upscale service delivery and improvement in more ways than one. Some questions that Tapscott’s work raises include:

  • How can corporations harness the might of mass collaboration where peers come together to create value often outside the walls of the traditional company?
  • How can senior leaders nurture and capitalise on the power of networked models of innovations and value creation?

Don Tapscott is Chief Executive of New Paradigm and Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on business strategy and organisational transformation. His clients include top executives of many of the world’s largest corporations and government leaders from many countries. The Washington Technology Report called him one of the most influential media authorities since Marshall McLuhan.

 

Peter Drucker Emanuel Gobillot Harrison Owen Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff Don Tapscott Dr David Cooperrider Dr Marshall Goldsmith Rosabeth Moss Kanter Prof Lynda Gratton Rod Beckstrom