- The future is in coordinating personbytes of knowledge: It’s hard to get knowledge into people. Each person only holds a personbyte of knowledge, which represents an enormous coordination problem in a peoplebyte world. This problem of coordination is addressed through organizations and networks.
- Diversity is incredibly powerful in an increasingly uncertain world: Diversity results in a larger possibilities set and generates creativity from productive friction – if you can mitigate the coordination costs of diversity, either through empathy or technology. Competitive advantage comes from learning faster than everyone else. Across countries, diversity is predictive of economic success and future growth.
- A nonzero-sum game culture can motivate people to collaborate – a well-designed game oriented towards common objectives can create a framework for mutual collaboration.
- Control inhibits adoption: Open source works because it’s not just altruistic – it spurs adoption and allows technology to cross the chasm. A lot of great technology dies because there’s too much control.
- Importance of humility in open innovation: Open innovation is not top-down. You lead by being custodian of a process. You never say you're running something or someone works for you. You credential yourself by being effective, which works because the world is becoming increasing transparent.
- Formal authority is not the same as influence: In analyses of networks, the most influential person was often a lower-level manager who worked across functions and offices. Relationships drove influence in an organization more than seniority. People gravitate to those they have met face-to-face with.
- Ecosystems rather than monoliths: In a world of complexity and where the future is unevenly distributed, you don't try to understand the whole thing. One person cannot understand the whole system. Solutions that emerge are "small pieces loosely joined." You throw away your well-drawn map because it inhibits serendipity. When you embrace the "power of pull", you are allowing yourself to "get lucky." Serendipity is not randomness – it’s an approach to managing the randomness in the world.
- Technology can supplant process: Technology can perform some of the same jobs that process used to. For instance, it can help manage accountability through visibility, as opposed to structured oversight.
- Innovation has become cheap, so we can “plan” by building: Because of the declining cost of innovation, you can now "plan" by placing yourself under the constraint / rigor of having to make something. In big conservative Japanese companies, the feasibility study can cost more than the project, which makes no sense. In a way, the “power of pull” is the ultimate just-in-time strategy.
- Hardware innovation is tracing software innovation: It’s “hardware as software” – there’s embedded knowledge in hardware that is subject to the same explosive forces as the software innovation of the past two decades. Hardware innovation is advancing extremely quickly right now in informal groups and communities.
- Leverage local hubs with existing real communities – there’s a temptation to address the large busy hubs in an organization or network but “demand” for resources and bandwidth in the busier hubs is often greater than supply.
- Emotions are contagious – both negative and positive. It is hard to happy and productive when you are surrounded by people who are not. Human networks are designed to magnify the things they are seeded with, good or bad.
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