The Power of Connections: Unleashing Imagination and Reimagining the Future

1. Connect!Tom Peters/01.30.2003

2. All to All

3. “A Big Electronics Show Is All About Connections” —headline, New York Times/ 01.13.2003/ Consumer Electronics Show > COMDEX

4. NOKIAConnecting People

5. UBIQUITY! “It’s the cars, not the tires, that squeal”: NYT/Circuits/10.25.01): E-ZPass (6M in NE), tests with McD’s, gas stations and parking lots next. OnStar (GM/1.5M). Plus: “black boxes,” GPS (the case of the $450 ticket), CA smog offenders.

6. “Dawn Meyerreicks, CTO of the Defense Intelligence Systems Agency, made one of the most fateful military calls of the 21st century. After 9/11 … her office quickly leased all the available transponders covering Central Asia. The implications should change everything about U.S. military thinking in the years ahead. “The U.S. Air Force had kicked off its fight against the Taliban with an ineffective bombing campaign, and Washington was anguishing over whether to send in a few Army divisions. Donald Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to give the initiative to 250 Special Forces already on the ground. They used satellite phones, Predator surveillance drones, and GPS- and laser-based targeting systems to make the air strikes brutally effective.“In effect, they ‘Napsterized’ the battlefield by cutting out the middlemen (much of the military’s command and control) and working directly with the real players. … The data came in so fast that HQ revised operating procedures to allow intelligence analysts and attack planners to work directly together. Their favorite tool, incidentally, was instant messaging over a secure network.”—Ned Desmond/“Broadband’s New Killer App”/Business 2.0/ OCT2002

7. Imagination!

8. Forget>“Learn”“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.”Dee Hock

9. “Most of our predictions are based on very linear thinking. That’s why they will most likely be wrong.”Vinod Khosla, in “GIGATRENDS,” Wired 04.01

10. “There’s no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”Lewis Carroll

11. I’net …… allows you to dream dreams you could never have dreamed before!

12. “Don’t rebuild. Reimagine.”The New York Times Magazine on the future of the WTC space in Lower Manhattan/09.08.2002

13. “Suppose—just suppose—that the Web is a new world we’re just beginning to inhabit. We’re like the earlier European settlers in the United States, living on the edge of the forest. We don’t know what’s there and we don’t know exactly what we need to do to find out: Do we pack mountain climbing gear, desert wear, canoes, or all three? Of course while the settlers may not have known what the geography of the New World was going to be, they at least knew that there was a geography. The Web, on the other hand, has no geography, no landscape. It has no distance. It has nothing natural in it. It has few rules of behavior and fewer lines of authority. Common sense doesn’t hold here, and uncommon sense hasn’t yet emerged.” David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined

14. “Imagine a world where a citizen could search the globe to assemble “my government,” the ultimate in customized,customer-centric services. Health care from the Netherlands, business incorporation in Malaysia …” Don Tapscott

15. “The e-conomy is one of re-intermediation, where new technologies make it possible to radically increase complexity and efficiency with the introduction of new marketplaces. In these markets, value chains constantly reorganize as the demands of the consumer and business change.”Thomas Koulopoulos, Delphi Group

16. Wild, Wacky, Weird!

17. Impact No. 1/ Logistics & Distribution: Wal*Mart … Dell … Amazon.com … Autobytel.com … FedEx … UPS … Ryder … Cisco … Etc. … Etc. … Ad Infinitum.

18. Autobytel:$400.Wal*Mart:13%.Source: BW(05.13.2002)

19. 2.5G, 3G, 4GWindowsSymbianJavaBluetooth Wi-FiPCs-PDAs-Cell“phones”E-business vs. M-businessEtc.

20. NTT/DoCoMo/i-motion/“remote control for your life”/“If Tokyo and DoCoMo are the first capitals of the wireless Internet industry, Helsinki and Nokia have been the wellsprings of mobile telephony—Finland leads the world in both Internet connections and mobile phones per capita.”Source: Howard Rheingold/Smart Mobs

21. Outsider’s view: (1) Billions are being spent, even in a down market. (2) NOBODY HAS A CLUE AS TO WHO THE WINNERS—AND LOSERS—WILL BE. (3) Yet you must play. Now. Hard. Fast.

22. The Real “News”: X1,000,000TowTruckNet.com

23. Yikes!

24. “We’re in the Internet age, and the average patient can’t email their doctor.”Donald Berwick, Harvard Med School

25. “In an era when terrorists use satellite phones and encrypted email,US gatekeepers stand armed against them with pencils and paperwork, and archaic computer systems that don’t talk to each other.”Boston Globe (09.30.2001)

26. “Once devised in Riyadh, the tasking order took hours to get to the Navy’s six aircraft carriers—because the Navy had failed years earlier to procure the proper communications gear that would have connected the Navy with its Air Force counterparts. … To compensate for the lack of communications capability, the Navy was forced to fly a daily cargo mission from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea to Riyadh in order to pick up a computer printout of the air mission tasking order, then fly back to the carriers, run photocopy machines at full tilt, and distribute the documents to the air wing squadrons that were planning the next strike.” –Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War

27. “Many flaws remained—flaws not from poor performance, but from an ingrained command hierarchy and an outmoded concept of war that had taken root during World War II and then during the cold war. Desert Storm was a joint military operation in name rather than in fact. … The battlefield was divided among service components. … The fiefdoms existed not only because of tradition, service rivalry and the egos of the commanders; they were also there because of technological limitations. We did not have the communications capability to do it differently.” –Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War

28. “SOS: Emergency Agencies Often Unable to Talk to Each Other” —headline, p1, USA Today/11.20.2002

29. Defective Orgs!

30. “The organizations we created have become tyrants. They have taken control, holding us fettered, creating barriers that hinder rather than help our businesses. The lines that we drew on our neat organizational diagrams have turned into walls that no one can scale or penetrate or even peer over.”—Frank Lekanne Deprez & René Tissen, Zero Space: Moving Beyond Organizational Limits.

31. “The coefficient of friction associated with the grunge of business is amazing!”Michael Schrage

32. [ Words to Live By …“Hierarchy is an organization with its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer.”Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle,Funky Business]

33. “The corporation as we know it, which is now 120 years old, isnot likely to survive the next 25 years.Legally and financially, yes, but not structurally and economically.”Peter Drucker, Business 2.0 (08.00)

34. “E-business is the final nail in the coffin for bureaucracy at GE.”Jack Welch/GE Annual Report 2000

35. “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy!”The Cluetrain Manifesto

36. Corporate Resistance to “It”“It all goes back to fear of losing control!”The Cluetrain Manifesto

37. m-“On” or Out of the Loop“Managers in Finland always keep their phones on. Customers expect fast reactions. And if you can’t reach a superior, you make many decisions yourself. Managers who want to influence decisions of subordinates must keep their phones open.”—Risto Linturi, Finnish m-guru, in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs

38. “A bureaucrat is an expensive microchip.”Dan Sullivan, consultant and executive coach

39. E.g. …Jeff Immelt: 75% of “admin, back room, finance” “digitalized” in 3 years.Source: BW (01.28.02)

40. BW Cover/02.2003“IS YOUR JOB NEXT? A New Round of GLOBALIZATION Is Sending Upscale Jobs Offshore. They Include Chip Design, Basic Research—even Financial Analysis. Can America Lose These Jobs and Still Prosper?”

41. “The Futility of Size …“[Regarding this issue] the new process of virtualization fully asserts itself. Virtualization is the recognition that territorial size does not solve economic problems. … Economic access must become the substitute for increasing domain.”Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Virtual State

42. [“Don’t own nothin’ if you can help it. If you can, rent your shoes.”F.G.]

43. “The new dependence on productive assets located within someone else’s state represents an unprecedented trust in the integrity and peacefulness of strangers.”“In its pure form – an ideal model toward which many states are tending – the virtual state carries within it the possibility of an entirely new system of world politics.”Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Virtual State

44. “In 25 years, you’ll probably be able to get the sum total of all human knowledge on a personal device.”Greg Blonder, VC [was Chief Technical Adviser for Corporate Strategy @ AT&T] [Barron’s 11.13.2000]

45. “This is the first meter of a 10-kilometer race. Eventually, all markets will come to resemble today’s foreign exchange market.”Hamid Biglari, Head of Corporate Strategy, Citigroup, in “GIGATRENDS”, Wired 04.01

46. Glimpses of the Future

47. “Our entire facility is digital. No paper, no film, no medical records. Nothing. And it’s all integrated—from the lab to X-ray to records to physician order entry. Patients don’t have to wait for anything. The information from the physician’s office is in registration and vice versa. The referring physician is immediately sent an email telling him his patient has shown up. … It’s wireless in-house. We have 800 notebook computers that are wireless. Physicians can walk around with a computer that’s pre-programmed. If the physician wants, we’ll go out and wire their house so they can sit on the couch and connect to the network. They can review a chart from 100 miles away.”—David Veillette, CEO, Indiana Heart Hospital (Healthleaders/12.2002)

48. Read It Closely:“We don’t sell insurance anymore.Wesell speed.”Peter Lewis, Progressive

49. “By combining powerful computer technology and other modern information-based systems we could make a revitalized, leaner military force that is designed to outsee, outmaneuver and outfight any foe.”—Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War

50. From: Weapon v. WeaponTo:Org structure v. Org structure