RSA Conference Exhibitor List 2024 - Exhibitors Data
How the web changes the organisation of business - and the business of organisation
1. The door the web is opening
How the web changes the business of organisation
and the organisation of business
David Cushman, 90:10 Group
2. @davidcushman FasterFuture.blogspot.com
david@ninety10group.com The Power of the Network
• 20+ years in traditional media – 12 of which in
digital
• Blogging since 1999.
• Author of The Power of the Network and the
forthcoming Platform Thinking: How the web
changes the business of organisation and the
organisation of business.
• Ex Digital Development Director Bauer Media
• Ex Director of Social Media at Brando Social
• Board Trustee Citizens Online lulu.com
• Co-Founder 90:10 Group – a global business
consultancy focused on inspiring Open Business
through social tools , techniques and technologies.
• Dad, Husband, Son, Brother
• www.Ninety10group.com
linkedin.com/in/davidcushman
3. What am I talking about?
• I’d like us to think about how and
why the web is such a
disruptive, unstoppable, force
• How it means so much about the
world we know is changing and
must change
• How it opens a door to a better
way of being a business
• The crucial differences between
social and open business
4. Why am I talking about this?
• Because you must prepare to
change – not simply how you do
things, but what you do and WHY
you do them.
• Why buy a screwdriver if you
don’t know what you are building
or why?
• The how of implementation
should be your last consideration
right now – not the tech-solution
driven first.
13. Don’t need to worry about that
• Worry less about
what the tech is
• Understand what
people are
doing, with each
other, with the
tech
14. The future is self-organised
• The social technologies we
now have bring people
together; people who care
about the same things.
• They lower the cost of group
forming.
• Groups (Communities of
Purpose, less of friends) lower
the cost of action.
• They find each other, they
create their own content, they
distribute it to each other.
15. Keep Aaron Cutting
£35k raised and back in business
Not by an age-related charity... But by people who cared. And could.
16. #Riotcleanup
Conversation – aggregation - action
• #riotcleanup, was started shortly
after midnight by Dan
Thompson, who runs a social
initiative aimed at encouraging
people to use empty shops and
open spaces.
• By 10am Monday, the tag was
the top trending topic in the
UK, and the second worldwide.
• Can centrally
organised, monolithic
hierarchies: How can orgs seek to match this? What is
1. Adapt to need as accurately, their role in the context of the self-organising
2. Allocate resource as future?
appropriately
3. Act to create change as fast?
17. The new reality 3D printing (desktop factories) reveals
Home factories to have the impact and reach of PCs
• 3D printing is a few short years away from having the
impact and reach of the home pc*
• Those who thought the disruption delivered by the
web ends at movies, music and paid-for
content, must take a deep breath and imagine this:
“(We) may be heading to a world in
which people do not buy consumer
goods but download them from the
web to print them themselves...
“The ability of a 3D printer to print a copy of itself
*S Bradshaw, A Bowyer and P
suggests the cost of 3D printing may rapidly fall to Haufe, "The Intellectual Property
become a widely-available technology.” Implications of Low-Cost 3D
Printing", (2010)
18. What about economies of scale?
The future is a more widely distributed, less centrally organised place
• What of economies of scale? That's
the howl heard against serving of
micro-niches (in which users shape
products to their fitness
landscape, compared to the often
wasteful ill-fit of the lowest-common-
denominators of mass production).
The future is a more widely
distributed, less centrally
organised place...
*S Bradshaw, A Bowyer and P Haufe, "The
• Economies of scale are not universal:
Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D
eg laundries vs washing machines; Printing", (2010)
Electricity in power stations vs
generated by individual photovoltaics
on everyone’s roof. Home printer vs
photo-processing factories.
19. Niche and decentralised doesn’t mean alone
Our social nature drives our desire to connect
• Our preference, as social beings, is to work
with others. We are not silos and we will not
produce, customise or replicate in silos.
• The web is not for taking from (ie searching for a product to
download and print out). It is for connecting us, for making
with (others).
• Through it we connect with people aiming to solve the same
problem as us in real-time.
• Through those relationships our preferences are shaped.
• When we find each other we need effective ways of
surfacing our best ways forward - and support in reducing
the cost of delivering those solutions/fixes/next steps.
20. We want to make together
The space for the organisation
• Even a world in which we all have a home factory
leaves a role for the organisation – provided it is
one which takes a supporting – platform
approach.
• The very process of making together delivers
better results for those with shared purpose (none
of us is as clever as all of us, after all...)
• Platform Organisations bring us together
and help us discover successful collective
solutions.
• The expertise they contribute will be another
value-add.
• Their ability to bring us together to source raw
materials at a collective price, another.
21. Where does the means of production reside?
3D printing is the new delivery truck
• 3D printing is one of the ways in which the
outcome is delivered. It's the new delivery truck.
The web - and the relationships it enables - retains
its role as means of production.
Means of production = the machinery to
produce... but that does not mean the device.
In a mass production world the connection
between the machinery and the process is clearer.
• A newspaper owner needed to own a printing
press. They also needed to employ
writers, photographers, editors etc to produce the
content.
• Which was the means of production? The printing
press or the producers of the content? The two
were so tightly connected it didn't matter.
22. The org isn’t the maker – it’s the supporter of makers
3D printing reveals the need for platform thinking
• On the web the owner of the means of production is the
person who creates the content. This was always so. In the
past the owner of the means or production of content had
no access to the printing press. Now they have the web
and everyone is a publisher.
• The same is true of factories where the production line is
the equivalent of the printing press. In a world in which
everyone has access to their own production line (a home
3D printer) the real means of production is revealed as
those coming up with the ideas, process and required
designs.
• 3D printing throws into sharp relief the
need for organisations to think of
themselves far less as the makers of, and
far more the supporters of the makers
of, 'their' products.
23. The role of the organisation – a platform for ‘making with’
Purpose drives the ‘why’ someone would choose to make with you.
A platform organisation uses its available resources to
find, connect and support those who share its Purpose.
Value
innovation
Discover and Better-fit
Understand and Surface what
introduce those
express your
who share your the group Act to fix it solutions
Purpose wants to fix
Purpose More
efficient
marketing
24. Platforms lower the cost of relevant action
Making use of what we have in abundance – the desire to connect
• They bring together people who
believe in a cause – in a purpose.
• When they gather they may find they
have more than cash to give;
skills, ideas, suggestions for
improvements
• They may find they care enough
about those ideas that they are
prepared not only to give but to act to
make things better.
25. The journey
Three Steps
• Traditional orgs are not best 1. Operational
adapted to accessing the
riches of the networked Learning Processes Guides
world.
• To win you must become 2. Strategic
more like an Open Business
Principles Rules
– built on the principles of
platform thinking.
3. Organisational
Open Platform
26. Step 1: Operational
A self-sustaining model for delivering
direct insights, best-fit products and
services and efficient social media
marketing.
Typical platform deliverables include:
• Process for understanding online
conversation and deriving insight from it,
• A toolkit selected for monitoring online
conversation, (learning faster)
• Improved internal information flows and
workflows (speeding response).
• Bespoke training, guidelines and
governance (with documentation),
• Support for internal evangelists
• An org-specific way of co-creation
designed to deliver best-fit social media
tactics with relevant communities (building
relevance).
27. Step 2: Strategic - rules of success
1. Have something to believe in.
What else have you got?
2. Don’t do stuff to people. Make
stuff with people. That way it’ll be a
better fit and matter more.
3. We don’t connect to be
marketed to. No one forms groups
or resides in communities to be
marketed to. Ask yourself why
groups DO form.
4. We do what the other monkeys
around us do. Then post rationalise.
This matters.
5. There are powerful connections
between circumstances and
behaviour. Do not ignore them.
28. Step 3: Organisational:
Become an Open Business – a platform to achieve - with people
A platform organisation uses its available resources
to find, connect and support those who share its
Purpose.
29. Not just a marketing solution
It’s a way of making better business
• It’s about much more than
message delivery, more
even than changing
behaviour.
• It is the future of the
business of business;
• For the way things get made
and made better, for how
services get created and
how ideas get shared
• It is the new way the world
gets changed
30. Don’t manage channels, create value
Even governments can play...
• Instead of using digital to
‘channel manage’ use it to
create value.
• 1m-plus jobs lost in the UK
• We can manage their
relationship with welfare more
efficiently
OR
• We can support them to find
others who share their
ambitions and need each
others’ skills to build new
businesses they all believe in
| 13 January 2008 | 30
| Course Title
31. Why Open, not ‘Social’ business
3 key distinctions focus on making with, not doing to
1. It's not about the tools - it is about behaviours:
Often social business conversations focus on implementing
software. Open Business urges you to think Behaviours first.
What are people doing, what can and will they do? Start with
tools and you’ll start in the wrong place.
2. Think less about messages and more about products:
Open Business makes things with the people for whom they
are intended; for the best possible fit with real need; for
efficiency; for results people care about. Messages are an
outcome of this - not its purpose. Talk 'social' and all roads
will lead you back to messages.
Tools vs Behaviours
3. Ditch the customer (love your partner) Messages vs Products
No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are
people you do things to. Open Business urges you to think
Customers vs Partners
about partners to work with instead, to join with and be
supported by the org in delivering the things all parties want
- all partners want.
32. The revolution will not be automated
Look beyond tools
• The revolution will not be
automated.
• It will not be delivered as a
turn-key solution or As A
Service.
• There will be no button to
hit, switch to throw or
command centre from which to
run it.
• The revolution will be
hard, human, challenging, chan
ging work.
33. Prepare to change what you do and WHY you do it
How you do it should be the last consideration, not the first
• Without the will to undergo cultural change all the tech
will do is smear a little make up on the corpse of the past
and prop it up in a chair. That won't fool anyone for long.
• Treat me like a customer and I will buy your stuff. Treat
me like a partner and I will help you make it.
• No console has a 'treat me like a partner', button.
• No console has an 'understand behavioural change'
function.
• Show me the console with 'make better messages' on it -
let alone 'make better products and services'.
34. Scaling your resources
It’s why we’re called 90:10
• The people who can make the biggest difference to your
company or organisation don’t work for it.
• Adapting to the connected world means that they can
35. Summary
• The future isn’t digital, it is self-
organised.
• When people can self-organise, the role
of the organisation has to change.
• Your role is to become a supporting,
open business platform to make change
with those who believe as you do.
• Your first step is to understand WHY you
are building something, then what that
something is. Only then should you
consider how you will do it.
36. Contact
David Cushman
Co-Founder 90:10 Group
Managing Director 90:10 UK
46-47 Britton St,
London EC1 M5UJ
T. +44 (0)207 253 0354
M. +44 (0)7736 353590
david@ninety10group.com
T. 0207 841 2745
M. 07736 353590
When the printing press arrived I daresay there were futurists and consultants of every hue (likely called diviners and astrologers back then) who predicted the future was all about paper – and big clanky printing presses.But it wasn’t – it was about the impact of new information flows and how people and society changed in response to this new freer, less church/state controlled flow of informationJust as now, the future is not about the tools and the platforms we use to exchange information – it is about what changes as a result of their use – what we discover about ourselvesIt is self-organising.