Final version of the slides I presented in a keynote for Webciety at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany on March 8, 2012. You can see the video of me presenting it here: http://webciety.c.nmdn.net/playlist/list.php#entryId=0_yxkxvl4w or go to my blog FasterFuture.blogspot.com and search for CeBIT

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
• Co-Founder 90:10 Group – a global business lulu.com
consultancy focused on inspiring Open Business to
deliver effective engagement, insight, innovation and
change with the tools and techniques of social
media
• Dad, Husband, Father, 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.
• The how of implementation
should be your last
consideration right now – not
the tech-solution driven first.
• Why buy a screwdriver if you
don’t know what you are
building or why?

5. The future isn’t digital
Not books, but renaissance, end of feudalism,
Changes in the way information flowed changed the
way society was organised

6. What’s the next tool?

7. What’s the next tool?

8. What’s the next tool?

9. What’s the next tool?

10. What’s the next tool?

11. What’s the next tool? The next device?

12. What’s the next tool? The next device?

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:
1. Adapt to need as accurately,
2. Allocate resource as
appropriately
How can organisations seek to match
3. Act to create change as fast?
this? What is their role in the context of
the self-organising future?

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...
*S Bradshaw, A Bowyer and P
“The ability of a 3D printer to print a copy of itself Haufe, "The Intellectual Property
suggests the cost of 3D printing may rapidly fall to Implications of Low-Cost 3D
Printing", (2010)
become a widely-available technology.”

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 Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D
universal: eg laundries vs washing Printing", (2010)
machines; 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 of 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
Discover and innovation
Understand introduce Surface what Better-fit
and express those who the group Act to fix it solutions
your Purpose share your wants to fix Efficient
Purpose
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 Operational
Operational
Operational
best adapted to accessing
Learning | Processes | Guides
the riches of the
networked world.
Strategic
• To win you must become
more like an Open Principles | Rules
Business – built on the
principles of platform
thinking.
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
A fundamental 21st century choice: To join the new -
or make the old more efficiently. One has a future.

31. 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, changing
work.

32. 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'.

33. 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 - giving the old ways a
little more life
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)
No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are people
Messages vs Products
you do things to. Open Business urges you to think about Customers vs Partners
partners to work with instead, to join with and be supported by
the org in delivering the things all parties want - all partners want.

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

37. Thank you
Twitter: @davidcushman
Linkedin.com/in/
davidcushman
FasterFuture.blogspot.com