wow. it’s not every day you get to hear a TED talk validating ideas you wrote up 10+ years ago.
back in 1998, i wrote a paper called the inviting organization emerges, suggesting that a fast company magazine cover story was wrong: the new strategic question was not “how digital is your company,” but had gone beyond that, to “how inviting is your organization?” getting the question right mattered because everytime it changes, businesses need to rethink their answers, in terms of talent, customers, speed and finance.
home sick this week, trying to ease my (very literally) feverish mind, i stumbled upon a lisa gansky TED talk about the future of business. it seems that what i was calling “markets” and “marketplaces,” she and others are now calling “mesh,” “sharing” and “platforms.” specifically, she says, “platforms = invitations” and notes the success of apple, facebook, netflix, zipcar and others in the last ten years. she makes my 1998 paper look pretty good.