the age of synthesis

August 27th, 2009 • posts i've written

The corporations we know and recognize today were built by amassing information. Barriers to communication required these monoliths of knowledge and know-how. Producing, promoting, and selling a product was incredibly difficult and the people inside these organizations had to be skilled at retaining this information.

Times have changed.

Information has been redistributed.

Information critical to commerce is, more than ever, spread across the marketplace. The next generation of businesses are realizing that information flows more than ever before; and that synthesizing what’s needed into strategy, and allowing the rest to remain the purview of smaller and smaller business units is the way forward.

This also means that the type of people needed within an organization has changed.

We need people that can deftly oversee streams of information, suss out the interesting bits, and combine them to create something new. We need people that can manage multiple ongoing partnerships and keep an eye out for new ones. We need people unafraid of change and unwilling to repeat the past year’s mistakes.

Related posts:

1. how to protest in the age of twitter
2. the organization should adapt to its talent
3. we need new organizational forms

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