I just came from dinner party at a beach house. The entire dinner party was then moved to a bonfire on the beach for dessert – brownies, cookies and marshmallows roasted over the fire. We sat around the fire telling outrageous April Fool’s stories and observing the star filled sky. As I was driving home, I realized it was Thursday – still a week night – and tomorrow was another day of work. 🙂
About networks: 2 years ago, I read an interesting book titled, “Competing In A Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World” by Victor Fung, William Fung and Yoram Wind. At the time, I was helping my mother’s fashion business produce a 28 minute infomercial for sale in Europe.
The Fung’s book is based upon the Fung’s experience as “network orchestrators” in the garment and consumer goods industry. The Fungs conclude that global competition is no longer about “firm versus firm” but “network versus network”. They encourage firms to join these networks or practically be squashed by highly orchestrated networks with vast resources. What I like the most about the Fungs is that they are not theorizing academically – they’re doing it. They also see that the present challenges, and those ahead, for a truly flat world as coming from politics and nation states’ bureaucracies slowing down the speed and efficiency of these orchestrated networks.
It’s late and I’ll leave you with this quote from their book:
“A company’s strength lies not as much in the competencies that it possesses as much as in the competencies it can connect to. This means that the capability to connect to competencies – the capability for network orchestration – and the capability for learning might be becoming as important as any firm capabilities”
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Hi Jorge,
I believe you are on a subject that has already started on many fronts.I recently saw President Obama and the French Prime president take questions from the press after a day meeting and the substance of the issues discussed were less important than the thoughts expressed. In an answer the french president stated he anther other world leaders had regular (daily or weekly) had conference calls with obama and he and the other leaders had reached a great level of trust not because they agreed but because obama did what he said whether good or not so good from their view.However,by reaching this consensus of trust these leaders will create a potential voting block among this group which has the potential to be much greater than the sum of its parts. I can see how this applies to the oba and other groups that already see the flat world today.