Management – The Age of the Platform

Postal Vision 2020 Panel

I recently participated on a 47-minute panel at Postal Vision 2020 with Marshall Van Alstyne, Syed Hoda, Larry Weber, and Jeff Jarvis. The topic: how the USPS can embrace platform thinking. It's a lively discussion with some pretty smart cookies.

Panel starts: 8 minutes in Q&A starts: 25:30 in. (Jeff says that he's playing Oprah, but he gives off a distinctly Donohue-type vibe.)

My favorite part occurs at the very end when Jeff

Postal Vision 2020 Keynote

Here's my recent 30-minute keynote address from Postal Vision 2020. I talk about The Age of the Platform, the Gang of Four, and the implications for the postal service. Video courtesy of Ursa Major Associates, copyright 2012.

On Groupon’s Death Watch

In the end of the book, I write about emerging platforms like Force.com, WordPress, and Groupon, among others. If I sat down to write about that topic today, Groupon would certainly not be included. It would be replaced with Kickstarter, Udemy, and a bevy of other promising platforms.

Groupon may in fact be living on borrowed time. The DeathWatch is on for the company, as this RRW piece points out:

OCLC Anaheim Keynote

My 53-minute keynote and Q&A from the Anaheim OCLC event in June of this year is now up. Click here to watch it with the slides, although the video player is a bit small. For the full-screen experience, see below:

Want to Buy My Platform?

RIM is officially reeling and has hired JP Morgan Chase to explore "strategic options." A few months ago, its CEO Thorsten Heins was committed to building a "future-proof platform." How's that going? Doesn't exist. Never will. RIM serves as an instructive example of what not to do in the Age of the Platform: Assume that your ecosystem will come to you. Ignore the consumer. Believe that loyal and typically conservative enterprise customers will always stay with Read More

The Platform Wars Continue

Larry Page will be on Charlie Rose tonight. In this trailer, Page talks about Facebook's lack of openness: Page laments Facebook's lack of openness and hopes that Facebook will "open up" its platform to the mighty search giant. My take: He can keep waiting. Facebook isn't completely open by design. You think that Facebook would be work nearly $100 billion if Google could just index its data and allow people to circumvent Read More

Dan Loeb and Platforms

Google has taken criticism for its recent and controversial stock split. Some wonder if Mark Zuckerberg's 57 percent of voting power in post-IPO Facebook is too much. I don't. Each company wants to prevent a Dan-Loeb-type situation. And it should. Activist shareholders waging proxy fights distract companies from the real work at hand. And that work is never finished in the Age of the Platform--particularly for a company struggling as much as Yahoo! is. Employees Read More

The Inherent Tension Between Management and Innovation

Innovation means failure. Always has. Management at the vast majority of large, conservative companies serve to minimize failure. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have built great platforms because their leaders understand that, to innovate, you have to embrace intelligent risk and uncertainty. And I'm hardly the only one to notice. Ron Ashkenas writes about the difficulty that managers have innovating on HBR.

What prevents companies from innovating better? One possibility is

The Short(er) Long Term

Eric Jackson on Forbes writes about some pretty uncanny ways in which Google resembles Microsoft circa 1999. To me, this is kind of like comparing the assassinations of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln. Eerie similarities, but I don't believe that the Google brass is nearly as complacent as Microsoft in 1999. Remember, Apple was all but dead then and Netscape was the only thing resembling a rival back then. Google was built on disintermediation and Read More

The Problem with Ubiquity

Will Wheaton is angry about a more Plus-centric Google. He's used to using Google in a certain way, a way free from near-constant suggestions about upgrades and +1's. People hate change and, for platform companies, it’s a fine line between evolution/progress and annoying your user base. You want to adapt and innovate without being intrusive. It’s much more art than science. Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook all face the same fundamental Read More