By Regan Kohlhardt
Re-Vision Labs Fellow Emeritus

When I’ve talked to people about what RVL does – building community, both within a business and outside of it – one of the more typical responses I get back is, “Ah, like Google.” I’ve always thought this response was both amusing and entirely appropriate. Amusing because the word ‘community’ doesn’t really bring to mind the world’s biggest search, a technological tool for the masses; Appropriate because Google really has excelled in creating itself an excellent reputation through the cultivation of community.

Below are 4 Lessons from Google on how to create a stellar reputation as a charismatic and well-meaning company:

1. Doodle

Nearly everyone who has signed onto the internet and carried out a search on Google has noticed that the Google logo changes from time to time depending on certain holidays or events. This is a very subtle quirk of Google’s efforts to create a colorful, creative, and friendly aura around its brand. According to Google’s website, the Doodle has become both quite popular with users and integral to the brand’s identity. Apparently, some users even collect the Doodles.

The important  take-home note from the Doodle is that it represents Google’s willingness to have fun, show a little personality, and ultimately relate to its consumers.

I love the Doodle. I have to admit, it makes me happy when I see a new Google Doodle online. If every company’s objective is to make its consumers happy, then Google has definitely succeeded on this front.

2. Keep the employees happy

Keeping the employees happy has made Google famous as one of the best company’s to work for in the world. Fortune Magazine has ranked Google in the top 5 of its 100 Best Companies to Work For listing for three years in a row.

With everything from on-site daycare and gourmet foods to nap pods, dental services, and recreational facilities, Google strives for employee contentment.

It also strives to keep its employees working as much as possible for as long as possible. All of these extra amenities seem fantastic, but let’s not forget the original purpose of them: to extract more work form Google employees. If you never have to leave work to eat, to go to the dentist, to work out, or to see your kids, you’ll end up spending more time at work, and subsequently, you’ll end up doing more work.

Regardless of the long hours, the Google-plex is legendary for trying to please employees, and that reputation serves the company well. When I’ve spoken personally with people about Google, they tend to get this dreamy look in their eyes as they start listing off the amazing features that the company has to keep its employees innovative and happy: bean bags and balls to sit on, work hours dedicated to exploring personal ideas and projects for Google, the afore-mentioned nap pods, health services, etc etc. The place sounds like a working paradise!

3. Have an environmental conscience

Google is working towards a neutral carbon footprint. The company is working to make its own processes more environmentally friendly, to source its electricity from renewable sources (and ultimately work towards making renewable energy cheaper than traditional forms), and to invest in projects that will offset greenhouse gases (see the Google Blog for more info).

Why? Why should they care? Would it really drive business away from their search engine if they did nothing about the environment?

The answer lies in the fact that Google wants to appear to be on the side of the people. That’s why it has the Doodles and happy-employee programs. It doesn’t want to come off as a cold, metallic tool that a search engine could otherwise come across as.

Investing in the environment is synonymous to saying to users, “Google cares about you and your lot. We want to help.” That alone can win people over.

4. Don’t be evil

Finally, Google’s unofficial and already famous company motto is: Don’t be evil. It’s actually stated in their company philosophy as “you can make money without doing evil.”

This refreshing. Money-making enterprises don’t have to be evil and based off greed! How novel!

Google has made its stance on evil fairly obvious in its recent interactions with China. The company has recently made it clear to China that censorship regarding the internet is not compatible with the Google company motto.

A corporate giant taking a stand against one of the world’s super powers. Indeed, it would appear we have a battle of the titans on hand. Who will win out? Democracy on the web or governmental control?

Whether or not the act is ultimately successful in achieving internet democracy in China, Google’s stance on China has once again proven that the company is not just a greedy, profit snatching corporation. Google has a conscience, and people like that in a company.

For interest sake, I’ve pasted the entire list of Google’s corporate philosophy below. The bottom line that I want to communicate is that corporate success lies not just in a good product and good financial figures, it also lies in working with the people who are consuming the company’s product.

In other words, be fun, schmooze the people who work for you (they’ll do better work!), hug trees (within reason – tree hugging extremists are NOT attractive), and and don’t be evil – the people will follow.

Google Philosophy

1. focus on the user and all else will follow
2. it’s best to do one thing really, really well
3. fast is better than slow
4. democracy on the web works
5. you don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer
6. you can make money without doing evil
7. there’s always more information out there
8. the need for information crosses all borders
9. you can be serious without a suit
10. great just isn’t good enough

Last Friday I checked out Globe 2010, a Vancouver-based fair dedicated to doing business in green. The fair is “one of the world’s largest and longest-running events dedicated to the business of the environment” and was fairly spectacular in terms of exhibitors and attendees. Exhibitors paid over $3,000 dollars for a booth. This goes to show you that doing business in green does not mean that running around dressed like a hippie giving out free hugs and cookies is the best and only way to promote your business.

Being green means serious business. The Globe 2010 company representatives were fully decked out in suits and ties (though yes, there were a few t-shirts and slacks. Vancouver has never been your most formal city), some of the booths resembled elaborate lounges, and wow, the schmoozing and networking demonstrations were definitely on par with any other corporate affair!

But I digress from my original intention of writing about Globe 2010. There was one company that caught my interest in particular at the fair: Ecosystem Restoration Associates (ERA).

ERA is a Vancouver-based company which focuses on the restoration of degraded ecosystems primarily in British Columbia’s West Coast temperate rainforest areas. The company is currently in the planning phase of carrying out restoration projects abroad in developing countries. In simpler diction, ERA plants a lot baby trees in areas where they’ve all been cut down. Of course they do this keeping in mind the genetic specificity of the area they’re planting in and working with local communities as much as possible to guarantee some sense of longevity for the new trees.

What really caught my interest about ERA is not that it’s effectively battling the world’s climate change woes by planting a lot of trees or that it’s working as diligently as possible with local communities, rather it’s the way that ERA makes money that I thought was really quite intriguing.

ERA isn’t a non-profit like a lot of ‘do-gooding, tree hugging’ companies might be. Instead, it makes it’s money by selling the carbon offsets of its projects to paying customers on the carbon market.

We’ve all heard of the carbon market. It’s had a fairly dominating role in the news recently, but I guess I’ve been a bit fuzzy on the details. I assumed it was mostly a cap and trade system limited to transactions within particular industries or between countries. What I didn’t realize is that there’s an inter-industry carbon market where companies like Shell Oil can purchase carbon offsets from companies like ERA so that they can tout their brand as green.

Furthermore, I had no idea that an entire company can run on the profits made in the carbon market. In any other circumstance, I would have thought an ecosystem restoration company was either paid by the government to take on certain projects or operated entirely as a non-profit. ERA, however, is a for-profit company. Its owners aren’t even necessarily concerned for the environment. “They’re in it to make money,” as one of the reps at the ERA booth told me.

Fascinating. Selling green really can be good business.

But is selling green – specifically selling green on the carbon market – really good business in all senses of the word ‘good’? Can we view these carbon offset producers as having the same sense of corporate social and environmental responsibility as other organizations?

ERA might be making a profit, but  I couldn’t help but bring up the point with the ERA reps that allowing companies like Shell whose everyday activities have a substantially detrimental impact on the environment to purchase carbon offsets from another company is a bit of a cop-out.

Yes, you could argue that the money Shell purchases offsets with will eventually make its way as an added cost to consumers of Shell products. Shell products therefore become more expensive, and therefore consumers will slowly shift to a cheaper product. In some senses, Shell is being forced to incorporate its negative externalities into its business plan.

However, for some reason, the practice of buying carbon offsets still bothers me to some extent. I agree with the ERA rep that I was speaking with: companies who purchase carbon offsets are better than companies that do nothing at all, and if there’s a business model for ERA to profit from in selling those carbon offsets by planting more trees, then by all means, go ERA. We have to start somewhere in our fight for more sustainable lifestyles.

Something still rankles.

After some snooping around on the internet, I found an article that perfectly describes why the sale of carbon offsets bothers me: It’s almost synonymous to the ‘sale of indulgence’ practices of the Catholic Church throughout and beyond the Middle Ages.

“Catholic doctrine maintains that to avoid time in Purgatory after you die, you need to expiate your sins via some sort of punishment or task that is an external manifestation of your repentance. The idea was that the clergy were doing more of such actions than their meager sins demanded, so they effectively had a surplus of good deeds … these could be sold as indulgences to sinners who had money, but not necessarily the time or inclination to repent for themselves.”

-Smith, Kevin. “The Carbon Neural Myth: Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins.” The Carbon Watch. 2007.

With the sale of indulgences, people who were sinners, who were thieves, murderers, rapists, what-have-you, could buy their way into Heaven.

Isn’t the sale of carbon offsets similar to this? Companies who rape and pillage the earth and who have practically no environmental conscience themselves beyond what’s required for good publicity, can now buy their way into being green?

The sale of indulgences culminated in paramount corruption and eventually caused the complete reformation of the Catholic Church in the 16th century. Could the carbon market ever culminate in a similar kind of corruption?

Carbon Indulgences

The above argument is a bit left winged, I’ll admit. You can definitely draw some parallels between the sale of carbon offsets and the sale of indulgences, but I don’t realistically think the carbon market will follow the way of the Catholic Church into corruption.

As with any venture meant to improve the lot of the greater good, the complexities need to be examined especially with regard to guaranteeing the permanence of carbon offset projects (if all of the planted trees are cut down, they’ll merely add to the carbon in the atmosphere), checks and balances have to be put in place, and transparency must be guaranteed.

ERA could be on their way to incorporating all of these different features. The representatives I spoke with promised a careful, well-researched procedure when looking to carry out their projects in developing nations noting in particular that they work in politically stable areas with local non-profits and community leaders; ERA projects are evaluated by a third party in terms of what value they have on the carbon market; and the representatives seemed open and willing to discuss their business procedures, even admitting upfront that Shell is their biggest customers (I should note that I ran into an individual who works with ERA’s biggest competitor at the Globe 2010 Fair. He claimed that ERA has a lot of ground yet to break in terms of transparency).

On the other hand, ERA is facing enormous complexities in guaranteeing the value of the carbon offsets it sells. The future is unpredictable, and if ERA is hoping to work with individual communities abroad, they best be ready to do battle with an infinite number of complexities.

I’ll end by directing any interested parties to a Canadian Broadcast Company podcast which focuses on the good and the bad of carbon offset sales and which features ERA CEO Robert Falls: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20091005_21132.mp3.

If there’s one thing I took away from university, it’s that life is complex. Silver bullets, perfect solutions, and fairy tale endings just aren’t a part of reality.

I’m afraid that I may be guilty of having forgotten that little lesson in my recent espousing of community.  Though I not have said it outright in my previous blogs, I’ve been of the illusion that community is be-all and end-all of our world’s problems. “Community will make us more sustainable! We’ll treat the environment with respect! We’ll treat each other with respect! We’ll be economically successful! Everyone will be happy! Everyone will live happily ever after!”

Who am I kidding? Community is just as complex as life; indeed, how could it not be? It’s part of life.

It turns out I’m not the only one who has been ‘romanticizing the commons.’ I’ve picked up a book recently called Communities and the Environment, and according to its editors Arun Agrawal and Clark C. Gibson, it seems like it’s a relatively common thing for people to romanticize about the commons these days.

You even see large, prestigious NGOs like the World Bank and UN espousing community just as much as I do! We’ve become disenchanted with the idea that technology will lead us to a Utopia of sorts. We’ve even started to reject the idea that technology can help us at all, so we’ve turned back to the past for answers to a life before technology, decentralization, and the dissolution of community culture.

Unfortunately, as is usually the case, our current ideas of the past don’t reflect the reality of the past particularly well. We have these romanticized images of humans living in small communities in harmony with their environments, and now we (or at least some of us) think the solution to our current problems is to return to this state of small community driven lives.

Wrong!

Community can be good, yes. It can often be incredibly useful in some areas, but it is not this ideal solution to all of our problems that it has been made up to be!

As Agrawal and Clark C. Gibson point out, people who romanticize community as our silver bullet are usually thinking of a mythic version of community. That is, they’re thinking of a community that has a homogenous social structure, that is a single spatial unit, and that is made up of members who have shared norms (Agrawal, Gibson). Conservation groups and individuals have often advocated for community under this definition. In terms of resource management, such a homogeneous group would see it as being in their own interest to manage their resources sustainably. Therefore, some conservation groups would argue, community-based conservation efforts are the only way to pursue conservation.

But this is an illusion! As my one important lesson from university has taught me, life is complex! Community is complex!

Agrawal and Gibson pointed out in Communities and the Environment that communities are:

• Not homogeneous in terms of their social structure. Individuals within communities often have different levels of power or political influence.
• Not restricted to one locale. Communities can be mobile, they may share their environment with other communities, or they may take advantage of resources that are mobile
• Not automatically indicative of a group of people who have shared norms. Norms differ from person to person depending on occupation, family background, external influences, etc etc.

In other words, communities are complex. They are not a homogeneous unit that selflessly throws itself into projects of sustainability and general do-gooding. They are made up of individuals who have different motivations, different beliefs, different levels of influence, and different backgrounds. The intricacies of the interactions between community members, between different community, and between communities and external influences are endless.

Here’s the take home message: For anyone looking to cultivate community themselves, whether for a business, an organization, or anything else, they should keep in mind that communities are complicated entities. They can be unpredictable, uncooperative, and ineffective….they can also be extremely successful in serving whatever effect you want them to serve, but this means they have to be deployed with respect, care, and consideration.

Back in December, ‘09, the Nobel Foundations announced Elinor Ostrom as a recipient of the prestigious Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. I remember hearing the announcement on the radio and fleetingly thinking to myself, “First woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, that’s neat, good for her.” I did not note, I’ll admit, why Ostrom received the prize or what particular area her work is in – perhaps because I was tackling extremely rainy roads and night driving just outside of Seattle.

Just recently, Ostrom’s name came to my attention again, and this time, I did look up her area of work. As it turns out, her research falls right in line with my own curiosity about the role of community in our world.

To explicate, I’ll try to sum up Ostrom’s work:

Much of today’s economic thought is structured around Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons theory. The Tragedy of the Commons model basically states that people will inevitably pursue personal gain at the expense of a group where a common resource is concerned (see my previous blog entry for an explanation of the Tragedy of the Commons). The end result of self-interested individuals sharing a commons is eventual degradation of the commons. Garrett Hardin’s suggested solution to this tragedy is a) privatization of resources, or b) socialism where nobody owns the resource. In other words, he advocates against communally managed resources (“Revisiting the Commons”).

Ostrom’s work proves that privatization and socialism are not the only answers to the commons tragedy. Instead, her work has proved that individuals will act for the good of the group even with personal costs to themselves. In some cases, Ostrom has seen that communally managed commons have actually proved to be better managed than traditional models.

In Mongolia, for example, Ostrom found that nomadic herders managed commonly shared grasslands far better than their neighbors in China who had privatized agricultural lands. Degradation of the Mongolian ecosystem made up 1/10 of the used area whereas degradation of the Chinese lands was 1/3. Similarly, in Russia, where land was managed under a more socialist regime, degradation made up 3/4 of the area used (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).

Based on this example, it would appear that group cooperation can, in fact, serve as a functional institution to manage resources.

Check out this video for Ostrom’s own words on her work. The video starts to get pretty exciting at the end when Ostrom explains our reluctance to engage in mutually beneficial relationships base on trust is a result of our fear of being what she calls, “suckers.” It’s entertaining; I recommend you watch it!

Ostrom argues that we need a diversity of institutions. We can’t just operation in markets where privatization is the norm, and we can’t operate in markets where nobody owns the resources. We need a multiplicity of institutions, and a communal institutional most definitely has a place in that multiplicity. Our world is complex, why would we limit ourselves?

Even with that multiplicity of institutions, Ostrom holds that the distribution of “communication, information, and trust” is incredibly important to a properly functioning society and a well-maintained commons (“Revisiting the Commons”). Successful governance, in turn, is dictated by “active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules” (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences). Participation, communication, and trust are not features of the top management down approach of the past. They are features of community.

What does all of this mean for those of us who interested in the role that community plays in our lives? It means that we could be seeing changes in the way businesses are run, in the way that conservation efforts are approached, in the way we look at global development, and even in the way we carry out the education of our youth. Group cooperation is possible, sometimes it’s better than the traditional alternatives, and it will, in the future, be incorporated into the institutional structure of our lives.

Clash of the Communities in Vancouver, BC

I am at the Olympics!

Yes, feel free to envy me for having the opportunity to witness the world’s greatest athletes going at it neck to neck, to despise me for supporting what some people think is just a corporate grab for money funded by taxpayers dollars, or to be completely indifferent to the fact that I’m in Vancouver… The point that I want to make is that the Olympics have made up the largest gathering of communities I have ever seen.

My mom and I in the middle of Olympic crowds.

First you have your national communities, people from all different cultures from all over the world have flocked to Vancouver and the Sea to Sky corridor, proudly wearing their national colors and, in some cases, traditional dress garb.

You have your sports communities: The community of snowboarders, the community of Nordic skiers, the community of bobsledders,the  figureskaters, the curlers, the hockey players, speed skaters, etc etc.

And then of course you have all the other communities not directly related to sport diverging on this one geographic point, communities of musicians, artists, protestors, and all of their fan groups.

It’s really pretty incredible to see all of these different groups in one area forming what you could argue is one, gigantic, international community united by one common goal: to celebrate the athleticism and accomplishments of our athletes.

Me, trying to be part of both the American and Canadian Nordic Ski Fan Communities at the same time... not sure if I was 100% successful.

It’s no wonder big corporations like McDonalds and Coca-Cola are sponsoring the Olympics. They suddenly have monopolized and targeted access to multiple groups of people . If they convert a few members of one of these groups into avid consumers, then they have an ‘in’! Though on a bit of a side tangent, you have to wonder at the irony of McDonalds and Coca-Cola – the gold medal winners for least healthy choice of nourishment – sponsoring one of the largest athletic events in the world. I highly doubt the athletes that appear in McDonald’s advertisements happily munch away on Egg McMuffins and fries everyday.

How do the Olympics bring in so many different communities?

There’s something about the Olympics, and other sporting events for that matter, which really excel in attracting people in a way that your average business cannot replicate. Is it because, as humans, we’re attracted to greatness? Do we always want to see the very best of the best? Partly…

I would argue that it’s because so many fans of sporting events (including the athletes themselves) become emotionally involved with their respective sports. People tie their own happiness and success to the success of the athletes. They see themselves as playing some sort of role in determining the outcome for team or idol – the louder you cheer, the faster your athlete goes (not entirely, but that’s the idea).

We are attracted to greatness, but more importantly, we are attracted to somehow tying ourselves to that greatness. If we contributed to that greatness, then we ourselves share in that greatness.

I guess the interesting challenge for your average business person out there would be to emulate the Olympics:

1. Compete like an athlete – be open and personal

2. Appeal to the emotions of your potential clients through stories of your triumphs and failures and be sure to invite them to share in those triumphs and failures.

3. Lastly, surround yourself with greatness (easier said than done!).

The communities will come flocking!

I like Ted Talks, can you tell? I think it’s an amazing database full of amazing videos featuring amazing people and their amazing ideas!

The video above features Majora Carter, founder of an organization called Sustainable South Bronx which works to promote holistic community and sustainability developments in New York’s South Bronx. Carter speaks passionately in this Ted Talk about the connections between economic degradation, environmental degradation, and social degradation. It’s an inspiring presentation and definitely worth watching!

In terms of community, I think Carter hits on a couple of important points, as follows:

1. Healthy communities need healthy environments. Carter mentions how the residents of South Bronx have higher rates of obesity and asthmatic inflictions. A community that does not or cannot care for its common space cannot fully prosper even at the basic health levels.
2. Sustainable, holistic development carried our from a bottom-up and people-first approach can lead to long term economic and social success.
3. Sometimes identifying with a community can have negative implications for a group of people. As Carter says, ”If you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it is bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you?”

I never thought of community in this light. I’ve always assumed it was 100% positive, and that people need and thrive in a community atmosphere. While I still maintain that people need community, I think it makes sense that sometimes the ’shared’ or ‘common belief’ that knits a community together can be negative, especially if the community ethos has been defined by society as negative. Food for thought!

Prosuming

Opening up to open sourcing as a profitable business model is one of the newest trends among businesses. Many different companies are embracing the idea that their consumers and the public at large could produce valuable contributions to product design. Starbucks, for example, allows consumers to design their own coffee drink. Puma’s Mongolian Shoe BBQ lets the public design their own shoe. Amazon.com, IBM, craigslist, and a host of other businesses are all looking to open source as a new way to market, to design products, and to compete in what is becoming a ‘prosumer’ world.

Here are some more examples of companies integrating Open Source procedures into their business philosophy:

Fashion – Threadless

Why hire a product design team to come up with catchy phrases and designs for t-shirts when you can have the public do it for free?

Threadless is a Chicago-based T-shirt company which serves as the perfect example of a business capitalizing on prosumers. All of the tees produced by Threadless are designed and voted on by the public. Up to 300 designs are submitted daily, the favorites are picked by the public, and then the winners are awarded $2,000 per creation.

According to an article in Forbes Magazine, this translates into a T-shirt company with no product design team who made $30 million in revenue in 2009, secured 1.5 million followers on Twitter, and 100,000 fans on Facebook. Not bad for a company of only 50 actual employees.

Threadless has expertly cultivated a community of loyal fans and contributors that has proved to be the key to its success.

As Cam Balzer, the vice president of marketing at Threadless says:

“We’ve got a close-knit group of loyal customers and have worked hard to build that. The people who submit ideas to us, vote and buy our products aren’t random people, and they aren’t producing random work. We work closely with our consumers and give them a place on our site, the Threadless forum, where they can exchange ideas with one another–ideas that go beyond designing T-shirts. We have consumers who have voted on 150,000 designs, which means they’ve spent hours interacting on our site … They’re part of the community we’ve cultivated.”

- Forbes Magazine

The Web – Mozilla Firefox

The widespread use of the internet plays an integral in bringing open sourcing to the forefront of business practice. Without it, companies wouldn’t have nearly as much access to the opinions and contributions of prosumers. It therefore makes sense that web browsers like Mozilla Firefox (along with many other web-based software and applications) would be open source.

Introduced in 1998, Mozilla Firefox was designed around the idea that the internet “should be public, open, and accessible.” To that end, Mozilla brings together thousands of volunteers to aid its small staff in creating products which are available for free to the public. The company’s operations are open and transparent, the entire code for the browser is therefore a public resource, and the company hierarchy not defined by seniority or necessarily ownership, but by who contributes the most to product design and ultimately to “making the internet better for everyone.”

Media – NowPublic

NowPublic is a Vancvouer-based, online news source based entirely on stories and news submitted by the public. All of the audio, video, images, and written stories come from the public. The public even chose the lead story by voting on their favorite. The entire content of NowPublic is produced by 200,000 citizen journalists living in 5,500 different cities in 160 different countries. This makes NowPublic the largest participatory news organization in the world.

Still a relatively new company, NowPublic is rapidly making its mark in the media as reliable and remarkably current. Because NowPublic’s journalists are regular people with access to technology – whether it’s a computer, cell phone, camera, or anything else – NowPublic often finds itself the first news source to run a story. Other news sources have to bring in the reporters, ship them over to the drama lugging camera equipment in a manner which isn’t entirely expedious. For NowPublic, all it takes is one person with a Camcorder and an internet connection.

In 2007, NowPublic was named by Time Magazine as one of the top 50 websites for the year.

The Gold Industry – Goldcorp

Open Source methods have even found their way to gold!

When Goldcorp CEO Rob McEwen found himself heading up a dying mining company out of a 50 year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, he knew he had do something different and radical to keep Goldcorp from folding.

Taking a page out of Linus Torvalds book, he decided to open up to the public and allow them to tell him where to dig for gold. McEwen published all of Goldcorp’s geological data on the web – an unprecedented move in the gold industry – and waited for mass collaboration to work its magic…. and it didn’t disappoint.

1,000 people from 50 countries competed for a grand price of $575,000 in what McEwen called the Goldcorp challenge. The virtual prospecting resulting in 110 targets being pinpointed by the public. 80% of those targets were profitable and resulted in $3 billion dollars worth of gold.

Goldcorp was transformed from the underperforming, dying company it used to be into a $9 billion company. Open sourcing proved to be the company’s savior.

A New and Open Breed of Enterprise

I’ll sign out with a quote from Wikinomics authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams from a Wikinomics series they wrote for Business Week in 2007:

“A new breed of 21st-century enterprise is emerging—one that opens its doors to the world; co-innovates with everyone, especially customers; shares resources that were previously closely guarded; harnesses the power of mass collaboration; and behaves not as a multi-national, but as something new: a truly global business. These new modus operandi revolve around four powerful new ideas: openness, ‘peering,’ sharing, and acting globally.”