I have been reading Thomas Koulopoulos' books since 1997. Each successive book has built on the previous in an evolution of thought and, yet, each appears as fresh and new, as if it was the "ah-ha!" moment of the previous iteration of what was running through Tom's brain at the time. Tom is NOT one of those authors-of-business-books who writes the same book over and over. He has gone from good to great in his writing style, which is much the way he speaks. (If you have never heard him, go to [...].) His message is elegant, intelligent, thoughtful, logical, and rings true. I have enjoyed watching--and participating--in this amazing process of evolution. "Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale, and Success" does not disappoint in this regard. As the technology and human behavior changes, Tom's vision advances.
To begin with, "Cloud Surfing" is a wonderful primer on how economics has evolved over the last 150 years. However, Tom points out that we can no longer rely on the lessons of the past to predict the future. The cloud represents a place and time we have never before experienced. We do not know the full impact the cloud will have on the world. To illustrate this paradigm shift, Tom asks hard and thoughtful questions, such as, "What if the context changes?...What if all fears you have today about the way in which the Internet can create risk were eliminated, while all the ways that the Internet creates value were increased?" What if, indeed!
The world is becoming hyperconnected where all systems--economic, social, political, and individuals--are linked together and, most importantly, influencing each other in one big Gordian Knot of complex communities. The number of connections is increasing exponentially daily. The cloud is what will enable these connections to work in harmony with one another. Tom touches on the fearfulness of individuals in open systems and how this fear may manifest in the various systems. Then he effectively busts the twin myths of security and control. It will be interesting to watch, over the next 20 years, the "control" dynamic exerted out of fear by governments, corporations, our education systems, and individuals who try to impose rules and laws or who "drop out" or refuse to engage.
The cloud enables the move to open and transparent systems driven by the value of data. The cloud is zeroing out costs, by fostering a pay-as-you-go, scalable, collaborative social economy. As a result, value creation is accelerated. By aligning value with risk, you can scale your infrastructure, people, and systems in direct proportion to your success. The current paradigm is in structured markets and organizations. This doesn't work in fast-paced markets. We are moving toward a more organic, self-organizing model of doing work. Disruption happens when the outliers create big ideas because they don't "know" something won't work. The cloud is a disrupter, but we keep trying to retrofit the cloud into familiar patterns.
The future is about influence. The cloud facilitates the ability for individuals, enterprises, governments, and education systems to exert influence. The value of that influence will be based on reputation, trust, and integrity. Hyperconnectivity will replace the old models of teaming that don't work anymore. As the children of today reach working age, they will introduce a way of thinking that will result in a restructuring of how we think of intellectual property and the patent process, because they understand that a collaborative model enables creativity. The cloud will facilitate an inversion of the current power structure.
We are in the midst of a "perfect storm." Work has become placeless, ageless, weightless, and complex. Tom examines a number of cloud based organizations, which are already working in this space, such as Elance, LiveOps, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, InnoCentive, and NineSigma. "We are experiencing a democratization of ideas without historic precedent and with little sense for how profound the shift may be." This social economy is resulting in a collaborative workforce that could conceivably span five generations which could hyper-jump innovation with its diversity and richness of ideas.
The cloud has enabled a new way of creating value chains, to the point of developing new, virtual currencies. Cloud-based trading has the effect of busting monopolies. Classic marketing analysis doesn't work anymore. The key to survival is continuously rebuilding the value chain to drive liquidity. Operating in the cloud is the same as operating in the "now."
Tom goes even further--beyond the traditional conversation about the impact on commerce--and discusses the impact of the cloud on modern warfare and on our traditional brick and mortar education system. He talks about how living and working in the cloud affects us as individuals. The cloud will enable situational awareness at an individual level, turning the classic decision making process taught in business schools on its head. In the cloud, decision making is based on relevance, not recall.
Knowledge work is changing from focusing on content to focusing on the work itself. What will enable this is the "case concept," where the case--not the file folder--contains all the components of the work product and facilitates collaboration globally. This is the vision that some have trouble getting their head around (including me), but Tom does a wonderful job of illustrating the concept.
Tom's Afterward is a view of 2020--only 8 years from now. He validates one of my own predictions about the impact of a gaming generation on expectations of value creation, education, conflict management, healthcare, government, and living in general. The cloud is in its adolescence, but the potential for the betterment of the human condition is more real than ever before.
This book is amazing. It will make you think and dream and create. And, when you share that creation, you become a part of the community of cloud builders who are creating the future. Dr. Peter Drucker, Tom's mentor, once said, "The only way to predict the future is to invent it."
