There are no more conversations in the traditional marketplace. In fact, the traditional marketplace is going away, yet coming back at the same time. Just in a different place. The sales clerks in the retail stores of today’s shopping malls have no idea what is happening in the places where the products they sell come from, nor do they know who made them, or why.

Once an intrinsic part of the local community, commerce has evolved to the primary force shaping the community of nations on a global scale. But because of its increasing divorce from the day-to-day concerns of real people, commerce has come to ignore the natural conversation that defines communities as human.¹

Globalization and Mass-production – creation of any & every product by a virtually unskilled and possibly even illiterate worker – have silenced the conversation and threaten the niche worker, the skilled specialist, the original concept of the cottage industry. For a very long time industry was based on the scale and scope of the cottage. The Industrial Revolution changed everything about manufacturing, and then about selling, and finally the marketplace itself.

These changes were gradual at first. Even early on, “economies of scope” began to be perceived. General Motors broke Ford’s run on the Model T – an impossibly long product cycle by today’s standards – by offering cars that were not black, and even came in different styles to suit different tastes and pocketbooks. [...] Consumers began to have a wider range of choice, and they warmed quickly to their new options.²

Suddenly, the consumers began to drive the market, supporting some options, rejecting others. The “scope”, or the perceptions, of both producers and consumers changed, and now businesses all over the world were competing with each other.

Competition is healthy, we’d been told from birth, because it breeds greater choice. But now competition was out of control and old-guard notions of brand allegiance evaporated like mist in the rising-sun onslaught for Japan, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Choice and quality ruled the day, and consumer enthusiasm for the resulting array of new product options forever undermined the foundations of yesterday’s mass-market economy.³

The Internet is Coming for You

Now these remarkable (for some, earth-shattering) changes that came to manufacturing and the marketplace have come to the Service Providers and Information Workers. Choices and competition are nearly beyond comprehension.

However, most “e-commerce” plays today look a lot like General Motors circa 1969 – looking for that next lucrative mass market just when markets have shattered into a million mirror-shard constituencies, many asking for something altogether different from the mindless razzle-dazzle of the tube. Marketers still drool at the prospect of the Net replicating the top-down broadcast model wherein glitzy “content” is developed at great cost in remote studios and jammed down a one-way pipe into millions of living rooms. TV with a buy button! Wowee!⁴

The Consumer as Producer

Today’s consumer has the power to re-direct the direction of the content, to stop the one-way flow of “content” from the provider. Then they can turn and have a conversation with the entire world, discussing, critiquing, and mocking the content previously force-fed to them. Similarly, today’s worker has the power to communicate with everyone else in the world, without going through the filter of the “official” PR line. In addition, both consumers and workers have access to information that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago.

So, where do this take us? Where does it leave the information worker, the service provider, with this sea-change in the marketplace of ideas?

Knowledge worth having comes from turned-on volitional attention, not from slavishly following someone else’s orders. Innovation based on such knowledge is exciting, inflammatory, even “dangerous”, because it tends to challenge fixed procedures and inflexible policies. While collaboration has been paid much lip service within corporations, few have attempted it beyond their own boundaries.

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…the future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it “right”; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not “packaging” them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors.⁵

That is what you and I are going to talk about, this amazing new world of conversations and markets.

Welcome to the Future. I look forward to building it together.

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