On June 1st, 2010, I started my new board advisory firm – OpenMatters – which focuses on helping corporate directors and their leaders create value and mitigate risks. The reason I called the firm OpenMatters is that I believe Open is beginning to, and will increasingly, create value due to the convergence of four significant drivers:
- Communication: The advent of the internet has and will continue to change the way we live, work and play. More particularly, it is changing the way we interact, share our passions, interests and insights. In so doing, the internet is freeing us up from the traditions of the industrial age (command and control) and enabling us to freely interact with people from around the world – not just within our city, state, financial or religious boundaries.
- Collaboration: With the accelerated adoption of social, mobile and cloud technologies that sit on top of the internet, we are collaborating with people we know (fellow employees, customers, partners and investors) and don’t know (crowds and citizens from around the world seeking to make a difference). The result, we are increasingly connecting and creating communities of interest that advance the world as we know it on all fronts – education, healthcare, and the environment.
- Commitment: Due to the transparency that is being fostered upon us by today’s form of open and feee flowing communication and the collaboration that comes from this new reality, we are all finding that we must be willing to commit to each others’ well-being if we are to benefit mutually and fairly from the fee flow of insights and experiences. The result, a new found source of empathy and social conscience is emerging that is bringing down the old walls that divided us.
- Co-Creation: Increasingly, due to the above three factors, we are working together (as crowds, families and organizations) in loose nit ways (on-line and off) to create new medical discoveries, advances in education, solutions to environmental hazards as well as simpler things like making clothes, designing websites, producing software and generating science, math and technology advances not previously conceived. All because we are co-creating and leveraging our collective wisdom.
The age of ‘owning and managing’ assets is changing to unowning and unmanaging people and insights as 7 billion people start to connect using smart phones and social media. Our future is in front of us – and so is the greatest opportunity of all - as we learn to Open UpI
Please contact me if you and your board want to become a social and mobile enterprise in order to create unprecedented value as you seek to mitigate strategic risks.
