Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere by Christopher Meyer

Author:Christopher Meyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781422131688
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2012-01-16T14:00:00+00:00

Collaboration Emerges

By now, transaction costs have fallen so low and the ability to connect with others is so pervasive and rich that collaboration and collective action bubble up unbidden and unmanaged. It no longer takes an entity the size of a firm to strike a partnership; individuals can join forces with firms and with one another. Handshakes happen left and right, but often no one pauses to spell out or argue over terms and conditions. The gains are largely intangible in any case, and the motivations of the collaborators hard to pin down.

Think, for example, about the thousands of people who have pitched in to build Wikipedia. In a wonderful essay for the New York Review of Books, novelist Nicholson Baker, himself a longtime Wikipedia contributor, tries to describe why folks work on it. “It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose,” he writes, implying that it's the project's noncommercial nature that is the lure. But only a few lines later he suggests another motivator: that “when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren't called ‘Wikipedia's little helpers,’ they were called ‘editors.’” And still further down, he layers on more motivation:

It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn't been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn't like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world—this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one's own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.

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