the stuff that dreams are made of
Now that we have some idea about what an Atomized Enterprise is, what does such an enterprise actually look like relative to traditional enterprises? Are there existing value-producing models of loosely structured capital, ideas and collaboration that creators of Atomized Enterprises can draw inspiration from? The entertainment industry comes to mind in this context.
Year after year, movie and TV show producers raise money from backers assemble functional teams of skilled professionals to produce content for mass consumption. As studios shepherd a movie through movie theaters, DVD and ancillary merchandising, they assemble sizeable teams with diverse skills, which work together intensively to generate value at each stage, as measured by box office sales and proceeds from merchandising tie-ups. Movie franchises are great at creating value but not especially good, however, at sustaining it. By the very nature of the business, once the consuming audience has moved on, there is little incentive for the creators of a movie to continue delivering value.
A TV show that runs over multiple seasons may be a better model for atomized enterprises to aspire to, because of how the team running it can sustain its value over an extended time period. But even TV show production teams have only limited applicability to how a traditional enterprise functions. By and large, the setting, premise and characters of a TV show don’t change over its extended lifetime whereas an enterprise may reinvent itself over and over. Except for the occasional lead-in, TV shows generally don’t enter into partnerships with other TV shows in a bid to diversify their viewer base. In other words, TV shows sustain value but they don’t innovate.
Enterprises must create value, sustain value and innovate to adapt to changing economic and market conditions. Atomized enterprises can learn a lesson or two from the entertainment industry on how to create and sustain value, but as for innovation, we’re in a brave new world. I posit that another viable working model for an Atomized Enterprise to take inspiration from would be that of teams that develop open source software. The ultimate value delivered by a successful, widely used open source project is the creation and sustenance of active user communities–a strategic Herculean task that goes well beyond simply the code that implements the functionality of a project.
So where does all this leave us with respect to what an Atomized Enterprise looks like? An Atomized Enterprise can learn from the models of value creation, sustenance and innovation mentioned above that it must practice three kinds of discipline to stay atomized: deliverable discipline, communication discipline and retail discipline. Continued practice of these three kinds of discipline will support a loosely coupled entity for value creation where each step of the value chain is specialized and virtualized.
These last few posts have laid out a theory of Atomized Enterprises, but there are others who speak to the theory of Atomized Enterprises much better than I can. We will, however, touch upon the many profitable opportunities that the rise of Atomized Enterprises creates in future posts.
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[...] organizational and technological changes. Enterprises in this class must stringently maintain three kinds of discipline for their very survival, and will need a whole new class of software to help them do so. Analytics [...]