Bill Gates "Business @ the Speed of Thought" continues to kick out a few goodies ..I have highlights and corners folded all over my copy.
"Medium-size and Small companies can take advantage of the boundary-changing capabilities of the Web to act much bigger than they are without adding employees or offices. A small company with the right expertise can bid on and spearhead movie productions, a construction project, or an advertising campaign. By assembling other companies and professionals quickly, it can act as a virtual large company to see the project to a profitable end. Because the team can be disbanded at the end of the project, the company can manage labor resources without the administrative overhead of a large full-time staff. Smaller Companies can use the Web to scale without permanent mass."-- p 135
In an advocacy and campaign contexts these dynamics are important for several reasons. First, campaign efforts become bog down in a slow tempo legislative battle permanent mass becomes dead weight as political winds shift.
Second, small groups that could bid on "big projects" are often discounted as "vendors" because heavy hitter donors have not figured out how to work with smaller brands (lots of small grants are harder to give than one big one) They frequently do not give small groups access to the same capital flows.
Finally, many of the forces of the changing boundaries are blocked by traditional rules, management perspective and behaviors. Grant programs are "siloed", legal restrictions on IP, software and deployment of staff limit the ability of groups to swap staff and other assets.
Bill wraps up the chapter with a question "Do your digital systems" help you load balance work more efficiently?" As a movement of many causes and projects, do we have any capacity at all to load-balance?
Network-centric advocacy strategy is dependent on these boundary-changing dynamics.
