Google given glimpse into future

“WE’RE AT a turning point in history. Many of the institutions that served us well are now failing and collapsing.”

“WE’RE AT a turning point in history. Many of the institutions that served us well are now failing and collapsing.”

These were the dramatic opening words of Don Tapscott, co-author of the best-selling Wikinomics, as he addressed the Google Atmosphere 2010 conference outside Paris this week.

Rather than serving up doom and gloom, Tapscott’s keynote speech signalled the beginning of understanding as he unravelled the historic underpinnings of the current global downturn.

He even wove Google, cloud computing and networked intelligence into the equation, reasoning that the cloud is essentially the modern highway for the common sense approach of “two heads are better than one”, which can be applied to business principles, our economic woes and even how we get value from our government.

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Ahead of the launch of his forthcoming book, Macrowikinomics - Rebooting Business and the World, Tapscott talked about the ageing or malfunctioning institutions of banking, universities, the media and government and how they need to be rebuilt or “rebooted”.

Referencing the multi-trillion-dollar cost of 2008’s economic crash to the US economy, Tapscott said: “Many of the institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, seem frozen and unable to move forward.”

Switching to new models of networked intelligence and collaboration – of which he cited Google as a prime enabler – he referenced the recent rescue efforts in Haiti. Many of these were only made possible with mass collaboration and intelligence-gathering carried out remotely and online by volunteers such as the translation of Creole SMS messages for search and rescue teams.

Tapscott said that the same principles can replace the “legacy systems” of society’s most powerful institutions. We can look at rebuilding the financial services industry by “putting risk management in the commons” for example.

Porting this form of new interaction to business is also achievable – the Obama administration did it, says Tapscott: “We need to rebuild our enterprise around a new set of principles, around collaboration. The rise of the web unlocks the transaction costs of old and [these are] dropping so much that companies can cut across organisational silos.”

Simply put, the cost of collaboration was too high before the internet and high-speed broadband became commonplace. Now, instead of relying on internal resources, businesses can use the power of the web to spread risk, share intelligence and source skills and services. But part of this is realising that we do not need to own all our intellectual property.

In an age where government, banks and large corporations are being looked at under the micropscope, it was apt that Tapscott finished his talk by questioning leadership in a networked age.

Showing footage of starlings in flight he said: “This is a murmuration. There is no one leader but they never manage to go wrong. This is amazing synchronicity and collaborative leadership.”

And while “social” in the context of the internet is most often portrayed as time-wasting, narcissism and a leisure activity, Tapscott has other ideas: “Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. We were just waiting for social networking to become social production.”