At South by Southwest Interactive this year, Simon Pearce (@simonpearcelive) and Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) talked about the new collaborative economy, which Gary described as the "second industrial revolution."
If that sounds overblown, then consider this: the rate of change in technology has never been faster, and the access to the tools needed to create those new technologies has never been cheaper.
The implications of this are potentially quite profound: large organizations, with layer upon layer of decision-making may be transitioning from their natural advantage (economies of scale) to a natural disadvantage, the so-called dis-economy of speed. The control systems that stopped those companies making poor decisions in the past were designed for an age when the cost of failure was high. But what about an age when the cost of failure is low?
Worse still, what if the cost of failure is not a cost at all, but what Mark Hatch from Tech Shop calls "cheap learning"? In this new world of "fail fast and cheap" the truth is that you can't afford NOT to fail. If you are not failing then you are simply not trying hard enough, and if you are not trying hard enough then you are being left behind.
The fact is that access to institutional support structures that we used to rely on to get things done is rapidly becoming less important than sheer human passion and the willingness to try new things.