Wikinomics (the book) quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "When you say 'collaboration', the average forty-five-year-old thinks they know what you're talking about - teams sitting down, having a nice conversation with nice objectives and a nice attitude." In the 90's this was called "empowerment". I firmly believe in this type of collaborative culture because senior managers don't have a monopoly on good ideas and command-and-control cultures only work in slow moving industries. There are still plenty of organizations who have yet to adopt a collaborative culture, who view "enterprise 2.0" and "web 2.0" tools with suspicion. Most companies will slowly evolve...

However, this is not what Wikinomics / Mass Collaboration is about. Mass Collaboration is about fundamental changes to business structure. "Coase's law" says that firms "will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction on the open market." Technology is opening up a whole new set of possibilities for architecting business structures. Peer production is one example, where individuals combine in seemingly random ways to produce something. Wikipedia is the (already) classic example which needs no further description. Its predecessor, Nupedia, was a dismal failure. Why? It relied on command-and-control structures, and as a result after one year and $120,000, had only 24 articles. How many "Nupedias" are out there right now? Is YOUR business a Nupedia?

Adopting peer-production may be perceived as risky and quite radical, and it is certainly not right for all products and industries. But ALL management teams should consider its implications during strategic planning. Instead of determining why it is NOT right for your company, envision a competitor who starts from scratch and manages to pull it off in your industry. What does their business look like? If this competitor were real, what would it do to your business?

All elements of Wikinomics will require organizations to seriously rethink their business structures. New ventures will certainly be exploring these new business structures. Therefore established firms are perhaps most vulnerable to "surprise attacks" from upstarts who don't have the baggage of existing command-and-control structures and business models.