What It Means to be An
Internet Company – Part 1 (Page 3 of 6)
Psychological
There are several key psychological attributes that we believe should be
present in an Internet company. Many believe that the key trait is the
ability to take risk. We see it as the ability to force other people to
take risks by being offensive in creating chaos and change. Being an
Internet company means being proactive and creative.
- Assume continuous discontinuity. Everything will change all
the time, and the only way to benefit from this discontinuity is to
create it. Being able to create and thrive in an environment of
discontinuity may require special attributes in the people on the team.
How comfortable is your company with continually building and tearing
down what you do? Can your team create a virtual company?
- Time is the most valuable commodity.
The most fundamental thing that the Internet does is warp time. It allows
people to interact with Internet based entities on their time, not the
entities' time. It stretches the boundaries of the day and smoothes the
wrinkles of time zones as you conduct business around the globe.
Businesses and organizations should recognize that they can never be
closed, never not be available. Beyond that, the Internet allows the
dispersion of work and effort around the world. The standards based
infrastructure lets organizations move their work across time zones,
taking advantage of analog business hours. Ultimately, the ability to
work around the clock crunches the information half-life (how long
information is useable) and the product life cycles.
- Affinity not to just deal with change, but the ability to create
change. Accounting for change and anticipating change are
backward-looking philosophies. The Internet and the technologies create
a client of continuous discontinuity. Being accepting of change and
dealing with change are not acceptable traits for a forward-looking
Internet company. The true Internet company will create change and chaos
in a systematic way, and once the chaos has resolved into clarity it
will create chaos again as the next step in an ever-accelerating cycle
of chaos-to-clarity-to-chaos. Hence continuous discontinuity.
- Ability to deconstruct the very things that you have worked to
build. Organizations and the people in them need to be comfortable
with ego-less creation and ego-less deconstruction. The harder it is to
build and create something does not make that creation any more enduring.
Embedding the mechanisms of destruction within the essence of the
creation is an essential philosophy of design. This is another attribute
of continuous discontinuity.
Part 4 - Organizational
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