11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era

There are the things that we do. There are the things that we care about. And then there is the story we tell about it. When those things are in full alignment for individuals, we say they have integrity.

Each of these on its own is interesting but not the central idea; each on its own is only an example of how value is created with others, allowing seemingly disparate individuals to create value in a way that once only centralized organizations could.

How many companies have figured out how to shift from old-school “supply chain management” to the more modern idea of capturing insights and integrating them directly into product design, distribution, and delivery? Because that’s the point.

In the Social Era, the term to use is flexibility. Our goal is to learn our way into the future.

When community invests in an idea, it also co-owns its success. Instead of trying to achieve scale by all by yourself, we have a new way to have scale: scale can be in, with, and through community.

The value chain has changed. The customer is no longer just the buyer but also a co-creator. Co-creation, crowdfunding, and customization can lend a deeper value to the pricing.

To be sure, openness means letting go. But it also means making money and having power.

These are not easily controlled by one party over the other but are a process of coming together. And the relationship gains strength from trying new things and the resulting failures, for it is in the process of making mistakes—and the ensuing forgiveness—that resilience develops.

by the 1980s, buyers became customers with cynicism, opinions, and expectations, and by the 1990s, the old approach was starting to show the strain. Then in the early twenty-first century, so-called “customers” began to exert co-creative tendencies.