Wtf?

Without owning a single room, Airbnb has more rooms on offer than some of the largest hotel groups in the world.5 Airbnb has under 3,000 employees, while Hilton has 152,000. New forms of corporate organization are outcompeting businesses based on best practices that we’ve followed for the lifetimes of most business leaders.

But it is only when a business becomes profitably self-sustaining, rather than subsidized by investors, that we can be sure that it is here to stay.

And I’ll make the case that many of the algorithmic systems that we have put in place to guide our companies and our economy have been designed to disregard the humans and reward the machines.

Today two of the companies that teach us the most about the trends shaping the future are Uber and its rival Lyft.

Ultimately, network businesses need to develop both sides of the market.

In Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? Michael Schrage writes: Successful innovators don’t ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different …. Successful innovators ask users to embrace—or at least tolerate—new values, new skills, new behaviors, new vocabulary, new ideas, new expectations, and new

But the Internet has changed that math, as Kilpi observes. “If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically as is happening today,” he writes, “the form and logic of economic and organizational entities necessarily need to change! The core firm should now be small and agile, with a large network.” He adds:

“No, communication is terrible!” he said.7 The reason can be explained by the old joke: “One person sits and drinks. Two people clink and drink. The more people you add, the higher the ratio of clinking to drinking.” What you want is a situation where people “clink” only with the people doing shared work, not with everyone they touch. This is simpl

“The difference between theory and practice is always greater in practice than it is in theory.”