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DISRUPTION NETWORKS
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Some people have an instinct that is the ability to understand
how connection changes the nature of everything.
5. Understanding the age we are living in;
that financial volatility wasn’t just a feature
of 2008, but will be part of our lives for a long
time. In the financial system, the more peo-
ple who are connected and the faster those
connections, the more stuff goes on that no-
body can predict. Being able to take in-
formed risks is essential. Successful people
do things that have not been done before, but
are cognizant of the fact that the environ-
ment they operate in is one of instability. the puzzle is figuring it out with constant test-
ing, probing and feedback. There are also certain
network features, such as speed, that can help
a new firm get an edge on a network. The overall
point, I think, is that as the world gets more con-
nected, the firms in a position to accelerate and
improve that connection – for data or products
or ideas – should do very well. So, the secret is to
decode what process will produce that for you.
THE BUSINESS CONTEXT I have been asked why the Seventh Sense matters
and my answer is this: we will soon be living in-
escapably inside connected systems and people
need to be prepared for that. It is easy to feel
overwhelmed by our era; so much to master:
modern warfare, complex politics, radically
changing economics. We experience constant
replacement of old technologies with new ones
before we understand them. Future struggles
are not about whether we are going to be enmeshed
but, rather, the terms of that enmeshment.
We live in an age of leaders, whether they be
business CEOs, politicians or military, who don’t
have the technical instincts that the Seventh
Sense demands and who lack fluency in the digital
flux. We need men and women who can confident-
ly command networks in a fight against network
dangers. For example, more computer coding
academies are needed, as is better popular edu-
cation about network choices. Also, it is important
to beware of handing over control to a new
breed of “technos” who may or may not have a
vision of the importance of keeping a balance
with human needs.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a big feature of
this connectivity and raises significant ques-
tions: how do we design the topologies on which
AI operates? Can we protect ourselves? These
issues are already being debated in boardrooms,
with many people thinking that AI is humanity’s
greatest existential threat.
In a corporate setting, the Seventh Sense is that
ability to sit in the boardroom and look at what-
ever it is you sell and see the way in which con-
nections affect your company. That’s hard to
quantify, but you will be able to quantify what
happens to your business; you’ll see retail sales
flattening, or store traffic declining, or an in-
crease in sales of certain products, and you
might wonder why on earth this is happening.
Those who have developed the Seventh Sense
are able to understand these developments.
So many of the puzzles in our world – why
can’t we beat ISIS? Why is the middle class emp-
tying out? What is going on with our politics? –
all are rooted in the way that connected systems
are redistributing power. I don’t just mean the
Internet but connected systems of finance or
DNA or data or people. They behave differently
than older, top-down, industrial systems. The
sooner businesses understand this, the faster
they can adjust.
Business leaders must keep in mind that we
are what we’re connected to. In fact, the very
growth of the start-up economy has been accel-
erated because it is so much easier to draw on
all kinds of resources. The trick for real growth
is to get network effects running in your business:
the idea that the more people who use it, the
better it gets, so more people want to use it. So
many big start-ups today succeed because they
become platforms. The reality is, once you had
five billion people connected, there was going to
be something like Facebook – something was
going to serve that role. I think that’s true for
almost all the billion-plus user platforms on the
planet today. If you have a multi-billion user
company, then success might be near-inevitable.
To use the example of Facebook again, it dis-
covered that if people joined and found ten
friends in seven