Home > Work > The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
1 " Institutions designed for push cannot easily accommodate pull. "
― , The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
2 " As the Big Shift takes hold, companies are no longer places that exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger. They’re places that support and organize talented individuals to get better faster by working with others. The rationale of the firm shifts from scalable efficiency to scalable learning—the ability to improve performance more rapidly and learn faster by effectively integrating more and more participants distributed across traditional institutional boundaries. "
3 " We all have passions. "
4 " Rather than focusing on attracting and retaining talent, as they do today, institutional leaders must shift their attention to accessing and developing talent. "
5 " Institutional leaders will need to seek out “reverse mentors” among (often younger) individuals who can help them understand and master edge practices. "
6 " Core participants tend to focus on transactions rather than investing in the long-term effort to build sustainable, trust-based relationships on the edge. "
7 " Pull platforms make it easier to assemble participants and resources on an ad hoc basis to problem-solve unforeseen issues or situations. As a result, they enhance the potential for productive friction as people with different perspectives, skills, and experiences come together to try to find a solution for a specific problem. In contrast, push programs view all friction as an inefficiency that must be eliminated. The purpose of tightly specified programs is to eliminate wasteful debate and disagreement, especially at the point of execution. "
8 " the success of creation spaces can be traced back to careful design at the outset by a small group of people who were very thoughtful about the conditions required to foster or “scaffold” scalable collaboration, learning, and performance improvement. "
9 " Our research into emerging creation spaces has identified three elements that combine to set in motion the increasing-returns dynamics that make these spaces successful: participants, interactions, and environments. "
10 " Rather than molding individuals to fit the needs of the institution, institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs. "
11 " Push” describes a method and means of organizing activities and actions. Push operates on a key assumption—that it is possible to forecast or anticipate demand. Based on this assumption, push works mightily to ensure that the right people and resources are delivered at the right place and the right time to serve the anticipated demand. "
12 " The digital infrastructure makes outsourcing more feasible than ever, and this in turn makes it easier for small companies to access and use world-class capability to deliver more value to their markets and to respond more rapidly to unanticipated changes in markets. "
13 " True innovation does not happen when we control creativity,” Shai wrote in 2005, “but when we challenge, create shared vision, and passionately pursue excellence.”3 "
14 " When people chase what they love, they will inevitably seek out and immerse themselves in knowledge flows, drinking deeply from new creative wells even as they contribute their own experiences and insights along the way. "
15 " Passion in this context refers to a sustained and deep commitment to achieving our full potential and greater capacity for self-expression in a domain that engages us on a personal level. "
16 " No one will be able to effectively participate in relevant knowledge flows without possessing useful knowledge stocks of their own. People who reach out to connect with others to simply take knowledge will find that these interactions quickly dry up as others begin to realize they have little to gain from these connections. As in all relationships, reciprocity is essential. Knowledge stocks thus become both a means and an end to participation in knowledge flows. "
17 " Even when they are successful in tapping into a more diverse set of knowledge flows, companies tend to concentrate on flows involving transfers of existing knowledge rather than creation of new knowledge. I read your white paper. You show me your well-polished and tightly scripted PowerPoint presentation. We certainly gain value from exchanging this knowledge. But we are able to create even more value if we can bring people together across different companies to engage in deep problem solving around a performance challenge so that they are creating new knowledge. Now we are not simply accessing knowledge that already exists, but driving performance to new levels that could not be achieved without distinctive new knowledge. "
18 " The challenge for the institutional leader will be to quickly attract and mobilize passionate individuals wherever they reside within the institution (or even if they’re outside the institution). These individuals are often the most talented and motivated people in the organization, but they are also often the unhappiest—they see the potential for themselves and for the institution but feel blocked in their efforts to achieve this potential. Institutional leaders must encourage the mechanisms and structures needed to help connect these individuals with each other as well as with the institutional leaders, who must serve as both champions and resource procurers for these people. "
19 " In pull platforms, the modules are designed to be loosely coupled, with interfaces that help users to understand what the module contains and how it can be accessed. Because of this loosely coupled modular design, pull platforms can accommodate a much larger number of diverse participants. In fact, pull platforms tend to have increasing returns dynamics—the more participants and modules the platform can attract, the more valuable the platform becomes. "
20 " According to Hidary, most people become too dependent on one facet of their lives. And when one facet takes up 80 percent of somebody’s total exposed surface area, they tend to become defensive around it, protective. They become “experts.” They treat what they know as a stock rather than a flow, and they tend to isolate themselves from flows of new knowledge and the people creating them. "