VideoExamine your mind-set. Companies incorporating pull platforms into their operations must challenge and refine their key assumptions about what is required for success: greater control, for instance, will no longer be the appropriate response to growing uncertainty, which must be seen as an opportunity, not a threat. Executives will have to stand back and let individual employees identify and mobilize resources and collaborators at the right time. In many cases, it will be necessary to transform not-invented-here cultures that prevent organizations from effectively leveraging third-party resources. Instead of wondering what companies can get from their business partners, executives will have to ask what they and their business partners can learn from one another.
Reexamine your company's focus. As we have noted, companies traditionally carry on three core processes: managing infrastructure, managing customer relationships, and creating and commercializing products. It's tough to be on the leading edge in all three areas, but in an effort to retain control, most companies try. More versatile pull platforms let executives concentrate on becoming world class in one of the three processes, relying on external partners to supply the elements of the other two.
Start where you are. In our experience, most companies already use pull platforms in fragmented and informal contexts. Executives can begin preparing for a more systematic and formal transition from push to pull by investigating how effectively their companies now utilize such pull capabilities and which of their most profitable revenue streams might be vulnerable to pull-oriented competitors. These executives can start to transform corporate operating processes by challenging the managers who run them to deploy additional pull capabilities as a way of meeting performance targets. And companies can begin to redesign the organization by making pivotal employees — engineers in a high-tech company, for example, or brand managers in a consumer goods one — responsible for creating a pull platform to improve the way they work, both within and outside the enterprise.
The cyberpunk author William Gibson has observed that "The future is already here — it is just unevenly distributed." Pull systems may seem a remote threat, given their location at the periphery of many industries. Yet forces at the periphery can come to the center with astounding speed. As they do, business executives will have to reassess nearly every aspect of today's corporation.
About the Authors
John Seely Brown is the former head of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and chief scientist at Xerox. John Hagel, an alumnus of McKinsey's Silicon Valley office, is now a senior adviser to the firm.
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