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TUESDAY, MARCH 22
PRESENTATION – John Seely Brown and John Hagel:
Friction Can Be Good!
John Seely Brown and John Hagel embody their own message: They are more productive
as a team. Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox and long-time leader of
Xerox PARC, has more of a philosophical, scientific bent, while Hagel, a long-time
McKinsey consultant now working on his own, has a closer-to-the-metal appreciation
of business realities and strategies. Both have written several books and, more
significantly, each has written for Release 1.0 – Brown with Paul Duguid on the
social life of documents in October 1995, and together on the service grid and service-oriented
architectures in December 2002. Now they have just published an
“emergent” book, says Hagel; it emerged from a series of articles they wrote together
for the McKinsey Quarterly and the Harvard Business Review and a broader set of
research initiatives they have been pursuing together over the past five years.
“I would have liked to call it Rethinking Adam Smith and Ronald Coase for the 21st
Century” says Brown, “but the publisher [Harvard Business School Press] would
have none of it.” It is called The Only Sustainable Edge.
The book covers a confluence of ideas, just a few in the steady stream Hagel and
Brown produce. Every few years those ideas coalesce into a phrase or two that captures
a moment. A few years ago it was the trade-offs between flexibility and efficiency.
Now it’s that friction can be good and that we’re about to enter a new era in
corporate structure. It sounds grandiose, but of course it is already happening. We
just don’t quite see it yet.
Brown does see it, though: “For more than a hundred years we’ve been driving
towards efficiency, creating larger and larger organizations with replicated processes
and automation. But we’re approaching the end of what efficiencies can give us for
most firms. The pursuit of friction-free commerce may turn out to be a dead end. It
gives us efficiency, but it doesn’t add any value.”
Hagel picks up: “Most companies are an unnatural bundle of three different kinds of
businesses – customer relationship management, product or service innovation and
commercialization, and infrastructure management,” says Hagel. “The economics,
culture and competences for each of them are entirely different, and it no longer
makes sense for them to stay together. The kinds of dislocations and shifts we’re see-
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