Business journalist Theodore Kinni has published an article on MIT Sloan Management Review about what’s happening between management and technology this week, with some focus on how blockchains can transform management.
“The bigger issue is blockchains”, he writes, which “has so many uses that trying to summarize them can make veteran tech experts sound like PR hacks.” Kinni talks about how businesses everywhere are attempting to harness the power of the blockchain, but how we actually haven’t heard much about how blockchain can change the way that businesses are operated and managed. Kinni writes, “That’s a good reason to take a closer look at Blockchain Revolution, in which the Tapscotts devote a chapter to the topic.”
The MIT Sloan Management Review article continues with an excerpt from the book. The excerpt, entitled “How Do We Find New Talent and New Customers?”, starts with the architecture of the firm and how the first generation of the internet dropped the costs for new ideas and talent.
Now imagine the opportunities that arise from the ability to search the World Wide Ledger, a decentralized database of much of the world’s structured information. Who sold which discovery to whom? At what price? Who owns this intellectual property? Who is qualified to handle this project? What medical skills does our hospital have on staff? Who performed what type of surgery with what outcomes? How many carbon credits has this company saved? Which suppliers have experience in China? What subcontractors delivered on time and on budget according to their smart contracts? The results of these queries won’t be resumes, advertising links, or other pushed content; they’ll be transaction histories, proven track records of individuals and enterprises, ranked perhaps by reputation score. Get the picture? Said Vitalik Buterin, founder of the Ethereum blockchain, “Blockchains will drop search costs, causing a kind of decomposition that allows you to have markets of entities that are horizontally segregated and vertically segregated. That never really existed before. Instead you had kind of monoliths that do everything.”
The Tapscotts continue to outline the different ways blockchain can transform management, human resources, and marketing.
Read the full article and book excerpt on MIT Sloan Management Review.
