The Best Reads on Platforms from 2020
By: Simone Cicero
Tags: Marketplaces, Platform, Design, Innovation, Business

Unbundling and re-bundling the Organization

The unbundling of the corporation has been a leading theme of discussion this year with the ever-growing demonstrations of how the internet continues to challenge how the organization is made. The business world is increasingly made of interfaces, sometimes programmatic — as in the terrific growth and acquisitions this year for #APIFirst companies — sometimes human ones, that can be optimized with design and technology. As always Stratechery makes a category on its own: earlier this year Ben Thompson explained how even in a world of unbundled pieces, bundling may be the way of doing business. In his “2020 Bundles” he explored how the pattern of bundling pieces together the products of Apple, Netflix and more and in his exponentFM conversations with James Allworth he later explained how Intel didn’t get bundling right and what Apple is doing with the M1.

Surely one of the most competitive organizations in the world in managing interfaces is Amazon, and this blog post from Benedict Evans explains the matter pretty well: Amazon is a now itself a bundle.

These key insights in understanding the role of unbundling and re-bundling in modern organizing have been amazingly captured lately by Packy McCormick in his APIs All the Way Down that — by borrowing an apocryphal and supposedly ancient story of the infinite stack of turtles that carries the world on their shoulder as a metaphor — explained how today’s most competitive organizations learn how to do one thing well and connect to other (specialized) third parties to complement. This essential insight on the future of organizing as a swarm of specialized entities (some of them potentially reaching incredible heights and becoming “platform of platforms”) allowed us this year to eventually extend the conversation into building networked and unbundled organizations — a debate that here at Boundaryless we are capturing, modelling and abstracting into the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization Toolkit — to a broader audience, beyond the champions and pioneers such as Amazon, Haier, Zappos or Burtzoorg. Corporate Rebels’ Joost Minnaar surely was a prolific writer on the topic this year — his post on the Age of Community Capitalism framing this transition in time — standing as one of the most interesting reads, echoed by a legend of Agile such as Steve Denning on Forbes calling for transforming firms into agile networks.

Certainly, as technology unbundled organizations they now tend to re-bundle around problems that are nearer to their ecosystem, more meaningful, and farther from the bureaucratic need of self-maintaining themselves. Once Clay Shirky wrote: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” …well, this perspective seems to dry up more and more as time goes by and technology shortens the distance between the user and the organization. 2020 delivered to us a vision of the organization that is much more modular, contextual, and micro-entrepreneurial, where — according to Dave Snowden: “contextually unique solutions emerge and adapt based on a coherent whole.”

Of course, changes as big as the ones we’re describing — with the radical transition towards an economy of pluggable interfaces, low transaction costs — need to impact, change and even transform the way we understand the organization, innovation and strategy, and to do this a new wave of talent is needed.

Best Links on Unbundling and rebundling the organization

Further Reads from Boundaryless on the topic