It’s a Bottom Up World
November 11, 2009
In most of our pursuits, it used to be that a small group of elites would convene and decide how things were to be done. Entering a new market, investing in a new technology, and how the staff spends their time were often decided upon by these small groups of the chosen. Increasingly, our world is moving towards a different model where these decisions are distributed and more grass roots.
The growing use of the phrase “Built from the Ground Up” is a good illustration of the shift going on in our global culture. This phrase emerged in the early part of the last century. At the time, it was used to describe something exceptional. A rare event. It’s a phrase that is now commonplace. A quick Google search shows its origins in 1910, but only mentioned twice in that decade. There is only a single reference in the entire decade of the 1920’s. That started to change dramatically during the 1980’s as use of the phrase became more common and used increasingly up to today.
Mobilization at the grass roots level has always been the impetus for significant social progress (see – The Power of 11/9). Think about any large social movement – American civil rights, Indian independence – and the power of grass roots is recalled as the determinant lever. This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Berlin wall’s downfall. There is no better example of a grassroots movement prevailing.
Today, this dynamic – building success from the ground up – is moving across the fabric of our culture. Any new idea in the world of business is increasingly vetted at the grass roots level. Most venture capitalists value ideas coming through their door by breaking them down to their most basic level. “Tell me how this idea works at the individual level, demonstrate how it is new, and then prove that it can scale.” Philanthropy has moved in this direction as well. The rise of micro-financing, perhaps the biggest trend in the use of philanthropic funds, is a direct assault on top-down grant making and its perceived failures. Look at successful organizations like the Acumen Fund as an example of how the world of charity is being increasingly dominated by a ground up, grass roots view of the world. Increasingly, government’s credibility faces new threats from the grass roots. Think about the Iranian government’s challenges in controlling opinion of the recent election in that country. The easiest step taken to control opinion and dissent was to revoke the visas of all visiting journalists. Then they tried to stifle communications by shutting down access to YouTube and Twitter. They did not succeed on this count. Individuals far away from Iran set up proxy servers that thwarted the Iranian government’s actions, allowing Iranians continued access to the outside world. The web 2.0, bottom-up world put the Iranian government on its heels. In markets, think about Microsoft’s dominant power, and the challenges it faced in protecting its market position. It hasn’t been easy for the global heavyweight to keep up with a few college students who invented the browser more than a decade ago. Mark Zuckerberg, the student who invented Facebook years later, is another example.
Web 2.0 technologies are clearly accelerating this shift with an infrastructure that will solidify a more decentralized culture. Web 2.0 technologies allow for an individual idea to enter the collective conscious as quickly as it can be posted on YouTube. In 2008, Analysis from Technorati, a blog indexing web site, showed 133 million blog records alive on the internet, 7.4 million of those posted in just 120 days prior to the analysis. It is tough to comprehend how many ideas, how many innovations, how many new ways of doing things are out there to be recognized and tapped. Small groups that previously made the decisions and yielded the influence are now running to keep up.
Think of this shift to a bottom up world as the new operating system for our culture. In this new era, effective leadership will change its emphasis towards findings ways to leverage the new operating system. P&G’s Connect and Develop R&D model is an excellent example of how companies are trying to tap into it. Through this effort, P&G seeks to leverage a grassroots innovation network that is dispersed and organic, rather than dictating innovation from within. As another example, Google has become well-known for its self organizing development teams. Effective leadership in this new world means creating new ways for society and organizations to tap into ideas that start at a grass roots level. Leverage the network. It’s a bottom-up world.
