Dave Gray: The Connected Company

The Connected Company: An Inventory of the Possible:

French historian Fernand Braudel once said that a great city is an inventory of the possible. For thousands of years, cities have perfected the art of enabling complex social interactions at scale. A city is a social network, and so is a company. But there is a difference. As companies grow in size and complexity, they become less productive per capita. But as cities grow, they become more productive, by almost every measure. Why? It's getting more and more difficult for companies to handle complexity: increasing customer demands for more customization, more convenience, lower costs and faster innovation. At some point the machine breaks down and companies just can't handle it.

The 21st-century company will have the same kinds of dense, dynamic, and complex properties of well-designed cities: fast pace, high energy, rapid innovation and high productivity. And some companies are doing this today. In our panel we will talk about who those companies are, what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it works. We will show you how you can use the same principles to organize your company for a complex, networked, rapidly-changing global marketplace.

Dave Gray, founder & CEO of XPLANE and SVP Strategy at Dachis Group will kick off the session by providing some foundational thinking around this topic. Dave's talk will be followed by an interactive workshop which will enable attendees to explore in greater depth questions such as:

What can companies learn from successful cities?
How can companies be more successful by operating as social networks?
What is a connected company?
What are some examples of successful connected companies?
What makes these companies successful?

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  Science & Technology