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The Best Reads on Platforms from 2020

Unbundling and Re-bundling as the world changes

Simone Cicero
Stories of Platform Design

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This end of the year blog post provides a — always very much acclaimed by our community — year-round review of the most important reads, videos and podcasts you may have missed in 2020. It will surely fill your holiday read space with insights and prepare you at best for what’s coming up. This year we also provide a sneak peek on what was 2020 for Boundaryless and we also deliver two awards to the Writer, and Podcast Host we loved the most this year (see the end of the post for both). Be sure you have them in your radar.

2020 has been an incredible year for platforms.

This is how a properly marketed, enthusiastic end of the year review would likely start. But in reality, 2020 has been a crazy year for all of us: the world has been swept by a still far from being cleared global pandemic that left most of the west swamped and in search of new normalcy. We’ve also got the most chaotic (and at the same time most participated) US election of all times, and the global discussion on platforms and ecosystem is now intertwined with all sort of other threads, from politics to climate change, from policies to finance and culture.

The big picture

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Internet is in transition: beyond infancy, according to Marc Andressen, is creating an environment where “every failed idea from the dot bubble would work now” — or at least, we used to think before the Covid19 hit.

After months of the pandemic, the world seems both struck into an emergency and ready to move to level 2. Benedict Evans started laying down this vision of a world at an edge when at the start of the year — in a moment that feels lost in time now — came out with his “The end of the Beginning” where he pointed how no technological wave could be foreseen to give us the next “s-curve” of innovation, forecasting an age of regulations. As the Internet pervades every aspect of our lives — Evans highlights — the threats grow exponentially. Further works, especially Stratechery’s deep dive on the pervasive nature of today’s internet (what’s more than everywhere and all the time?), reflecting on the question of the new beginning (curiously using the very same title that Evans choose) have largely built on this essential question.

Also Mary Meeker’s contribution this year has been timely delivered and focused on imagining the long term impact of the pandemic when it was still possible to imagine it as a temporary interruption: she also pointed out the lasting effects of this pandemic on work and organizations, the second-order impacts of which we still have hard times imagining, on our cities, technologies and organizational models.

Best Links on the big picture:

Further Reads from Boundaryless

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

Polarizing and De-Polarizing workers on the Platform Economy

If there’s another trend that 2020 made clearly visible in the platform economy, is the relentless capability that technological pervasiveness and behavioural change have on the economy and society, mainly through the expression of Pareto laws, and — as a result — of polarization of industries into commodities and superstars. The firms and workers that fall down in the value chain often get commoditized to the extreme. In two great reads in the topic, Anna Wiener talks about how the delivery-optimized future of food impacts on cities and the food industry, giving a somewhat elusive idea of progress, and Caitlin Dewey complements with a rather merciless analysis of how covid19 broke many of the rosy expectations of gig-workers worldwide. Recently, Passion Economy legend Li Jin echoed similar sentiments on HBR with her appeal to foster a “midde class” in the Creator Economy.

Photo by Latrach Med Jamil on Unsplash

Certainly, platforms seem to have a choice in choosing how to relate with the creators and workers they empower, and the increasing convergence between optimized and vertical job marketplaces (deep job platforms) seems to drive broader empowerment for the worker that, being unbundled from the traditional organization can seek in the new middleman (the platform) opportunities for re-skilling and up-skilling, better work fit, and tech-enabledness, like Pete Flint explained earlier this year.

Best Reads on Polarizing and De-Polarizing workers on the Platform Economy

Further Reads from Boundaryless on the topic

The inflection point: marketplaces everywhere

If anything got clearer this year is the inflection point we are living in. In one of the most terrific conversations we’ve been able to listen to this year, strategic thinking legend Rita McGrath covered in plain terms a couple of essential themes of the year: marketplace pervasivity as an expression of the penetration of the internet in our lives and — on the other hand — the massive junction where western civilization finds itself in, now in the middle of a Coronavirus pandemic tha calls for rewriting the social compact.

Undoubtedly as we fully move into the post-fordist economy — in a covid driven acceleration — marketplaces are entering the “next phase” by looking into pervading every aspect of our lives, beyond food delivery and short term rental, into education, real estate, jobs and much much more. After all, networks always powered our lives, we just didn’t notice fully yet. In February, Andreessen Horowitz Marketplace 100: a data-driven research on the evolution of marketplaces, brought up some interesting insights, especially — again — the power-law shape of the marketplace industry and the struggle to penetrate key incumbent sectors. Echoes of reality checks on the capability of marketplaces to replace and augment traditional incumbent or fragmented spaces (in terms of having sustainable unit economics) can be also found in some of the most interesting podcast conversations we’ve been hearing so far this year, those facilitated by Erik Torenberg in his Venture Stories podcast and his “all things marketplaces” deep dives. In two massively important and far-reaching conversations, one with Casey Winters, Lenny Ratchinsky and Dan Hockemeier and one with Fabrice Grinda, the conversation penetrated the challenges that exist — as marketplaces pervade everything and verticalize in niches — in limiting expenses, capital and coordination needs with sustainable unit economics. In a few words, as platforms organize smaller spaces the smaller, traditional firm becomes, again, competitive and the case for super-niche marketplaces is thin albeit relevant.

From Dealroom’s report

This year also brought us a ton of very good insights into advancing our idea of marketplaces: my preferred list covers advice on scaling up (from the attraction, metrics, strategy and organizational development perspective), the leverage-ability of underutilized assets in the ecosystem, and even most importantly, how to knit together product strategies with marketplace strategies. This latter topic is an emerging and extremely important aspect of the conversation so far this year. The most amazing reads I’ve been stumbling upon came from Kevin Kwok — with his illuminating insights on Figma and why it wins — and by and large by Casey Winters and Gilad Horev in their three instalment cycle (1,2,3) exploring the space between Saas and Marketplaces, a space that is increasingly important as marketplaces move in spaces that are more specific and professional (and thus need to incorporate a stronger “product” value proposition). The need for marketplaces to increasingly play a role beyond connecting — especially as they move into spaces that are historically not mediated by marketplaces, has been explored widely in another great debutant of the year, Sharetribe’s podcast Two Sided (below my personal highlights).

From our recent Whitepaper (check out Chapter 1): A Revised Marketplace Map

Best Reads on The inflection point: marketplaces everywhere

Further Reads from Boundaryless on The inflection point: marketplaces everywhere

A note on Boundaryless’ 2020 (and what’s coming up)

For the loyal reader following our work, the notion that 2020 has been a bubbling, crazy experimentation year, full of new flows of conversation, exploration and prototyping will sound as old news.

The year at Boundaryless has indeed been characterized first by a decisive transition — during the second quarter — to a fully online training and workshopping experience, in light of the traveling restrictions emerged from Covid-19 outbreak. As a consequence, this year we have been able to deliver one live and two online Platform Design Certification Bootcamps — certifying almost 100 more practitioners — plus two Masterclasses. Eventually, we’ve been introducing a new format — that effectively supplants the Masterclass — the Platform Design Sprint based on an easier to access program (2 days, 11 hours), that we just premiered with around 30 participants in December, with an edition that was strongly oriented to Social Entrepreneurs (we let in several Positive Platform Shapers). This new format is much more clearly targeted to those with a platform thinking project that is looking for an accessible way to get accelerated towards validation and will certainly be replicated. As for coming back to live events, the judgement is still open, albeit my personal impressions from 2020 really lean towards completing a fully online transition, that will be soon completed with the release of self-paced, cohort-based training programs that accustom more easily to the trainee’s agenda.

On the left: part of our December online design sprint class and, on the right, the last Live Bootcamp we organized in Paris in January, when it still was possible to make jokes about the pandemic.

2020 also was the year we launched our New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem thinking research, a year-long research program that brought us to release a 120-page deep Whitepaper in creative commons (direct download here) that contributed to reshaping our understanding of the work we are doing in an increasingly complex world that dives into crises and the need for reinvention.

As part of this process, 2020 also marked the launch of the Boundaryless Conversations podcast, an exploration of the future of organizing at scale. This successful experiment gave us the opportunity to speak with some of the most respected industry leaders, entrepreneurs and scholars and heavily contributed to making new visions possible. After series one we’re now full steam into Series 2 and this endeavour will likely stay with us for long.

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast - Stories of Platform Design

This page contains links to all our Podcast Episodes. Stories, case studies and explorations in Platform Design, Vision…

stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com

The journey to the release of the Whitepaper that happened on November 20th (check the release webinar), also passed through a full-day conference, our “Sensemaking Session on the Future of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking” with keynotes, panels, one mega fishbowl, four Hands-on Workshops and more than 500 registrants, a tremendous success you can catch up with here: The Future of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking: A Sense-Making Session.

Check all the videos here: The Future of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking: A Sense-Making Session

If just this wasn’t enough, 2020 also was the year of the launch of our Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization initiative: a project born out of our strategic collaboration with the probably most advanced organization in the world — with regards to organizational development matter — the Chinese 80 thousand employee conglomerate Haier Group powered by the revolutionary organizational model Rendanheyi.

The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization practice we introduced aims at “open-sourcing” the wisdom from Haier and other pioneering organizations such as Zappos, Buurtzorg, Morningstar, and many more, in designing organizations that can rhyme with the complexity of modern interconnected markets and challenges. Despite the research is still in its early stages, we provided two public Masterclasses to more than 80 participants that have effectively provided the first Rendanheyi certifications in collaboration with Haier Model Institute, and we released the first Creative Commons released version of the EEEO Toolkit, together with a Release guide for the users to start playing with it. We also ran a series of tremendously successful webinars and interviews around Rendanheyi (including an interview with Haier’s iconic CEO Zhang Ruimin) and a small series of EEEO Conversations.

Boundaryless itself is now in the process of becoming an EEEO and we’ll share more and more as we move forward in this amazing journey of transforming our organization into becoming a more entrepreneurial and ecosystem focused and enabling infrastructure for the many that want to contribute to the conversation around how we transform organizing at scale for the XXI century. A new plan is in the works for 2021, that will include more training, more releases and more partnerships, so stay tuned!

It’s hard to say what the future holds but to give our community a peek into 2021. One thing I can say that we are staying loyal to our commitment to Open Source and Creative Commons, despite the fact that we continue to have issues with copycats, people that steal our work with no attribution and misattribution issues: we’re going to release a license clarification statement soon to make the situation clearer).

On the other hand Boundaryless is working to enable better ways for our large community of thousands of adopters, hundreds of organizations and tens of experts to connect and engage in a community of practitioners that connects platform thinking with ecosystemic organizational development and doesn’t refrain to explore even the dark zones and the shortcoming of a design, and strategy profession, that of Platform-Ecosystem thinking that is posed to become a cornerstone of how we organize at scale in the XXI century and — hopefully — beyond.

🏆Boundaryless Awards 2020🏆

These awards are meant to recognize key contributions to the conversation around platforms and ecosystems that particularly benefited our team this year. There are plenty of amazing writers and hosts in the world, these are just the ones we felt we wanted to provide a small tribute to!

  • Boundaryless Writer of the Year:
    ⌨️ Li Jin — for her fundamental contribution to uncovering and studying the passion economy and the new perspectives for creators in a networked economy.
  • Boundaryless Podcast host of the Year:
    🎙️ Erik Torenberg (Village Global Venture Stories) — for his tireless energy in covering all aspects of the Internet age, and building a true knowledge platform for entrepreneurs and founders worldwide.
    >> ex aequo with <<
    🎙️ Sonal Chokshi (Andressen Horowitz) — for her always inclusive style of hosting, her capability to explore social change beyond technological transformation from the hearth of Silicon Valley.

In closing 2020, we also want to remember the thoughtful soul of Tony Hsieh and of all the casualties of the Covid19 pandemic.

Before You Go!

As you may know, everything we do is released in Creative Commons for you to use. In case you’re getting value out of these reads and tools, we encourage you to click the 👏button and hold down to 20–50 claps as this will help us to get more exposure, and hopefully, work more on developing these tools.

If you liked this post, you can also follow us on Twitter, we normally curate this kind of content.

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Simone Cicero
Stories of Platform Design
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Written by Simone Cicero

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Building the ecosystemic society. Creator of Platform Design Toolkit. www.boundaryless.io CEO Thinkers50 Radar 2020

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