Re-bundling the Firm around Problems to Be Solved — with Sangeet Paul Choudary

Podcast Notes

In this episode, we’re excited to have a legend from the platform thinking space Sangeet Paul Choudary. We explore his fascinating journey from the micro level to macro when analysing the platform economy.

As Founder of Platformation Labs, and author of two bestselling books Platform Revolution and Platform Scale, Sangeet Paul Choudary is best known for his work on platform economics and network effects. He frequently advises the leadership of Fortune 500 firms and has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Sangeet’s work on platforms has been selected by Harvard Business Review as one of the top 10 ideas in strategy and has been featured thrice in the HBR Top 10 Must Reads compilations. Sangeet is a frequent keynote speaker at leading global forums including the G20 Summit, the World50 Summit, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum.

Sangeet helps us understand in depth how control and commoditization of supply play out in the current evolution of platforms and how regulators ought to look at it. He also paints an extremely interesting picture of the unbundling of work and what it may mean for the future of work coordination infrastructures, as work gets re-bundled in a post-firm context. Are we going to see teams join up to solve challenges related to the job-to-be-done, rather than taking on larger roles? Will the job-welfare bundle disappear? These are some interesting questions we dig into with Sangeet.

To find out more about Sangeet’s work:

• Blog: https://platformed.info/
• Substack newsletter: http://platforms.substack.com/

Other references and mentions:

• Sangeet Choudary, Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment, 2015: https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Scale-emerging-business-investment-ebook/dp/B015FAOKJ6
• Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You, 2016: https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Revolution-Networked-Transforming-Economyand-ebook/dp/B00ZAT8VS4
• The Entrepreneurial Age: Networks and a fragmenting world — with Nicolas Colin: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/the-entrepreneurial-age-networks-and-a-fragmenting-world-with-nicolas-colin-718c066b19bc
• Marketplaces: Unveiling the math behind society and what to do about it — with James Currier: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/marketplaces-unveiling-the-math-behind-society-and-what-to-do-about-it-aebefbac0c08
• Ping An Healthcare and Technology Company Limited http://www.pagd.net/allPage/aboutUs/47?lang=EN_US
• Participatory City: http://www.participatorycity.org/
• Belt and Road Initiative: https://www.beltroad-initiative.com/belt-and-road/
• Electronic World Trade Platform: https://www.ewtp.org/
• Sidewalk Labs: https://www.sidewalklabs.com/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at: https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 18 September 2020

Key Insights

1.Sangeet‘s macro view onhow technology is changing the world suggests that too much focus on the narrative of exponential technologies, without understanding control and commoditization — the core of platform-ecosystem strategies — makes companies less able to understand how to use new technologies to their benefit. Understanding the nature of control and commoditization, rather than the industry as unit of analysis, can thus help determine to what extent suppliers need to be commoditized for a platform to be successful. For regulators of the platform economy, he believes that they should focus on regulating aggregation of demand, avoiding hoarding of demand, and not so much on the standard setters or slowing down commoditization.

2. Analysing the future of work, the most interesting aspect according to Sangeet is what is happening when workers — such as in the passion economy — do not have to be vertically integrated inside the firm in order to access work benefit and welfare bundles, since these can exist and be re-bundled outside the firm, such as health care, unionization, etc. What we may witness in the “post-firm bundle” is for teams to form dynamically around problems to be solved, and organised by work coordination infrastructures. However, Sangeet believes we still have some way to go before we are seeing the “real” future of work. As for now, we are in the transition.

3. Looking at the geopolitical landscape, the conversation led us to believe we might face a new era of globalisation, where countries exporting essential infrastructures — like financial or information technology — provide standards and protocols to which players using these infrastructures have to adhere. With China, Alibaba and the Belt and Road Initiative providing an example, we also ponder on how the global-local interplay is affected by such an evolution, especially what it would mean for resilience of the system. Indeed, resilient systems should strive a.) to not have one, centralised “single point of failure” and b.) to avoid extreme inequality, extreme concentration of power, or extreme concentration of control. Instead, control should be distributed.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.