Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing.
BUSINESS ECOSYSTEMS
Become business ego-systems.
Today, when a business builds a platform for a business ecosystem, it positions itself to extract the most value.
As shareholder and public markets push more consistent to returns and increased profitability, owners of these systems can become predatory.
In any marketplace, all participants have to be connected. Today this is achieved through a hub and spoke model.
In this model: Industries and businesses exist in their silos and then rely on a market platform to come together and do business.
They are currently referred to as Business Ecosystems. Google and Amazon are prominent examples of business ecosystems that integrate market participants and facilitate transactions.
A Business Ecosystem has proven very useful, but having a proprietary market platform also adds cost and friction. More importantly, these platforms also disintermediate the customer interface, transferring the customer relationship from the business providing the product or service to the platform's owner.
In today's vast and proprietary Big Tech platforms, only the platform owner has a complete overview of the data in a centralized data platform. The opposite happens with the Blockchain ecosystem; the customer relationship becomes collectively owned by the participants.
What do you call an ecosystem in which you always see your company as the central actor? An EGOSYSTEM.
This is how we end up with “insert-your-name-here ecosystem.” These labels seem impressive at the get-go, but they undermine an important truth: Ecosystem strategy should be an alignment strategy.
More often than not, there isn't any and members of an ego-system find themselves in a race to the bottom.