Examples: Salesforce.com and its Apps marketplace, Facebook w/ its developer apps, Apple with the iPhone apps. Build your product with open APIs etc and get other people to help you expand your platform empire. Make your product the default choice, the almost-mandatory choice, the clear leader in that entire space/zone by enlisting a large community of users and developers to generate an entire ecosystem of additional value around your core “thing”.

In a way this is an evolution/expansion of the old software idea of having a big developer community. It leverages the network effect: the more people are using your product/platform, the more people / additional developers will pile on, the more likely it is that some good add-on stuff will be created, which will help attract new people, etc.

Which of course is wonderful for the core company — it creates barriers of entry and enables them to preserve high prices/profit margins. So this isn’t just “creating meaning” for the benefit of the broader world. It’s a business strategy can be highly profitable and defendable.

>>>At the moment, we are good at making meaning (Facebook) and good at making money (Amazon), but we are not good at doing both. <<<

Yup — my only observation there is that may be a sign of the relative age/maturity of the respective companies & market.

Amazon didn’t make serious money and was considered to be badly off track (unfocused etc.) for many years. Facebook is a much newer company: its business model is still evolving. There are a lot of companies out there where the new business model is not yet fully formed & in place (such as the news and traditional newspapers – where the old model is failing before the new model gets into place).

The trick of course with these new organizations is that there may or may not be a profitable business model at the end of it — it can be hard to tell if the light at the end of the tunnel is daylight or an oncoming train.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

The article is built on a much broader perspective regarding the fundamental shifts driving the evolution of our business and social landscape. We are in the process of trying to develop the key elements of this broader perspective at a new blog on The Big Shift at http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/

Would certainly welcome your comments and reactions to our postings there – they should be helpful in framing the context for the shaping strategy opportunity.

I told her the kind of job that I wanted. Before she was able to send me out on interviews, I landed the national lab job of my dreams on my own. It pays much less, but I have never regretted it.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/01/tagged-youre-it.html

BTW, I raved about Taleb’s Black Swan here: http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2008/04/black-swan.html.

But I disagree on one point. IQ follows a power law relationship, not a normal distribution. Email me if you want to know why. It is not bloggable.

I wrote a post on another blog once about “new-wave utility strategy” where a firm becomes a part of the infrastructure that others depend upon without thinking about it–like Google or Federal Express. It now occurs to me that a kind of meaning infrastructure might be possible too–a way of making people feel that their participation in a world or use of a service is also a message about their identity or their intentions. And we could go farther and have perhaps a modular set of meanings within one of these worlds that participants could snap together in different ways. (Although as Grant once pointed out about the meanings of clothes, these modular meaning carriers need not constitute a language.)