Stacy Becker is one of consultants I’m working with at the Citizens League on their MAP 150 project. (See her MAP 150 blog.)

At a meeting last week, she told me about this book: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.

I bought the book last night and read the intro and chapter 1 (PDF available on their site). Wow. I’d read two of Tapscott’s earlier books Growing Up Digital and The Naked Corporation but they didn’t grab me like this one already has after 33 pages. It’s probably because I’ve been so immersed doing the stuff they’re talking about (creating online communities, jump-starting a local blogosphere, developing leadership blogging and podcasting, teaching the use of web-based project collaboration tools) that I’ve not fully appreciated the pervasive implications.

Cool phrase: “weapons of mass collaboration.” I’ve incorporated this into my blog tagline:

Wigley and Associates: Leadership blogging, citizen media, and weapons of mass collaboration for organizations.

Here are some quotes from the book that stood out for me.

These changes, among others, are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history-a world where value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive. A world where only the connected will survive. A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated-cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value.

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“We the People” is no longer just a political expression-a hopeful ode to the power of “the masses”; it’s also an apt description of how ordinary people, as employees, consumers, community members, and taxpayers innovate and to create value on the global stage.

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Mass collaboration can empower a growing cohort of connected individuals and organizations to create extraordinary wealth and reach unprecedented heights in learning and scientific discovery. If we are wise, we will harness this capability to create opportunities for everyone and to carefully steward the planet’s natural resources. But the new participation will also cause great upheaval, dislocation, and danger for societies, corporations, and individuals that fail to keep up with relentless change.

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New models of peer production can bring the prepared manager rich new possibilities to unlock innovative potential in a wide range of resources that thrive inside and outside the firm. With the right approach, companies can obtain higher rates of growth and innovation by learning how to engage and co-create with a dynamic and increasingly global network of peers. Rather than conceding defeat to the most powerful economic force of our times, established companies can harness the new collaboration for unparalleled success. The new promise of collaboration is that with peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously. Sounds like a tall order. But the collective knowledge, capability, and resources embodied within broad horizontal networks of participants can be mobilized to accomplish much more than one firm acting alone. Whether designing an airplane, assembling a motorcycle, or analyzing the human genome, the ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organizations is becoming the defining competency for managers and firms. And in the years to come, this new mode of peer production will displace traditional corporation hierarchies as the key engine of wealth creation in the economy.

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The new mass collaboration is driving a historic change in how companies and societies harness knowledge and capability to innovate and create value. This affects just about every sector of society and every aspect of management. A new kind of business is emerging-one that opens its doors to the world, co-innovates with everyone (especially customers), shares resources that were previously closely guarded, harnesses the power of mass collaboration, and behaves not as a multinational but as something new: a truly global firm. These companies are driving important changes in their industries and rewriting the rules of competition.

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These four principles-openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally- increasingly define how twenty-first-century corporations compete. This is very different from the hierarchical, closed, secretive, and insular multinational that dominated the previous century. One thing that has not changed is that winning organizations (and societies) will be those that tap the torrent of human knowledge and translate it into new and useful applications. The difference today is that organizational values, skills, tools, processes, and architectures of the ebbing commandand- control economy are not simply outdated; they are handicaps on the value creation process. In an age where mass collaboration can reshape an industry overnight, the old hierarchical ways of organizing work and innovation do not afford the level of agility, creativity, and connectivity that companies require to remain competitive in today’s environment. Every individual now has a role to play in the economy, and every company has a choice-commoditize or get connected.