Extinguish The Need to Own. Now.

Speed, efficiency and disruption is the result of being “open.”‍

‍Imagine a day in your company, where you didn’t have to establish ownership of your portfolio. Develop proprietary code to accomplish your project mandate. Implement a huge buy via procurement to update your server stack.

‍A day where you just put your intellectual power to work, without having to prove you are or can make a decision to be the “owner” of something.

‍Would be pretty glorious, wouldn’t it?

‍Let’s take a look at cloud for a minute.

‍Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others are building huge platforms to drive computing and intelligence forward, and are opening them up to the anyone to use them. Yes, I get that these giants are doing this for profit-motivated reasons, but the world is seeing HUGE gains in short periods of time because of the open-nature of these platforms.

‍As a result, the need to own (code, infrastructure, etc) is being extinguished in a very short timeline.

‍Companies are moving quickly to cloud to create business advantage. But the benefit they are getting isn’t just from reducing costs, time to market etc. They are getting it because they are becoming open to the concept that holding on to ideas, tools, processes and even their own portfolio’s inside their walls reduces the ability to move quickly, efficiently and effectively.

It’s an idea we should all be considering.

‍Maybe, just maybe, if we removed our closely-held notion that if “I own something, I am indispensable” we might actually be MORE helpful and part of moving things along.

‍Inside any organization, there is power in the size of your portfolio, your staff count and the budget you have commandeered. The more you have, the more you can control. This business truth creates silo’s, and once built they take a lot of time and energy to maintain. This effort would be / could be put to better use, to drive the outcomes that we’re all (every single one of us in an organization) expected to deliver on for our customers.

‍Stop thinking “if I share access to that data set, people won’t need me anymore.”Being “radically generous” is what we should all aspire to be.

‍To democratize our knowledge, energy and abilities.My preacher reminds me constantly, that God loves a generous giver. I try to align that in my professional life, to be helpful every single moment of the day. I don’t always get that right, but directionally it has benefitted me much more than it has hurt me.