Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

Incomplete contracting and residual rights of control will probably always necessitate the existence of companies.

One of the things our economy needs most are people who specialize in inventing these new jobs. This task requires designing and implementing new combinations of technologies, human skills,

Instead, they fall back whenever possible on the processes of iteration and experimentation to find unbiased evidence on the quality of a new idea. Managers,

they make the transmission of an organization work smoothly, and prevent it from seizing up. The second reason

some subset of people has taken on the role of defining and shaping the work to be done. When this goes poorly, we get tyrants, demagogues,

if, through a series of small decisions and events, one of them gets a bigger share of consumers’ attention, that advantage can feed on itself until the game vastly dominates its competitor. Network effects, economies of scale, complementarities, two-sided networks, learning curves, and a variety of other factors can create very strong path depende

using technology to complement human labor is Iora Health, which (as we discussed in Chapter 5) employs health coaches.

Consider 99Degrees Custom, a Lawrence, Massachusetts, apparel maker. You seemingly

Every company I talked to had middle and even senior managers who operated as player-coaches, tasked with both doing things and directing others.”