Tony O'Driscoll Ed.D. is a Professor of the Practice at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business where he also serves as Executive Director of Fuqua’s Center for IT and Media; a research center dedicated to understanding the strategic, structural, operational and business model issues associated with these vibrant and volatile sectors. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as Management Information Sciences Quarterly, the Journal of Management Information Systems, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He has also written for respected professional journals such as Harvard Business Review, Strategy and Business, Supply Chain Management Review and Chief Learning Officer Magazine. Tony was a founding member of IBM Global Service’s Strategy and Change consulting practice. In that role, he consulted with business leaders around the world on how to best leverage technology to create sustainable competitive advantage in an increasingly global, networked and knowledge-enabled economy.
Authored Comments
Chris,
I really liked your points here. In our work here at the Center for IT and Media at Fuqua, as we studied the Fedora community, the two points you made here ring true.
In classic terms of power structures in organizations, in an open source model the power moves from Position, Coercive and Reward sources to Knowledge and Referent. Who and what you know becomes much more important that where you sit. And yet, at the core of these communities, as was described with Threadless, there reside a set of individuals who have the earned strong reputational capital within the community for their contribution and/or creativity.
Yes there will always be someone on the periphery who can contribute their insights or knowledge via a piece of code or a good piece of marketing artwork, but without that core built on emotion and passion there is no center of gravity around which the work endeavor can coalesce.