Regarding Platforms

@augustpublic aug.co @clayparkerjones
Regarding
Platforms
1

Platforms. Important, hard to define, even
harder to build.
Let’s at least start in a common place.
Bill Gates knows what he’s talking about.
Platforms are rare, and they’re very rarely
designed on purpose. They are things that
happen – they’re active – because they rely
on people, not designers, to be effective.
Bill Gates, via Semil Shah
Platforms Are For People
2
A platform is when the
economic value of
everybody that uses it
exceeds the value of the
company that creates it

The San Francisco waterfront was – and is
today – a beautiful part of an already great
city. But from 1968 to 1991 it was shaded by
the Embarcadero Freeway, cutting it off
from the rest of the city. This seemed like a
good idea to those designing the city from
afar, but it ended up taking the life out of a
precious asset for downtown.
The Embarcadero Freeway
3

Seriously. Look how sad this is.
The Embarcadero Freeway
4

For a long time, this was just how things
worked. City design happened as an
expressly intentional, utopian act, far from
the actual users of the city.
Generally: bad stuff.
But don’t those designs look neat!?
Thanks, Ebenezer!
5

But in 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake
damaged the freeway, and it had to be torn
down. Folks thought there would be bad
traffic as a result, but it turned out there
wasn’t – and now SF’s waterfront was
ready to be restored to its current state.
Tourist destination or not, the Ferry Building
is a magnet for activity day and night, and
is connected to multiple modes of
pedestrian-friendly transit.
Downtown is for people, not for cars.
Force Majeure
6

All of this big, central planning stuff came
to a head in the 1960s, when Robert Moses
intended to run a freeway through
Greenwich Village. Citizens, led by Jane
Jacobs, resisted these efforts. In 1958 and
1961, respectively, Jacobs wrote “Downtown
is for People” and Death and Life in Great
American Cities, bringing attention and life
to the new Urbanist movement. The result
was the end of the Lower Manhattan
Expressway and a growing resistance to Big
Development Projects in American cities.
Jacobs summarized keys to vibrant cities
(through their economic utility) in four key
criteria:
Along Came Jane
7

Each block should have mixed primary uses,
so that at any given time of day, there’s a
reason for people to be there. Dense
commercial zones without bars and
restaurants will feel dead and scary at
night. Same goes for exclusively residential
streets.
Mixed Uses
8

Short blocks promote vibrant cities by
making it easy to discover different parts of
a neighborhood. A long block – represented
by a development, freeway, or other
impasse – will create dead zones.
Short Blocks
9

Diversity of use (and tenants) can be
promoted by encouraging blocks to host
both old and new buildings. Old buildings
allow lower rents, enabling lower-income
businesses and families to live alongside
richer ones.
Buildings Of Various Ages
10

And finally, density! Density promotes
vibrancy and diversity by putting more
people next to more people, pushing
connections where there may currently be
none, creating new relationships, and
helping people create new and better ideas.
Density
11

Jacobs talks about these four criteria as
Generators of Diversity and critical to
building Economic Pools of Use in the city. I
like that interchange – it’s not so often that
diversity and economic utility share equal
billing. But it’s appropriate if you’ve ever
experienced a great city; the wholesome
diversity of cities make them easy platforms
for commerce and growth.
Suburbs? Not so much. Too much driving.
Generators Of Diversity
12Jane jacobs
Mixed
uses
Short
blocks
Buildings of
various ages Density

@augustpublic aug.co @clayparkerjones 13
Cities » Ease

Jacobs also had this to say about cities.  
And I’m sure you’ll note that this sentiment,
about self-organization, is the obverse of
the Howard-Moses school of thought.  
The traditional methods of city planning
prioritize top-down “expert” driven design.
The best cities come to life through active
participatory design by their inhabitants.
Jane Jacobs, Death and Life in Great
American Cities
Cities, As It Happens, Are
About Self-Organization
14
Cities have the capability  
of providing something for
everybody, only because,
and only when, they are  
created by everybody

It’s no coincidence that Amazon affords its
teams an extraordinary amount of
autonomy.
The everything store, supplied by everyone.
(Also worth pointing out here – cities are a
thing that happens, not a thing that is.)
Jane Jacobs, Death and Life in Great
American Cities
Cities, As It Happens, Are
About Self-Organization
15
Cities have the capability  
of providing something for
everybody, only because,  
and only when, they are  
created by everybody

You know the Airbus A380, right? Biggest
passenger airplane ever built? And one of
the biggest, most complex industrial
achievements of the modern world?
Unsurprisingly it was more than two years
late and six billion over budget.
Turns out, when they started to put
together the first prototype (which was no
small piece of work) the wiring for all the
components were all about two centimeters
too short.
Two centimeters cost two years, and six
billion.
Why? The designers of the fuselage and the
wiring were using two different versions of
the same software.
You’ll Never Believe This
16

Companies »
Not Easy

No joke.
I’ve paraphrased the following narrative
from his work. Hopefully it translates here!
Geoffrey West Changed  
My Life
18

In searching for an explanation of how cities
work – why they’re growing, what we can
understand about their future – Dr. West
and his team looked at networks.
The idea is pretty simple. Biological
networks are well-understood, and if we can
compare the way biological systems work to
the way cities work, we might then be able
to understand all human systems, including
companies.
Let’s Talk About Nets, Baby
19

Input Rate~ Maintenance + Growth
~~
All systems seem to follow this rule: that the input rate will
always be equal to the amount of maintenance necessary to
keep the system running, and the amount of growth that it
can sustain. 
 
(In corporate speak: Growth = Input – Maintenance.)
True Of All Systems
GEOFFREY WEST, ET AL.

How Do These Work?

It turns out that when you look at all kinds
of inputs and outputs of living systems,
there’s this incredible uniformity to how
they scale. Metabolic rate slows as an
organism gets larger. Cancer rates decline –
rats have lots of cancer, while Blue Whales
have almost none. Sleep requirements get
shorter. (See also: “Why is my cat so lazy?”)
But it’s not just that input and output rates
slow as organisms scale – when you double
the size of a thing, you don’t need double
the inputs, you need about 75% more.
Universally.
Less is needed as organisms get larger.
“Systematic Uniformity”
22
0.01
0.1
1
10
100
1,000
10,000
0.01 0.1 1 10 100 1000 10000
Elephant
Human
Giant Rat
CondorChicken
Mouse
Body Mass
MetabolicRate
22GEOFFREY WEST, ET AL.

PA R I S
S H A N G H A I
How Do These Work?

Turns out, when West and team looked at
cities through the same lens, they found a
“systematic uniformity” to cities and how
they scale. And when looking at the inputs
to a city, from the length of electrical lines
to the number of gas stations for a given
population, it follows the same exact
pattern as biological systems – as you
double, you need about 75% of the input.
Amazing!
And, oddly enough, this is true across
cultures. No matter what nation, region, or
culture, all cities follow this same pattern.
Holy Crap! Cities, Too?
Netherlands
Spain
Germany
France
1 0 2
1 0 3
1 0 1
1 0 5 1 0 6
Population
GasStations

The amazing thing that they discovered
about cities is that they're not just more
efficient as they scale – like biological
systems – they're also more effective at
creating outputs. So when you double the
size of a city, no matter what, you get more
than double the outputs. And with the same
amazing uniformity!
A word of caution, however – for the
researchers, outputs covered productive and
harmful outputs. So cities produce more
wages, supercreatives, patents, universities
(the list goes on), but they also produce
more crime, HIV cases, and the like.
Exponents At Work
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Population
Wages

Note that the previous charts follow one of
two patterns:
A sub-linear pattern, representing
economies of scale (you need less as you
grow);
A super-linear pattern, representing returns
to scale (you get more as you grow).
Looking For Patterns
26
Economies Returns

What can we learn from this? Sublinear and
Superlinear scaling patterns have an impact
on how a thing grows – whether it can
sustain exponential growth or whether it
will eventually stop growing, and die.
Biology follows the latter pattern: all living
things start by growing quickly; eventually
their growth slows, and they all perish.
Cities, on the other hand, almost never die.
Sublinear Scaling =
Eventual Death
27
Economies Returns

So. Are companies more like cities, which
are hard to kill and create accelerating
outcomes for their inhabitants? You’d think
that would be the case – after all, they’re
social networks, just like cities, filled of
people, not cells. Right?
Nope. They’re more like biological systems,
which are eventually overcome by their
maintenance cost.
WTF?
All Companies Will Die
28
Population
Profits
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
1,000,000
10 100 1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000

Input Rate~ Maintenance + Growth
~~
R E S O U R C E S
P R O D U C T S
E N E R GY
D O L L A R S
→
R E PA I R
R E P L A C E M E N T
M A N A G E M E N T
B U R E A U C R A C Y
S U S T E N A N C E
→
So let’s return to this for a second. Is it possible that
companies could function like cities? Is it possible that
maintenance costs at companies could go down as they get
bigger, instead of going up? So that we could achieve
superlinear growth? I’ve seen this happen. It’s called self-
organization, and it’s about making it easy to do hard work.

Growth » Ease

This is where I grew up! And that road over
there is the one we drove on, for four hours,
to buy my first computer.
Arcata, California
31

This was my first computer.
Its most important role in my life – at age
12-ish – was connecting me to my friends
through a bulletin-board system called
SMUGglers BBS. It was a crap version of
Facebook, but for the time it did a lot:
messaging, group and private chat, the
works.
All for $15 dollars per month.
For 45 minutes of usage per day.  
45 minutes!
The Compaq Presario
32

I worked out that my parents were paying
around five cents per megabyte of data
when I was using SMUGglers BBS.
(Of course I wasn’t transmitting constantly,
so in practice it was much more expensive
than that. Anyway.)
Today I spend about one cent per megabyte
for data.
But that’s on my phone. At home, the price
drops to practically to zero cents per
megabyte, because I can transmit and
receive unlimited amounts of data.
Moore’s Law! Hooray!
Let’s Get Free Y’all
33
¢5 ¢1 ¢0

(Dear reader, I know you know about this,
but the visual is helpful for a particular
point about decision-making.)
This is how Moore’s Law works. The number
of transistors on a chip doubles at a
predictable rate. It’s easy to lose sight of
how these chips work, though: each
transistor is a switch that can either be on
or off, representing a one or a zero.
Everything your computer or phone does
breaks down to these tiny decisions. The
more “decisions” that a chip can process,
the faster it works, and the more your
device can do.
Density. Rapid decision-making. Exponential
(super-linear) results.
Sound familiar?
Visualizing Moore’s Law
34
1 1 1
1 0 0
0
1
1 0 1 0
0 1 0 1
1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0
1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0
1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
Doubling Transistors = More Individual “Decisions”
Halving Size = Faster “Decision Making”
18 
Months

If you wanted to buy the computing power
of a single iPhone 6 in the 1960s, it would
have cost you ~500 trillion dollars.
And we’re still using matrix and command-
control systems in our organizations.
Got it.
Fun Fact!
35
$1,000,000,000,000
$0.22
20131961

72,057,594,037,927,900 144,115,188,075,856,000 288,230,376,151,712,000 576,460,752,303,423,000 1,152,921,504,606,850,000 2,305,843,009,213,690,000 4,611,686,018,427,390,000 9,223,372,036,854,780,000
281,474,976,710,656 562,949,953,421,312 1,125,899,906,842,624 2,251,799,813,685,248 4,503,599,627,370,496 9,007,199,254,740,990 18,014,398,509,482,000 36,028,797,018,964,000
1,099,511,627,776 2,199,023,255,552 4,398,046,511,104 8,796,093,022,208 17,592,186,044,416 35,184,372,088,832 70,368,744,177,664 140,737,488,355,328
4,294,967,296 8,589,934,592 17,179,869,184 34,359,738,368 68,719,476,736 137,438,953,472 274,877,906,944 549,755,813,888
16,777,216 33,554,432 67,108,864 134,217,728 268,435,456 536,870,912 1,073,741,824 2,147,483,648
65,536 131,072 262,144 524,288 1,048,576 2,097,152 4,194,304 8,388,608
256 512 1,024 2,048 4,096 8,192 16,384 32,768
1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
You know this story, right? Supposedly, the wise inventor of
chess presented the new game to their master, who offered
any prize in return for the amazing invention. The request
was to put one grain of wheat on the first square, two on
the second, four on the third, and so on. The master laughed
off the meager prize, but as they started to fulfill the prize,
they realized the magnitude of the request.
In particular, the numbers get really big in the second half of
the chessboard, illustrating the power of doubling.
♛♚♜♝♞♟

72,057,594,037,927,900 144,115,188,075,856,000 288,230,376,151,712,000 576,460,752,303,423,000 1,152,921,504,606,850,000 2,305,843,009,213,690,000 4,611,686,018,427,390,000 9,223,372,036,854,780,000
281,474,976,710,656 562,949,953,421,312 1,125,899,906,842,624 2,251,799,813,685,248 4,503,599,627,370,496 9,007,199,254,740,990 18,014,398,509,482,000 36,028,797,018,964,000
1,099,511,627,776 2,199,023,255,552 4,398,046,511,104 8,796,093,022,208 17,592,186,044,416 35,184,372,088,832 70,368,744,177,664 140,737,488,355,328
4,294,967,296 8,589,934,592 17,179,869,184 34,359,738,368 68,719,476,736 137,438,953,472 274,877,906,944 549,755,813,888
16,777,216 33,554,432 67,108,864 134,217,728 268,435,456 536,870,912 1,073,741,824 2,147,483,648
65,536 131,072 262,144 524,288 1,048,576 2,097,152 4,194,304 8,388,608
256 512 1,024 2,048 4,096 8,192 16,384 32,768
1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Nine Quintillion→

2015 2017
1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013
1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997
1967 1969 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979 1981
1951 1953 1955 1957 1959 1961 1963 1965
Things did just  
get weird, right?
→
My Compaq→

The cost of these robots has dropped 23x in
five years.
This is a GIF in the regular presentation, and
you’re supposed to go, “WHOA those are
fast.”
Robots Building Cars
39MALONE

The cost of these drones has dropped 143x
in six years.
This is a GIF in the regular presentation, and
you’re supposed to be amazed that drones
are building a bridge out of rope.
#terminator
Drones Building A Bridge
40MALONE

The cost of PV panels has dropped 200x in
thirty years.
This is a GIF too but it’s not that impressive.
Solar Panels Tracking Sun
41MALONE

The cost of the sensors needed to run a self-
driving car has dropped 300x in six years.
This GIF is crazy. It’s a rendering of what a
Google Car sees, showing obstructions,
paths, etc. Google it (ha).
The point of all of these GIFs is to show how
the price for technological performance is
dropping rapidly, making previously
impossible things darn near free, if not easy
to implement.
Cars Driving Themselves
42MALONE

I love, love, love this quote.
My experience with SMUGglers BBS wasn’t
socially interesting. Perhaps a thousand
people in NorCal were on the system. It
fulfilled nearly all of the user stories that
Facebook fulfills, but it was still
technologically novel to connect with friends
over the internet.
Contrast this to everything happening
around us today – the tools have become
boring, allowing everyone to use them,
which has profound social impacts.
Quote from Clay Shirky
Boring Is Good Powerful
43
Communications tools don't
get socially interesting until
they get technologically boring

This is pretty simplistic, but I think Shirky’s
statement is applicable beyond
communications tools. It’s applicable to all
technologies, including the generic ones
that underpin organizations.
That’s the thing about our management
systems – they’re all still technologically
interesting. They’re enthusiast-grade
technologies, only useful if you really give a
shit about them. (Again, think about my
1990s social networking experience.)
This will change.
A Broader Truth
44
Things don't get socially
interesting until they get
technologically boring.

Boring » Easy

I’m sure you’re well familiar with this chart,
showing disengagement at work (in white)
contrasted with engagement (in grey). Most
people are some form of disengaged at
work. My experience is that this is because
the hard, engaging work is made difficult by
our methods and values.
Engagement dies because work is too hard,
because the management tasks overcome
the growth tasks.
Disengagement Everywhere
46GALLUP

Again, a familiar chart, showing the “life
expectancy” of companies on the S&P 500,
dropping systematically, and uniformly, over
time.
Companies die because work is too hard,
because the management tasks overcome
the growth tasks.
Chart Your Firm’s Death
47
0
18
35
53
70
1958 1982 2006 2030
FOSTER & KAPLAN

Let’s return to where we started – thinking
about platforms. Why adopt a platform
mindset? Why consider them in the context
of your business at all?
Consider the city around you. It is a
platform for economic utility, vibrancy,
growth, and change. We know why it works
this way – it’s self-organizing, with simple
rules that push the right kind of
development. And like a platform, it’s not a
planned development – it’s something that
happens through the power of networks.
Companies should behave the same way,
but too few of their leaders insist on leaving
the platform advantage – the self-
organizing advantage – to others.
Bill Gates, via Semil Shah
Platforms Are For People
48
A platform is when the
economic value of
everybody that uses it
exceeds the value of the
company that creates it

Platforms » Ease

Regarding Platforms

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