GE’s questions were borne out of a culture and processes built for an industrial age, when a premium was placed on productivity, certainty, and top-down control. To GE, the hypercollaborative endeavors of this new networked age came across, then, as free-spirit dot-com insanity. GE and the best of corporate America—think of them as Old Power—had always won by developing proprietary knowledge and then ferociously guarding that knowledge as a valuable asset.
