The Ecosystem Economy Quotes

“Put value creation over profits For you to be successful, you need to let value creation guide you at every step along the way. By this we mean value creation not only for customers but also for all ecosystem partners. Value creation comes in many forms—for instance, making it easier for your partners to work with you is a form of value creation. As is making it easier for your partners to offer propositions to your customers.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Avoid incrementalism You can't take baby steps. In every aspect of how you approach your ecosystem business, you need to be ready to make big, ambitious moves. First, aim high in terms of the value proposition you are looking to deliver. Second, be ambitious in terms of the partnerships you pursue and how you structure those relationships. And, third, be ambitious in terms of developing, fostering, growing, and maintaining the ecosystem.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Identify and leverage control points While building your ecosystem business, you need to pay close attention to the control points—like data. That is to say, identify the key steps in the customer journey that, if you control them, will allow you to gain an advantage over your competitors and form a deeper, closer relationship with your customers by meeting their needs holistically. Typically, important data sets make good control points. Therefore, you must identify and pursue the especially important data sets that will offer deeper and more meaningful insights into your customers’ needs. And beyond data sets, there could be many other things (e.g., access to customers) that could function as control points.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Don't solve your business problem; solve the customer's problem. Every move you make when building an ecosystem should be directed toward making life easier and more convenient for your customers—which in turn makes your offer more compelling and differentiated.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Start with the customer and end with the customer In the ecosystem economy, customers and their needs should be the highest of all priorities. Ecosystem businesses should be designed around the value propositions you are making to your customers.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Most traditional businesses have a culture of not accepting failure, which sometimes leads them to declare new business projects successful even when they plainly are not. This incentivizes company leaders to do all sorts of irrational things, like inefficiently allocating resources, investing imprudently in struggling ecosystem businesses, and—perhaps most importantly—pulling resources and management attention away from promising new ventures by keeping them focused on old, failing ones that everyone is too proud to admit are failing. Only radical transparency and not just the acceptance but celebration of failures can help here.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“To own the customer, you need to know the customer. And to know the customer, you need data. Data is the number one weapon in the fight to own customers. To effectively wield this weapon, though, you need not only to collect, maintain, and analyze the data; you need a strong, externally-facing infrastructure capable of controlling how these data flow through your ecosystem. And you need an infrastructure that effectively manages how the different participants in your ecosystem are able to share and collaboratively use those data. The danger you need to avoid at all costs is letting data get siloed, or trapped within one part of the ecosystem, when it could be put to work more productively elsewhere. If you are running an ecosystem with many different parts and many different services, you need infrastructure to connect them—you need to ensure that incentives are properly aligned so that data are able to flow freely between those different parts as needed.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Finally, any successful culture building effort focused on the ecosystem economy needs to promote long-term thinking. Rather than concentrating their energies on meeting narrow targets in the immediate future in order to impress their bosses and advance their own career prospects, employees should be focused on creating something sustainable—something that contributes value for everyone involved. This is particularly important in the context of ecosystems since, as we previously explained, building an ecosystem requires adjusting your expectations in the short term. You may have to sacrifice in the immediate future in order to lay the foundation for a successful ecosystem business later on.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Ecosystems require organizations that are constantly on the lookout for new possibilities, constantly scanning the horizon for new opportunities to make cross-sectoral plays and forge cooperative partnerships with others. Organizations can only be open to those possibilities and opportunities when their employees are curious and open minded. And employees are most likely to be curious and open minded when their leaders are holistically looking out for their best interests and actively searching for ways to provide them with everything they need. This is clearly most relevant to those within the senior ranks of your organization, but it really applies to everyone who serves in key roles. Above all, servant leadership helps organizations adopt all of the ideals that the ecosystem economy demands: openness, entrepreneurialism, decisiveness, a fail-fast mindset, long-term thinking, and more.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“According to the nonprofit organization Greenleaf founded, “the key tools for a servant-leader [include] listening, persuasion, access to intuition and foresight, use of language, and pragmatic measurements of outcomes.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Another value that is key to building an effective culture around ecosystems is the servant leadership mindset. This means taking a holistic view of your employees, learning what they need in order to do their jobs effectively, and figuring out everything you can do to help them reach their full potential. In contrast to the traditional model of leadership, in which the leader's main focus is giving direction and enforcing standards, servant leadership seeks to build employees up—to give them the resources they need to feel comfortable executing the tasks they need to.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has famously declared his intention to cultivate a “learn-it-all” culture rather than a “know-it-all” culture.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“At a fundamental level, you need to foster a culture and a set of core values that allow you to take advantage of the ecosystem economy. Some of these core values include: intellectual curiosity, failing fast, servant leadership, teamwork, and long-term thinking.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“After considering what gets covered, you will need to turn your attention to who is involved in the performance management cycle. Traditional performance management models are typically formal and hierarchical—and often involve only the senior management or leadership team. When you're setting up performance management for the ecosystem economy, you need a less hierarchical, more project-oriented, more results-oriented model. You need to involve not just senior management, but also people from all levels within your agile model (e.g., tribes, chapters, and squads). Involving more of the team not only creates a more streamlined and efficient process, but also facilitates an unfiltered flow of information. Management gets an opportunity to hear an unfiltered report straight from the team members who will be best equipped to give it. And the team members get an opportunity to receive feedback and instruction straight from management, without anything getting lost in translation as the information passed through two or three levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“At the very beginning, the only OKR that really matters is your effectiveness in delivering basic services and in reaching customers. The goal, at this stage, is simply to become operational. Next, as your ecosystem becomes more established, you will move on to more concrete metrics.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“In an ecosystem context, however, you need to focus only on the objectives and key results (OKRs) that are at the core of each agile chapter, tribe, or squad's work. As you do so, remember to always ask yourself: What objective did we give the teams, and what key results are we expecting them to drive?”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“In the agile model, and especially in the context of the servant leadership mindset, it is not uncommon to have weekly or even more frequent check-ins—not in a punitive or adversarial way, but simply to find whatever roadblocks are standing in the team's way and to ensure that everyone has what they need to move forward.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“In traditional performance management models, working teams present to leadership in performative, high-stakes monthly or quarterly reviews. By keeping these reviews on such an infrequent cadence, both sides can lose sight of what the real purpose of the review is: to support and sustain the work, and to ensure that everyone is moving together toward the desired results. Such an approach is ill-suited to the ecosystem economy. When you have agile tribes, chapters, and squads working on dynamic, cross-sectoral value propositions, you need to push your performance management process toward a much more frequent operating cadence.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Landing too far toward one extreme or the other can cause serious problems—and, in fact, this is one of the top reasons why some ecosystems falter. If you keep them too close to the core organization, their innovative, entrepreneurial spirit will be stifled. But keep them too far away, and they will struggle to scale up and benefit from synergies. Organizations, therefore, must strive to find a “Goldilocks zone” for most of their ecosystem businesses, at least until they successfully scale up and become fully independent. That is, they must develop ecosystem ideas that are not too close to the core business, but also not too far.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“the vast majority of unsuccessful ecosystem builds can trace their failure back to a flawed approach to governance. This is understandable because organizational structures designed for businesses in traditional sectors are ill-suited for ecosystem businesses that cut across sectors.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“One of the hardest parts of rising to the demands of the new ecosystem economy is the task of building an ecosystem-oriented business within an organizational framework that is simply not set up to do so. To successfully build ecosystem-oriented businesses, then, you will need to devise a new organizational model.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Ultimately, ecosystems are about building community and bringing different parties with different interests together—in the true spirit of serving customers’ best interests.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“if you are an HVAC equipment manufacturer, an online or software player would be an ideal choice as they would be well positioned to fill in the missing but critical capability of building the platform. They are an attractive potential collaborator. (Though, it is important to note that in such a scenario, partnering with an online player carries a risk of putting that player in a position to disintermediate you—so you would be wise to proceed with caution.) At the same time, you bring something important to the table, too: your equipment, which is essential to the value proposition. This makes the partnership feasible.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Ask yourself: What assets or capabilities do you need to be successful in this comfort-and-safety-as-a-service proposition? For example, you would need the capability to assemble and distribute the necessary HVAC equipment, security cameras, and other physical infrastructure. This, fortunately, may be a capability you already possess as an equipment manufacturer. But chances are that such a player would lack at least a few other critical capabilities. For instance, you would need the ability to install and maintain that equipment, which may go beyond the scope of your current operation. Perhaps most importantly, you would need an online platform to connect all the devices, sensors, and other equipment—allowing for the creation of digital twins for real-time remote digital monitoring. This online platform would also allow customers to make adjustments, access camera footage, and manage their subscription, all in one place.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“One of the fundamental qualities that characterizes this distinction is the presence of collective value creation. That is to say, in real, ecosystem-based relationships, partners grow the pie together and then share that value. The relationship is not transactional, but rather, cooperative.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“The first thing to understand is that to survive in the new ecosystem economy, you will need to expand both the breadth and depth of your relationships. That is to say, you will need to drastically expand the number of partners you are working with, but you will also need to make those relationships count for more.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“If a capability is straightforward to develop and doesn't require much effort or know-how to maintain, it should be simple to build organically on your own. If the asset or capability in question is harder to develop but easy to maintain, you might instead consider acquiring an outside business that has already developed it—incorporating their business into your own will save you valuable time. And finally, if you need an asset or capability that is difficult both to develop and to maintain, the best route is likely an ecosystem partnership. Bringing participant businesses with the necessary skills or assets into your ecosystem through a structured collaboration will give you the best of both worlds. You will have access to the capabilities you need without going through the trouble of having to develop or maintain them on your own.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“But the platforms serve the central function of coordinating activities, structuring the relationship, and providing the backbone. For example, they provide billing and collection as well as ensuring the safety and security of all parties involved.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Customer Network and Go-to-Market Infrastructure: Orchestrators use their platforms to create a network effect, connecting participants with customers and sometimes with one another. In other words, they help ecosystem participants thrive by bringing them together and providing services to help them enhance their offers as well as access to a broad network of customers. As more and more customers join, the ecosystem becomes more and more attractive to participants. And likewise, as more and more participants join, the ecosystem becomes increasingly attractive to customers.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“An ecosystem, after all, is by definition a community of interconnected businesses that work across the boundaries between traditional sectors. An important part of what makes ecosystems special, therefore, is that they thrive on connectivity. They create value through cooperation and then share that value among their different constituent parts.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders