The Speculist

Individual contributor. That's my classification at work. It means that I'm a manager (reasonably senior), but no one reports to me.

So what does that tell us, exactly? That I'm a foot soldier? A worker bee?

Actually, it means that I am -- to some extent -- a unit unto myself. Some tasks require a team. My tasks require a team of one. Which is not to say that I'm not a part of any team. As a matter of fact, I'm part of several. But they are all of the dotted-line, cross-functional, here-today-gone-tomorrow variety. I participate in teams, but my role is not that of a team member. My role is that of an individual contributor.

Reading over Glenn's thoughts on bigness and smallness, a thought occured to me that may be an answer to his rhetorical question: "How big can small get?"

My "organization" at work has one member -- you can't get any smaller than that. But that wasn't the question. The question wasn't how small can small get, but rather how big can it get. What it comes down to is this: How big can a group of one be?

The answer is...a lot bigger than it used to. Glenn talks about a corporation being a web of contracts and the business world being a web of relationships. Exactly. Is it any wonder that the dominant metaphor for the Internet would be that of a web? All bloggers are individual contributors; a few of them have achieved a level of prominence and influence that large media orgnaizations could not. One can be more than many. Small can be bigger than big.

Part of the resaon for this is what I have dubbed de-industrialization:

After 20 years or so, it's easy to forget that a small revolution in its own right occured when, all of a sudden, virtually anyone anywhere could produce typeset copy. If you wanted to be a publisher, all you needed was a computer, a laser printer, and access to a photocopier. Publishing, or at least a good-sized piece of it, was de-industrialized. That is to say, the big industrial components that only a big company could afford to purchase, house, and operate -- in this case, a linotype machine and an offset press -- were made optional.

Over the past two decades, de-industrialization has emerged in many other areas. The recording industry has been massively de-industrialized. The equipment for making a musical recording has been simplified, but that's nothing compared to the change in infrastructure used to distribute a recording. We no longer need factories to press vinyl records; at this point, even burning CDs is starting to seem kind of quaint and clunky.

De-industrialization has empowered the individual in a very literal sense. One person can now do what it used to take many to do. That's why we are all (mostly) now our own travel agents, photo processors, and print shops. Not to mention grocery clerks.

Artists have always been individual contributors. But now musicians can record, market, and sell their work without a studio and without a label. Now novelsists can write, publish, and distribute their works all on their own. Small is as big as big, if not bigger.

One more example. We now have this notion of the long tail. Not only can individual producers be as big as, if not bigger than, large organizations; individual consumers -- markets of just a few or perhaps as few as one -- can be bigger than mass markets.

So maybe, in the future, small will be bigger than big, and one will be bigger than small. Kind of Zen, isn't it?