Greg’sGarage
Presents
The SmartSwarms Proformance Ecosystems Players Production of
“Why are Cities as a Service the future of my business and life in the city?”
Thank you everyone for coming out today and listening to me trying to answer the topic of our gathering, “just why are Cities as a Service the future of your business and life in our city?”
This is my favourite question.
To understand performance, we need to understand systems.
When I talk about performance in systems, I’ve always thought about performance in terms of the greater systems they are nested in.
A market by its very nature is composed of hundreds of thousands of subsystems that work together to deliver goods and services to billions of people every second of every day all over the world.
It never stops.
Your business is part of that subsystem, your business is part of what makes the market economy an amazing invisible force upon which we all rely.
Needless to say something like a market economy — which quite truly works by an invisible magic behind a curtain we can’t even see, other than what we can make of the various subsystems — is a complex system.
Everyone. And I mean everyone has their own point of view on the good and evil of any particular component of the subsystem they choose to direct the praise and admiration for if it works for them, or! Conversely! Their ire and loathing of the evils of the particular parts of the subsystems that don’t work for them.
Everyone. In that statistically significant sort of way.
Without chasing these rabbits any further, what I believe we all have a level of understanding as business people here, is that we’re aware that we always have to be improving our own systems and that many, if not most, of our most painful points come from the systems outside our control that our systems are in some form or another are interdependent upon or with.
I believe we all here can recognise many of our business issues we deal with every day are both systematic and people oriented.
We all deal with people. We all deal with an ever evolving technological landscape, we all deal with the pros and cons of systematic interdependencies. We all deal with these dynamics as a business, as consumers, as citizens.
What we are dealing with is the very definition of ecosystems.
Nobody owns them, everyone is affected by them.
It has been like this since settlements arose 10,000 years ago, with the increasing ability to scale coming in the form of cities a few thousand years later.
People.
Technology.
Systems.
Interdependencies.
Adapting to outside influences beyond anyone’s control.
We are stronger in groups than we are as small bands of family units.
That cities exist at all is a testament to these guiding principles of the existence of human life on earth.
This, ladies and gentlemen, has been the defining essence of city life for thousands of years.
Cities have always been an ecosystem of services. Bazaars have been intrinsic to these market economies for much of the history of cities.
What changes over time?
If we study the great cities over the millenia, we understand that they all solved for a long and successful degree the challenges of scale and governance, supplies and demand, the suite of services needed to make their city functional and desirable enough for tens and hundreds of thousands of people to commit to them.
We know that across Africa, the Asias, Eurasia, Europe, North and South America, even islands as remote as Easter Island and all across the South Pacific, settlements that grew into high performing cities of services emerged to varying scale over varying periods of time continuously for the last five thousand years.
They all achieved a certain level of mastery over the keystone components of city life.
This level of organisation and performance over time is extraordinary and needs to be studied in depth to truly appreciate the magnificence of this collective ability.
Let’s also appreciate that before there were nations, there were cities.
Let’s also appreciate the nations have come and gone over the millenia, but cities endure.
So what changes over time to allow cities to advance?
Information.
The ability to process information.
Information technologies. And the ability to capture information in ever more sophisticated means over time and distance.
Money has always been a key social technology for information exchange and the ability to do commerce in a collective environment, and between collective environments.
Architecture and engineering is another that allows information to travel over time and distance.
Both used networks to transcend time and distance.
What I just described is the rise of collective intelligence in cities.
Money. Architecture and Engineering. Networks. Ecosystems of relative autonomy. Cities.
Everything we have today derived from these fundamentals of information technologies that used networks to transmit information across the time and space of history in the form of cities.
Cities are an unbroken web of knowledge with threads thousands of years long.
Scale and performance depend on all these working well together, over time and distance.
This is the bedrock of civilization on earth.
As business people, who make our living in cities, I believe we can recognise the importance of the smooth functionality of these essential components.
Let’s have a show of hands to confirm our appreciation of these cornerstone components of the systems upon which we all rely!
Better yet, let’s have a round of applause for these unsung heroes behind our economic life!
::applause!!!::
So, it behoves us to ask, I would hope, “What is new with Information Technologies?”
Which is to ask, what is new about “information”, “money”, “architecture and engineering” and “social networks”.
You know, these cornerstones to our existence.
Two words.
Digital Platforms.
Digital Platforms are the difference between Amazon’s business and Walmart.
Walmart had taken what it knew about the information technologies and networks of its day to build out an unbeatable supply chain for both understanding its customers and delivering what they really wanted: Choice and low price in one place.
Amazon used the fundamentals of platforms to manage its operations as ecosystems to do the same thing. And deliver it right to your door using applications.
One is worth about 150 a share.
The other is worth about 2,300 a share.
If we want to understand business performance today and the dynamics we need to master for the coming years, we need to remaster our understanding of:
- Information
- Money
- Architecture and Engineering
- Networks
- Platforms
This is where we usually feel the oxygen leave the room a bit.
Sort of like hearing you need to master calculus to deliver the newspapers.
Yeah, that.
From my end, I might as well ask you all to line up for dental surgery without anaesthesia.
“Who’s first!”
Okay, here’s the good news!
This is the beauty of cities.
It’s a shared cost.
Just like we share the costs for our infrastructure of roads, water supply, electricity, sewer systems, sanitation services, emergency and security services, parks, recreation…we get the idea.
We all know who got this the best, and that was the Romans. Well, except for the electricity part.
They did okay because of their mastery over essential systems.
Like a few thousand years okay.
Egypt and the Greeks laid the foundations, the Romans took it to whole new levels.
That we still learn the lessons from these civilisations today is a testament to this degree of mastery.
With all this in mind, the question we have to ask ourselves now,
“Is this worth the investment? These digital platforms and their clouds of applications?”
This is my second favourite question!
The risks and rewards of cities.
The hidden costs of bad information (eco)systems.
The benefits of shared ecosystematic performance.
We could easily descend into the intricacies of information technologies to make our case, but real life examples are better.
One word: Corona.
And we’re not talking beer here.
Nothing laid bare the frailty of the outdated infrastructure of our current byzantine of information technologies by an unseen and unforeseeable force than what the world went through over the last 26 months.
Something so small, so elusive we didn’t even know it existed until the last century — but have felt its presence since time began — took down the global economy, and brought city life to its knees.
A virus.
I think I am safe in speaking for this room, that to a person, I don’t think anyone here would put up their hand and declare for all to hear,
“Hell ya! I enjoyed that! That was fun. Let’s do it again.”
::pause::
What we can take pride in, is that everyone here did their part. And we got through it. Barely. But we did it!
We suffered, but we all suffered together. We all paid the price.
Because that’s what we’re made of.
Oh. By the way,
You know who made off like bandits?
Amazon.
Facebook.
Google.
Apple.
These aren’t “tech” stocks.
That’s like looking in the mirror and declaring yourself as a “nervous system” person.
Tech is the subsystems.
These are all platform based ecosystems.
These are all high performance ecosystems.
Ecosystems comprised of well conceived information technologies, currencies, architecture and engineering; interdependent subsystems that make use of networks to all work near seamlessly together to deliver things we apparently couldn’t get enough of.
These platforms of ecosystems made more money off of our pain than at any point in history.
We’re dying and they’re thriving.
They’re not just thriving, they’re getting ridiculously rich because we were here in our cities, on our knees puking our guts out, trapped inside our houses.
Think about that for a minute.
::long pause::
How does that taste?
I’m not sure about anyone else here, but this is the sort of thing that puts the bile of my stomach up into my mouth.
Sure, we can admire their ability to thrive while we are fighting for our lives, in that admiring the skills and force of Attila the Hun while his warriors slaughter our children and families kind of way.
So.
Back to the question at hand.
What are these fundamental skills of modern economics worth to us?
Now let’s not forget here.
Cities are an ecosystem of information technologies, architecture and engineering, and the ability to deliver stuff to our residents 24/7.
And we’ve been doing that for the better part of the last five thousand years.
This is our f*****g wheelhouse, ladies and gentlemen!!
This is our f*****g raison d’etre!
And we just let a bunch of cool kids with fleets of private jets and bigger ambitions steal our lunch money.
And we worshipped them like Gods, throwing what little we had left at their feet via an app.
“I mean, check that share price!! We’re crushing it!”
How DOES that taste?
They’re now worth trillions while we can barely afford to take out the trash.
How DOES that taste?
::long pause::
Okay. Deep breaths.
The question is not whether we can afford to learn and apply these platform applications of information, money, architecture and engineering and networks on top of our existing ecosystem of services.
The question has become,
“Can we afford not to?”
Thank you for hearing me out and I hope we can meet to do business soon.
