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By Root 1565 0

after Brennen’s initial post, another user posted video using Brennen’s instructions to demonstrate how quickly and easily he could compromise Kryptonite’s star product. The impact was astonishing. Details of the product failure crossed the globe within hours. Within two days of Brennen’s first posting, more than 11,000 people had visited the discussion thread and 40,000 had downloaded the video. Early on in the crisis, concerned forum users contacted Kryptonite’s public relations manager to alert the company to this critical product failure; Kryptonite had built terrific customer loyalty over the years, and these lock owners wanted to help Kryptonite to protect their bicycles before savvy thieves caught on. What did Kryptonite do? Not much. It was, after all, just a bunch of online nuts. But other online forums linked to the posts, and bloggers trumpeted the failure loudly. After a week, the numbers jumped to 340,000 views and three million downloads.4 Worse, the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Associated Press grabbed the story and nearly instantly transformed what years ago might have been a quiet-but-manageable embarrassment into a multimillion-dollar hit to Kryptonite’s reputation. By the time Kryptonite developed its definitive response 10 days later, it was in the midst of one of the first large-scale, Internet-spawned public relations (PR) disasters on record. Their entire brand promise, years of work, lay in ruins.

Patricia Swann, assistant professor of public relations at Utica College, studies this phenomenon, known as issue contagion, and published a paper on the Kryptonite debacle. “Kryptonite’s decision not to respond provided the bike forum’s posters even more motivation, as the fear grew that the company would ignore their concerns unless many people complained,” Swann said. “The Internet has totally changed the rules of the game. You used to get a couple of days, or at least 24 hours, to prepare a response to something like this. Now, it goes everywhere, fast like wildfire. You have no control of the story.”5

The mass-media society of the twentieth century was built on a discursive, top-down model of communication. Information flowed through centralized channels and was easily dammed and harnessed. As Swann suggested, you had time to control the story. Powerful organizations, powerful societies, and powerful people were built on this vertical information structure. Now, consider the following, an eloquent summation of the world as we now know it, reported in May 2006 by Kevin Kelly in the New York Times Magazine:

From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows, and short films, and 100 billion public Web pages. . . . When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50, 1-petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod.6

Knowledge is power. That old adage is as true today as when philosopher Francis Bacon first said it in the seventeenth century. When knowledge—enabled by this unprecedented access to information—was controllable, those who controlled it accrued power and became leaders. Now that information is virtually uncontrollable, the power has shifted to those who share it. We must adapt to take advantage of the new realities.

We have discussed how business in the twentieth century is busy remaking itself in order to profit from the strengths and efficiencies of the free-flowing internetworked world. More people in more places can collaborate freely, sparking innovation and invention. There is less functional disparity between the top and the bottom of an organization, so more and more of our business relationships become horizontal collaborations between equals. Skills and habits that helped us thrive in top-down hierarchies are less vital in collaborative networks.