“There is no Pepsi in cyberspace,” says Prof Paul X McCarthy who is acclaimed for his recent book Online Gravity . He is talking about how there have been leaders and challenger brands in practically every category in the offline space. For instance, in carbonated beverages, Coca-Cola is the global leader and Pepsi is the challenger brand.
The future belongs to companies which tap products, like Google, or dominate markets, like Samsung, or have a vice-like grip on talent, like Apple.
He says one quality is common to the giants who dominate the Online Gravity world. They are all “curious learners”. Among individual talents, he says the future belongs to those who have in-depth knowledge across two diverse fields of skill-sets, “two disciplinary strengths of great depth.”
Employees with T-shaped skill-sets or Pi-shaped skill sets are likely to be more successful than ones with just I-shaped skill-sets. He calls it a “Leonardo idea” referring to Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian genius, who was a multi-skilled artist, mathematician and engineer.
He says giants are going to dominate each space and they will have no close competitors.
For example, Google dominates in search, while Facebook reigns over social media. Will that give rise to strong monopolies? McCarthy asks you to not worry about that because “the new leaders are democratically elected monopolies.”
Also, the past has proven that those who dominate a single market segment rarely experience similar success across other categories that they chose to enter. For instance, Google did not experience too much success in social media with Google Plus, Microsoft’s entry into the mobile phone space has not been too successful, Facebook is yet to make any great impact in its search and so on.
He says there is a lot of spare time with talent, which results in the availability of millions of man-hours. He speaks about an ad agency based in Colorado called Victor and Spoils.
The agency has embraced an open creative process that fosters collaboration between in-house creative teams and creative people everywhere who can moonlight during their spare time with the agency.