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Kaihan Krippendorff shares a post that explains why the trend toward platform and digital requires an entirely new mindset around how you serve your customers.

Last week’s trend piece focused on Community Coordination — companies that create a platform for users to communicate and coordinate are better prepared for a future where consumers are using these platforms to connect quickly and make their voices heard. This trend toward coordinating the uncoordinated has been growing for many years and pervades across industries.

Historically in business, power came from control or ownership of assets and building economies of scale. In the new paradigm, power comes from coordination. Today’s outthinkers are able to build power without ownership.

But this takes more than a change in your business model. The trend toward platform and digital requires an entirely new mindset around how you serve your customers.

BHARAT ANAND AND THE SPOKE-TO-SPOKE MODEL 

During monthly conversations with our network of top Chief Strategy Officers, many of them have expressed similar concerns related to developing platform business models and harnessing the power of connections between users. We invited Bharat Anand — author of The Content Trap and expert in digital strategy, media and entertainment strategy, corporate strategy, and organizational change — to speak to the group. Based on his research of the disruption of print media over the past 25 years, he explained the trend toward platform mindset using a hub-and-spoke model.

Most people believe that the decline in print media over the years was caused by the advent of the internet. However, Bharat’s research shows that the impact of the internet on print was no greater than that of radio or TV. Circulation per household was decreasing before the internet was invented. Circulation revenue has remained stable, while display advertising revenue has dropped, and classified advertising revenue (which fosters connections between readers) has almost completely disappeared.

Key points include:

• Learning to coordinate the uncoordinated
• Platform models driven by the pandemic
• Rave mobile safety harnesses coordination to do good

Read the full article, Spoke-to-spoke: A Mindset Shift To Digital & Platform Models, on Kaihan.net.