Blockchain and business running side by side, but the gap is closing

I set off for Germany tomorrow for three days of training deliveries in one city, and then moving over to another on Friday for the vetting of a potential training partner for the future. It is a slow process to build a global network of skilled and knowledgeable trainers for a product that is ramping up enormously, but is still relatively unknown globally. When I say slow, the prediction is a few years at least before it is where it needs to be, but I am looking forward to the process.

Many of the challenges a startup company faces in expansion and development of network is actually internally as even though everyone wants success, expansion means change and change means discomfort. Often, developing strategy shifts to step on toes and ideals of people within the company who think that a different direction should be taken, usually one that doesn't affect their position or beliefs.

Change management is a process of dealing with internal resistance more than external factors as the hardest people to shift are the ones who are comfortably doing what they do. While a company can make all kinds of decisions, it is up to the people who must enact them who actually make it happen, or stop it from happening. It is easy to blame managements inability to communicate the vision and strategy well, but at the same time people are getting paid to understand and most earning are salary aren't children -despite how some may act.

My company is in a fortunate position of sorts as the profile of employees is eclectic and while a startup, has been able to onboard hundreds of people who have worked within and understand medium and very large companies, with quite a few coming across from companies such as Nokia and Microsoft. This means that the startup culture has changed, but the direction it has gone has also been welcomed by most as it becomes less volatile and more predictable. Yet at the speed of growth of company and book of business, there is still enough uncertainty to keep people on their toes - which reduces the pain of having them stepped on.

I am looking forward to the challenges involved in the process of network development and distribution so that there is less centralized control and more partners operating independently to create solutions for their customers that are innovative and valuable for the platform. The attractive things for me are the similarities between it and Steem, which is why I took the job.

How I see it is that in the future, the company will not only be able to make decent returns for investors and offer personnel remuneration, it will also be a factor of value for a large distribution of companies spread across the globe who are able to in turn add value to their clients, who in turn add value to theirs. It is a production line of value-adding processes that diversify by use case the further out from the core they become, while still building upon the core itself.

What is happening in the world of business is that the decentralized mindset we value so much in blockchain tech is actually also being mirrored in some of the more cutting edge companies who value things like opensource thinking and community-centric growth. While many of them aren't recognizing the parallel development yet, they will in time and as blockchain meets business and business meets blockchain, there are going to be experiences that can almost plug into each other to offer something much more valuable combined than apart.

It is this "more than the sum of their parts" that makes me value Steem so greatly because in time it is not just a blockchain, or a blockchain community, but a collection of communities that may not even know of each other yet, are all adding value to the communities they service and to the core itself, Steem. It is also because of this potential future that I believe building a foundation that is able to underpin all of these various experiences is vital to the success of the future parts that are to come.

What can happen is that there can be a highly distributed and complex set of relationships that all feed into and off of each other in various ways to create an ecosystem that is both stable, and encouraging of innovation and independence of growth and experience. I think this is what a healthy economy would look like where there is potential for all participants to try their hand at what they think might bring value. Of course, there are no guarantees of success, but if the foundation is good, failure of parts doesn't bring down the frame of the whole.

Today it was 39C where I am heading in Germany - I hope it cools down a little as I don't get to wear shorts to work. At this point, I don't know what my evening schedule is going to look like but I am taking a camera with me so hopefully I can get a bit of a walk in each night to snap some pictures along the way.

The days however are going to be very intense so, I am unsure what I will be prepared to write about at night. Maybe a photo diary for a few days before the coming Hardfork might not be a bad idea anyway.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]