The first rule

The main purpose of this book, in fact the purpose of the whole trilogy, has been to arrive at a position to start an e-business. The various chapters reflect the tortuous route that has had to be taken to reach this final goal.

It should be clear by now that starting out with a business plan, based upon a set business idea, is not a practical way to go about creating a business in a rapidly changing environment. It may be the right way to obtain finance, but, as the dotcom crash proved, getting finance has very little relevance to creating a viable business.

Learning from the many failures of the e-business pioneers, it has become evident that the Internet is mainly about enablement rather than selling. It is about communication rather than simply providing more information. While most of the ambitious e-business ventures – based upon expensively constructed Web sites and powerful backend databases – were proving to be white elephants, the simple concept of person to person communication was going from strength to strength.

Ignored by most of the main developers, e-mail became the "killer app". The inherent tendency for human systems to self organise, put all deliberate human initiatives to shame. On-line communities, costing virtually nothing to set up and maintain, had created as much, if not more, usefulness than the millions of Web sites that had squandered billions of dollars in human resources.

Anyone who has studied organic systems, knows that they have a natural tendency to self organise. They are driven by evolutionary mechanisms that act continuously to improve efficiencies at every level of organisation. The Internet is an organic system, not because it is based upon computer technology but because it is based upon human activity. It is as natural for the Internet to create its own order, and progress towards increased efficiency, as it is for any other biological organism or ecosystem.

Observing the progress of the e-business environment over the rise and fall of the dotcom bubble, it became increasingly more evident that rational human organisation is like a small sailing ship in a storm. Pitted against the natural tendency of a dynamic system to self organise, it is virtually powerless. Any human activity that does not make any real improvements towards efficiency is ruthlessly broken up or destroyed.

The instances where Internet businesses seem to have had most success is where they have been allowed to self organise: without the imposition of human control. This observation provided me with a first rule for deciding what kind of business situation to create:

1) The business should take advantage of a system's natural tendency to self organise.