Chapter 1

My entry into communication technology began in 1989, when, after fifteen years experience as an entrepreneur in the world of fashion and entertainment, I saw a potential in multimedia. At that time, CD-ROMs were emerging as "the next big thing". Like many others, I saw this as a great opportunity to be a first mover in a new area of technology and become a pioneer in what seemed to be a field of unlimited opportunity. As I have described in "The Entrepreneurial Web", despite producing an award winning CD-ROM, this venture came to a sad ending – as did similar ventures for so many others, who joined that first mad rush into the new CD-ROM technology.

What I did gain out of the experience though was an appreciation that along with the unlimited possibilities offered by this new world of information technology, there also came unprecedented pitfalls and dangers. I discovered it to be a world of constant and unpredictable change. This taught me to think carefully before plunging into any new business venture connected with the technological world of information.

Like a diver, who tests the water to see how deep it is before diving in, I decided to investigate the complexities underlying communication technology. I'd learnt the hard way that it isn't sufficient just to have good ideas, it was first more important to learn what makes an environment tick. This led me into the black arts of computer programming. I figured that if I was going to work with computers I should begin by learning how their power could be harnessed and controlled

Learning computer programming is something like opening Russian dolls. Just as you think you have acquired an understanding, a new level of awareness comes into view. It is like entering a cave to find an opening into yet another cave and in this cave is an opening to yet another. The whole experience is a never ending process of discovering new levels of awareness.

This progress through these levels of awareness is evident in the two books I wrote on computer programming: "Lingo Sorcery" and "Magical A-Life Avatars". First came the discovery of syntax and the thrilling experience of being able to write code that made the computer actually respond to the user and do things. Next came the discovery of objects and object oriented programming where highly complex systems can be constructed out of relatively simple modules that could be placed into the RAM space of computer memory.

Next came the revelation of the synergy that can be created between a human and a computer: the understanding that a computer can be used to enhance the limited powers of the human brain. As if this wasn't momentous enough, the Internet emerged. It is an all consuming entity that connects vast numbers of people and computer programs together into a vast conglomeration of unimaginable complexity.

As hundreds of millions became connected and millions of Web sites were built I looked for some order and stability in this seething, chaotic environment. Where could I fit in? How could I benefit? What sort of business could I create that would be able to exploit the opportunities that this phenomenon so obviously contained? I envisioned a virtual world that existed partly in computers, partly on CD-ROM and partly in the minds of the users. An enigmatic world where boundaries were continually changing and merging into one another.

My computer programming books reflected this view of the new electronic world that was emerging. I explored the potential of using intelligent agents, of software that extended and enhanced the human brain. Software robots with simulated emotions. Surely these would lead me into a successful e-business venture?

For many months I worked at these exotic software creations. I produced a system that could clone a user's character and personality onto an intelligent agent. It was designed to seek out other clones on the Internet and, with simulated emotions, choose those clones whose owner's would likely be compatible with their own owners.

When I'd solved most of the technical problems and made working prototypes, I decided to introduce these ideas to the world. Surely everyone would wonder at these creations and I'd have investors queuing up at my door? Then I hit the reality of the newly emerging information environment – it wasn't what I had been expecting to find. I discovered I wasn't the only one with a brilliant idea. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of others also had brilliant ideas. I was just one voice in an unimaginably vast crowd of people waving their hands to seek attention.

I did get to speak to several funding institutions, banks and venture capital companies. I tried to explain my ideas and showed them demos of the software, but, they weren't interested in technical details. They were more interested in tangible concepts they were familiar with and could understand. To them, this new technology was a foreign world where they had no way of knowing whether or not they were dealing with genuinely break through products or cranks with weird ideas.

The banks wanted to see securities to back up loans. Funding bodies wanted to see impressive records of past academic or commercial success. Venture Capital companies wanted to see a business plan, a cash flow forecast and a strong management team. I couldn't satisfy them on any of these counts. When I explained the uniqueness of my agents – cloning personalities, simulated emotions, able to search the Internet for compatible partners – I fitted neatly into the category of 'the crank' and was quickly shown the door.

When I came up against these attitudes, I was neither annoyed nor frustrated. I'd had a long experience of being a pragmatic entrepreneur where broad commercial principles and practicality came way before technical detail. It made eminent sense to me that these financiers should filter out my kind of proposition. They weren't in the business of being experimenters or pioneers, their overriding concern was return on capital investment or a substantial capital gain.

I understood and appreciated their position because in the early 1970's I'd spent some time in the City of London with brokers and professional investment managers. I'd even written an educational course to explain the principles of investment and financial strategy. It wasn't the financiers and funding bodies who were being short sighted – it was me, because I hadn't taken into consideration the practical criteria upon which their investment decision making would be based.

The realisation struck me that I was faced with a classical 'chicken or egg' problem: which comes first, the chicken or the egg? To get these ideas into operation, I'd need capital. To get capital I'd need to get these ideas into operation to illustrate their practical viability.

I decided to put my intelligent agents on hold, while I tried to work out a way round this dilemma.

Getting my head out of the box to take a wider view of the e-business environment, I found a confusing world of complexity; a world where knowledge constantly increased and nothing was certain or stable. Yet, people were plunging into this chaotic environment; many of them succeeding and making obscene amounts of money. I wanted to dive in myself and join in the free for all, but, I was cautious. I'd seen the hidden depths. I'd experienced the dangerous underlying currents. I needed to think before taking the plunge.

This thinking process lasted nearly two years; it is recorded in the first two books of this trilogy: "The Entrepreneurial Web" and "The Ultimate Game of Strategy".The broad conclusion I came to during this time was that I would be wasting my time if I used conventional business methods. Instead, I should be concentrating primarily upon the two most difficult problems: (1) dealing with knowledge gaps and (2) handling the dynamic complexity of a chaotic environment. I concluded that it would be the ability to deal with these two crucial problems that would sort out the winners from the losers.

Fortunately, I'd had fifteen years of experience working in an environment with these kind of problems – the London fashion scene. Although this may seem to be a million miles away from communication technology and e-business there are some remarkable parallels. Fashion is constantly changing in unpredictable ways and the fashion industry has evolved to cope with such volatility. Just like e-business, current trends can suddenly change direction causing whole design ranges and manufacturing practices to become obsolete. Current success is no indication of success in the future and historical design and strategy has no place other than in the history books.

There is no way you can plan fashion. Being successful is about creating an effective information network that can recognise changing trends as early as possible. It is not about predicting customer needs, it is about responding to them at the same moment as the customers themselves become aware of them. These comparisons between e-business and the fashion industry were fully covered in "The Entrepreneurial Web", and will be the inspiration behind many of the strategies to be described later in this book.

"The Entrepreneurial Web" was largely theoretical. It used the technique of abstraction to provide a practical framework in which to think about the problems involved in e-business. In an environment devoid of reliable case histories to provide useful examples, this is the only effective way of obtaining guidance and exercising any control over direction. Building upon this framework, the second book, "The Ultimate Game of Strategy" provided a toolbox of concepts that might usefully be applied in the creation of practical e-business strategies.

The final conclusions of these two books were totally at odds with conventional business thinking. Business plans and planning were seen as useless, even counter productive. Management and managed teams were seen as being inefficient. Starting with a single good idea was seen as being the wrong way to start off any e-business venture. Not surprisingly, these conclusions were seen by many as being ridiculous, especially as they were couched in terms of arcane theory.

The only way is to confound the detractors and prove these conclusions valid would be to demonstrate their use in creating a strategy which leads to a viable business. This then, is the main purpose of current this book.

Throughout the writing of "The Entrepreneurial Web" and "The Ultimate Game of Strategy", the conclusions pointed again and again to e-business being about people rather than ideas or technology. This suggests that the first concern should be to find people to collaborate with.

This may seem an odd way to go about creating an e-business. Conventional business theory always assumes that you start with the business idea - then go on to find suitable people to help put that idea into practice. Yet, the implication is that a better strategy for creating an e-business might be to reverse that sequence: first find people to collaborate with and then look for the business opportunity.

This is not such an outrageous proposition as it might first appear: if you take into consideration that the Internet environment offers a huge variety of different ways in which wealth can be created. It is easy to think up ideas and identify probable profitable situations; hundreds of thousands of people are doings this all over the world all of the time. The problem is to be in a position to take full advantage of an opportunity when it is recognised. To be able to do this you would need to have the right combination of contacts and skill sets at hand.

A strategy that starts by simply acquiring contacts and then waiting expectantly for an opportunity to come out of the blue would seem to be hopelessly naive. But, this is not taking into account object oriented design philosophy. In essence, this philosophy says that your skill sets, knowledge and experience are not limited to your own abilities and knowledge – they are the sum total of your own plus those of all the friends and acquaintances you can call upon for information, help or guidance. Even in the world of bricks and mortar this philosophy has credence, but, in a massively connected world this is a powerful way of thinking.

Compare the strategies of seventeen hypothetical graduates who decide to spend the two years following their graduation predominantly in one of the following ways:

Which of these seventeen graduates would be best placed to create an e-business at the end of the two years? Wouldn't it be number seventeen?

In the world of bricks and mortar it would be nigh on impossible for anyone to establish relationships with such a wide range of contacts. In the world of the Internet it may take a little time but it is not impossible. This would see graduate number seventeen as being strategically best placed to take advantage of any opportunity that came along – even if it meant being reliant on many of the others to be able to take effective action.

I came to this realisation after being in the position of firstly number four, learning to become an expert programmer. Then in the position of number two when I learned how to create multimedia presentations and finally number ten when I developed a product. That took six years of my life, but even so, I wasn't in a position to create a viable e-business because I hadn't sufficient knowledge or expertise in any of the other categories.

At first, I made an attempt to get up to speed with all the other knowledge I would need to be able to create an e-business. I learned enough HTML to create a Web site. I learned some Javascript to add a few clever tricks. I dabbled in graphics and tried to pick up information on as much as I could in the various other categories. The more I learned, the more I discovered I needed to know. Instead of getting more confident as I progressed, I got less confident.

I had been aware of the well known metaphor that likened obtaining information from the Internet to drinking from a fire hose (i. e., however much time is spent acquiring information it is possible to taste only an infinitesimally small fraction of it). What I hadn't been prepared for though was the over abundance of 'luck' I had in finding vitally important snippets of information. It seemed as if every discussion forum I joined, I arrived at a fortuitous time when a discussion thread was focused on a topic that was essential to me. Time and again I thanked my lucky stars that I had joined in at just the right moment in time.

The same thing happened when I looked at Web site articles that were mentioned in discussion forums. The few I had time to read more often than not contained invaluable information. It was the same with e-newsletters, it was uncanny how often they contained some point of view that gave me a radically new insight into e-business.

Having at one time owned a gaming club and also spent some time as a professional poker player, I was more than familiar with the phenomenon of lucky runs. They never last indefinitely and, if they ever did, it was usually the result of some anomaly, which involved factors other than chance. Checking with friends, I found they were also experiencing amazing runs of luck in discovering new and exciting information that seemed to apply specifically to them and their problems.

The startling inference was that these discoveries of new and exciting information were not down to lucky dips into the fire hose. It became apparent that there was so much vital and interesting information available that it would be almost impossible to miss important information wherever you choose to look. This has a downside: if everywhere you seek information you usually made exciting discoveries, what were you missing in the other 99.99% of the places – those that you haven't the time to visit?

It then became obvious that learning and seeking new knowledge and information is like trying to explore a bottomless pit. It could go on forever and never reach any definitive conclusions. Surely, there had to be a more efficient way to become successful in creating an e-business opportunity? The only answer was to rise above the detail and concentrate upon fundamental principles. This is what I aimed for in the previous two books: looking for broad concepts that could get me out of the syndrome of trying to absorb more and more information from an infinite sea of "need to know" knowledge.

Once you come to realise how much vital "need to know' information there is and to appreciate that you cannot hope to learn it all, it becomes obvious that a special strategy is needed. This strategy would need to be such that it would allow you to compete successfully in an environment when you are severely handicapped with huge knowledge gaps. It would obviously have to involve collaborating with others, who will have specific areas of knowledge that can fill the gaps.

The problem then is to find some way you can get people to share their knowledge with you. You don't want them to teach you what they know. You just need to be able to call upon their knowledge and expertise on demand: whenever it is needed. But, why should people want to do this?

The clue to the solution is that everyone else is in the same boat. Everyone has vast knowledge gaps. Wouldn't they be willing to give you help and knowledge on demand if they could get a reciprocal similar benefit. The trick then is establish a number of relationships where such an understanding can be established. The solution I came up with was the virtual cafe. This was a conceptual device that everyone can use as an efficient mechanism to facilitate the exchange of vital information on a "need to know" basis.

Having experimented with the virtual cafe idea over a couple of years and used it successfully for the previous two books in this series, I now have to put it to the ultimate test: to find out if it can be instrumental in the creation of an e-business. First I had to find collaborators.

Most of the people who visit my Web site go there out of curiosity because they have either encountered me in a discussion forum or have read one of my books. I also have a few articles on the Web site that bring people there through referral or recommendation.

On this Web site I invite visitors to subscribe to a newsletter that I send out from time to time.This provides a small but steady stream of new contacts (currently at the rate of about one per day). Over time, this has built up to several hundred people who are aware of me and my work. When I have need of any assistance I can appeal to this group and because they know me I have more chance of a response than appealing to a group of complete strangers.

More difficult is getting collaboration from complete strangers in e-mail discussion forums. I've tried several times to explain what I'm doing by posting to a forum as a whole, but, this seldom elicits any response. A regular feature of almost every discussion forum I've participated in has been propositions by different members of the group to join in something they are organising. As far as I can tell, these appeals are seldom successful, it seems that discussion groups get so saturated with offers of this kind that responses are always very low.

The only way that seems to work is to spend some time in a forum, contributing to the discussions to establish some kind of identity. By initiating discussions in the area of interested it is possible to discover people who might make suitable collaborators.

As I know I'm going to work with an unconventional strategy, I usually initiate a discussion by making what would seem to be an outrageous statement. Usually this is something along the lines of "planning is not appropriate in e-business" or "managed teams are not an efficient organisational structure". Such propositions immediately polarize opinion and it is easy to identify those who would be inclined towards my way of thinking. Once identified, I can then contact them off-list and explain the nature of the collaborative project I have in mind.

In this way, I assembled a group of about fifty people to collaborate with me in this project. Between them, they represent a far ranging variety of different fields and interests. Here are some of the items taken from their bios they sent to me when agreeing to join the group:

It is not difficult to see how such a varied assembly of collaborators can be of great assistance in a quest to find and establish an e-business. They are valuable contacts into a world of mind numbing complexity. They won't have all the answers, but, I'll be a lot better off with their help than I would be trying to find and develop an e-business opportunity on my own.

Obviously, it wouldn't be wise to force a single idea onto this group. It will be better to sow a few seeds and see which take hold. Even more likely, an idea will emerge out of the discussions in the virtual cafe – ideas which I wouldn't even be able to imagine at the commencement of this project.

The idea of setting off alone, to explore the environment of the Internet looking for a suitable e-business opportunity might seem hopelessly naive, especially with a limited amount of knowledge and technical skills. However, setting off in the company of fifty others, whose combined experience cover a wide variety of knowledge and skills is a more credible situation: especially if everyone is agreed upon creating an atmosphere of mutual collaboration.

Here it is necessary to make a distinction between cooperation and collaboration. If this group were cooperating, a common goal would need to be established. Everyone in the group would contribute their specialty knowledge to help achieve this agreed goal. The problem is that it would almost certainly be impossible to get an agreement on a common goal. Certainly I couldn't expect fifty people to selflessly concentrate upon a goal of my choosing.

Collaboration, on the other hand, doesn't require a common goal; everyone can have their own goal. Collaboration allows people to interact with each other, yet, still have independent viewpoints. This can be appreciated by considering the way collaboration takes place in e-mail discussion forums. In these forums, there is usually a common theme, perhaps a niche specialty area of technology. Everyone subscribing to the discussion is free to ask questions, put forward propositions or just listen in.

When a subscriber asks a question, there is usually someone in the forum who will give an answer or provide a pointer to where a solution might be found. This has the effect of providing everyone who belongs to the forum a source of knowledge and information. It is almost the equivalent of every subscriber to the discussion forum having the combined knowledge of all subscribers. This is a very powerful asset.

In a highly technical, constantly changing environment such as the Internet, these discussion forums are absolutely essential because it is impossible for anyone to know all there is to know. The forums allow members to obtain knowledge on a "need to know" basis: information on tap, eliminating the need to have to know absolutely everything in order to act competently.

Upon first encountering these collaborative e-mail discussion forums, it seems amazing that so many people act altruistically to take so much trouble to help each other. It seems to good to be true. However, when the motives of the helpful posters are examined, they are nearly always found to be benefiting from the helpful contributions they make. Three of these are of interest here:

These three reasons alone illustrate advantages for people who contribute to e-mail discussion forums. The people who merely listen in, without contributing, miss out on these three highly valuable benefits.

Asking questions and getting answers works extremely well for tactical subject matter, i. e., activities involving skills, techniques, methods or procedures. This is because answers are usually of a type that have a recognisable best solution.

However, when it comes to strategic issues, there is often no definitive answers or right solutions. In such cases, discussion often results in much disagreement and antagonism as different people try to put their own particular point of view across. This is readily observable in forums where there is competition between several subscribers to be recognised as "the authoritative voice". In order to protect their reputations, they will argue most forcibly, even though there can be no certainty that they hold the only correct answer or solution.

After writing "Magical A-Life Avatars", I set up an e-mail discussion forum for readers who might be interested in exploring the ideas presented in the book. The principle theme of the book was that software agents could be created as extensions of human capabilities. In other words, intelligent agents would be constructed as systems that included a human as part of the system rather than as separate autonomous entities. The theme proposed for the forum was that many of us could work together to create such a system of intelligent agents, based upon the programming environment provided by Macromedia's Director run time engine.

It would have seemed that an e-mail discussion forum would have been an ideal framework within which to facilitate this cooperative project; unfortunately, it proved to be a total disaster. Instead of a cooperative effort, it produced a confusion of irreconcilable different view points. Some people wanted to use programming environments other than the Director run time engine. Others wanted to create autonomous agents that were independent of human controls. It disintegrated into a confusion of animosity.

However, what emerged out of this was the idea of creating much smaller groups, which contained people with compatible thinking. By selecting specific people from the main forum discussion, who were more attuned to the idea I had in mind, I could have more productive discussions that might make more progress.

It wasn't long though before I realised that this method of creating discussions was seriously flawed because I was deliberately choosing people who were attuned to my own way of thinking. The larger discussion forum may have been unproductive but I'd benefited considerably by being made aware of the different ways people looked at the kind of problems I was trying to solve.

This presented a dilemma. I needed people who had the same train of thought as myself to make progress with a project, but, I also needed the input of the people who would disrupt progress because they could introduce contradictory thinking that would prevent the project becoming biased or too narrowly focused.

I then began experimenting with the creation of small groups that included a mixture of people with conflicting view points. Unfortunately, these small groups had no more success than the large discussion forum. They also quickly disintegrated into irreconcilable arguments.

It was then that I turned to evolutionary biology for a solution. At an abstract level, mother nature had solved this very problem. Biological organisms make progress through the simple expedient of creating many different groups of genes (individuals) that come into existence for short periods of time (lifetimes). At the end of each period (generation) the genes are reorganised to create different groupings (birthing new individuals). In this way, combinations of genes that make progress are preserved, but, it also allows new combinations to be created that could prompt alternative evolutionary directions to take place.

Looking at a discussion forum as a biological system, this strategy of nature could be adopted by dividing the forum up into many small groups which come into existence for short periods of time. At the end of each period, the people in these groups could be changed around in much the same way as genes are changed around in a biological system at the end of each generation. In this way, the discussion could be allowed to make progress yet allow for the continuous input of fresh ideas and influences.

This idea corresponded to a technique I'd used in the fashion business. The world of fashion is similar in many ways to the world of e-business because it consists almost entirely of information. Fashion is about the wearer transmitting an impression of themselves to others through their choice of clothes. To be successful in this business you don't have to be an original designer, simply a successful communicator who can find out the latest ways for people to identify with a group.

Much of my time was spent in discussions with small groups of people, mostly in cafes, talking to designers, retailers, wholesalers and various groups of people who were representative of my target customers. It was a daily ritual that provided useful information and feedback needed by the workshop to be able to produce sellable, up to the minute, fashion clothes. In a sense, these informal meetings could be considered as part of a creative engine driving the business.

With this scenario in mind, I thought of small e-mail discussion groups as conversations around a table in a virtual cafe. They lasted for a short time and then reconvened at a later time when some of the same people returned and new people joined in the discussion.

It is only a short step from thinking about a single discussion around a table in a cafe to thinking about a cafe full of tables where there is a discussion going on at each table. In a cafe in the real world, it would be possible to sit at only one table at a time. In a virtual cafe, with e-mail discussions around virtual tables, it is possible for the host to sit at every table.

Let's look at this in terms of the fifty people involved in the project of this book. They might be split up into six separate e-mail discussion groups as if they were sitting at six different tables in a cafe having a discussion. This is illustrated in figure 1.1.

The initial fifty collaborators are split into six groups. Each group is set up as a separate short term e-mail discussion forum where the host is a participant in each group. This can be likened to a cafe with six tables

From figure 1.1, it is easy to see how the fifty initial participants could be split up as if they were on separate tables in a cafe. This separation into six separate groups, allows discussion to take several different directions. If there are any strong but biased view points dominating a discussion at a particular table they wouldn't be able to spread to them all.

This was the method used to write the first two books in this trilogy. As each chapter in the book was written, it was submitted to each of six tables in a virtual cafe. They would comment on the content and compare it with their ideas on e-business. These comments would then strongly influence the direction and content of the following chapter. This process is illustrated in figure 1.2.

As each chapter is written, it is given to each of six tables in a virtual cafe. This produces six separate discussions regarding the content and these discussions influence to content of the next chapter

Using this technique, the books could evolve without any preplanning on the author's part. The content and direction were kept on track by the feedback and feed forward from the cafe discussions. In this way, the book was a result of the synergy between the author and the cafe of readers who could apply their combined thinking to the problems involved in creating e-business solutions. The progression of the process as it proceeds from chapter to chapter is illustrated in figure 1.3

By submitting each chapter to the cafe for opinions and comment before writing the following chapter, the entire content of the book is guided and influenced by the many different points of view of the people in the cafe

A full description of using the cafe to write a book is described in "The Ultimate Game of Strategy". It was provided as an example of how customers can be instrumental in designing products.

It was also used as an example of using the strategy of a genetic algorithm to optimise searches for solutions to problems where rational thinking cannot come up with the answers. It was proposed that this technique might be equally useful for searching for viable e-business opportunities. This is explained in figure 1.4.

Before jumping straight in to start looking for an e-business opportunity, let's take a closer look at this concept of a virtual cafe. It certainly isn't as simple as it appears. Most people, when they take part for the first time, assume that it takes the form of a cooperative discussion group: people, working together to arrive at some kind of mutually agreeable solution.

It comes as quite a surprise that the idea is for everyone to think about their own problems and solutions. They are in the cafe mainly for their own benefit and and are there to gain something positive from the experience. The proposition is that the host provides an interesting situation by which the participants can benefit through learning something worthwhile and meeting potentially valuable contacts. In return, the participants must provide value. This they do simply by providing intelligent and informed comment and opinion.

The participants are in absolute control of their own situation because if the cafe isn't providing them with sufficient benefit or stimulation they can leave at any time. They don't have to announce they are leaving, they simply cease giving comments and opinions. As the cafe is reconfigured at regular intervals (every one or two weeks) the non contributors are automatically excluded. This ensures that the cafe continues only with people who are benefiting from the experience. The onus then falls on the host to try to ensure that the people in the cafe are benefiting otherwise the cafe will empty out.

To see this in perspective, let's imagine a wealthy entrepreneur deciding to create an e-business. She has much experience of business in the conventional world of bricks and mortar but the environment of electronic communications is too complicated for her to fully understand. To compensate for her lack of knowledge she asks fifty people who are experienced in the ways of the Internet to advise and comment on her progress as she tries to find a business opportunity. For their helpful comments and opinions she gives them two hundred dollars a week for every week they comment on her ideas and progress.

She would reason that if she did this for a year, it would cost her half a million dollars for this advice, but, the value of having fifty experienced people commenting on her progress in finding and establishing a viable e-business would probably result in her being able to create a business that would be worth considerably more than half a million dollars. This expenditure could thus be justified.

Being a rational person, she would like to see some value for the money she is paying out each week. If she finds any of her consultants not bothering to make comments or contributing towards her progress, she would discontinue their services and find somebody else to take their place who might give better value for the two hundred dollars a week. In this way, she could ensure that not only did she get full value for her weekly expenditure of ten thousand dollars a week, but, the value she was getting would improve as she continuously replaced the non performing consultants. Or, if she didn't replace them, she'd be getting the same value for a reducing cost.

Realising that it would take all of her time to correspond with fifty correspondents every week and then having the bother of trying to sort out whose opinions were valid and whose were not, it would make a lot of sense for her just to explain her current thinking to them each week and then let them discuss it amongst themselves. She could then listen in to the discussions for confirmation or otherwise of her thinking and for inspiration and future directional pointers.

Besides saving the time of the correspondences, she would also have the added advantage that the comments and opinions when combined in discussion environments could be challenged and corrected where appropriate. This would greatly reduce the harmful effects of bias or lack of knowledge. Discussion would thus provide a greater accuracy plus an added synergy as different ideas and viewpoints are combined.

It would also make sense to divide the fifty consultants into a few small discussion groups, rather than have them all in a single discussion forum. This would allow several different directions to emerge rather than have the group become dominated by a few strong opinions. Remixing the groups from time to time would prevent group view points becoming locked into particular narrow mind sets.

It would probably be a very good arrangement for the consultants. It would involve reading the entrepreneur's ideas as they were evolving and being able to have interesting discussions with a peer group regarding the subject matter. Their contributions would require no more than a few posts a month and, if the subject matter was of interest to them in their professional capacity with their own business dealings, the discussions could provide them with valuable knowledge and information.

This would be particularly valuable if the discussions would enable them to raise their own problems and get opinions themselves from the discussion groups. Looked at in this way, a consultant not only gets a fee, but, also the benefit of having their own opinions checked out by a peer group. In addition they will be exposed to a variety of new ideas and inspirations.

Now consider what might happen if the entrepreneur suffered a serious setback in her financial situation such that she was no longer able to pay the consultants the two hundred dollars a week. Would it be rational for all the consultants to immediately pull out? Certainly they would not be getting the original incentive, but, by pulling out they would also be losing the benefit of the knowledge and experience they were gaining from being part of this collaborative group. They may well decide that despite the loss of the two hundred dollars a week, the effort of participation was amply rewarded by the benefits they were getting from these discussions.

They might take the same view as the entrepreneur when she set up this discussion in the first place. They might look at the loss of income as a lump sum – which might amount to ten thousand dollars in a year and consider that the benefits they were getting from the discussions would probably result in a their own earning prospects being improved by at least as much as this. If this were so, then although they weren't actually being paid this amount of money by participating they would in effect still be earning it.

After all, this was the way in which the entrepreneur would have seen it. Having the advantage of the opinions and comments of fifty consultants would greatly enhance the prospects of eventual success. It was highly likely that along the way several e-business opportunities might emerge, in which any of the collaborators might become actively involved.

Looking at the cafe from this view point, would see it as a non zero sum game where everyone can gain. As everyone can benefit from this situation it becomes one of those enigmatic sources of wealth generation that we are looking for in the environment of the Internet.

Everyone contributes a little effort for little or no commitment and everyone can gain far more than they are putting in.

Fifty collaborators

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Note: This book lead to the creation of the stigmergicsystems.com website