Four important questions

In chapter one, it was explained that the idea behind this book is to use the concepts described in the previous two books of this trilogy to create an e-business and write about the experience as it happens.

A few of the readers of were asking for specific business ideas to concentrate upon. As one reader put it, "You seem to be dancing around the fire rather than getting on with the job of creating a real e-business".

Another frustrated reader wrote:

Peter's feeling is that "going into the details of a particular business at this early stage of the book will slant the content in a narrow direction." But, it is precisely when he decides to go in a narrow direction that he'll get our support and experience. In wanting to stay with the concepts he prevents me and maybe other sympathisers contributing in a meaningful way.

Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when there are too many options. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralyzed with choices. Numerous small things connected together into a network generate tremendous power, but, this swarm power will need some kind of minimal governance from the top to maximize its usefulness.

These expressions of exasperation are typical of many who have yet to come to grips with a bottom up approach to creating e-business systems. They feel moribund without any central idea or business plan to focus upon: incapable of taking action without guidance or direction. Oddly enough, people often dogmatically maintain this attitude even when they agree that ideas, guidance (management) and business plans are of very little value in a highly volatile and unpredictable business environment.

The way to get over this conceptual hurdle is to think of the strategy used by Sherlock Holmes when he was faced with seemingly unsolvable problems. He would conclude that if an explanation could not be found through rational reasoning then rational reasoning had to abandoned because the answer must lie within the realm of the irrational.

In the context of e-business, this would mean abandoning the rationality of using initial ideas, management and planning and looking for a different kind of strategy that doesn't require them. The eureka moment comes as soon as it is realised that there are such strategies available – and that they are extremely efficient for creating robust e-businesses suitable for an unpredictable and highly competitive environment.

It is just such a strategy I'm pursuing here. No preconceived ideas, no business plans: I'm simply starting with a blind search in a solution space until a viable e-business opportunity emerges.

To the mind set of the Industrial Age, this will evoke four questions:

1) How can you start to create a business with no initial ideas?

2) What is a solution space?

3) How do viable systems emerge without planning?

4) With no visionary idea, with no business plan and no strong management: how can you possibly attract investment funding?

Over the course of the next few chapters I'll attempt to provide answers to these four questions. Only then will it become clear that the apparent vagueness of this approach to establishing an e-business is a necessary requisite that will avoid the problems that have been encountered by most of the early dotcoms who failed to survive.