Sharing economy is the new business model

When we were launching Viagra we knew the importance of high performance teamwork to deliver business success.  That’s why we implemented a series of team rules that have proven to withstand the test of time given Viagra’s success over the last 18 years.  Team rule #1, focus, was just one of them.  That’s why we had to think about sex all day, every day.  

In today’s rapidly transforming global economy, building a high performance team is more important than ever.  Especially as the rapid transition to what is referred to as a “sharing economy” business model continues to become the new business model. 

{mosads}A sharing economy takes a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology to empower individuals, corporations, non-profits and government with information that enables distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services.

In the old business model, a company’s success was based on adding more employees and doing more with more people.  The iconic businesses of the time;  GM, IBM, GE, Walmart and others, were behemoths with large groups of global employees in many cases numbering in the hundreds of thousands and, in Walmart’s case, over 2 million. With that size it was easy for any particular employee, or team, to literally become lost in the number count therefore their contributions, or lack thereof, could be more easily overlooked. 

Those days are over.  And those days have been over for some time.  Companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google have led the way.  Each of those companies is worth over $170 billion.  This compares with General Motors at $60 billion and even IBM at $160 billion.  

But here’s the kicker.  None of them has even half the total number of employees of today’s newer, smaller GM. In fact; the closest is Amazon with 154,000 employees versus GM’s 216,000.  Real superstars like Google, which is worth over 6 times the value of GM, have less than 25 percent of the employees of GM.  

The new “shared economy” and high tech firms are building on that foundation and are taking things even further.  They are doing more with less.  Specifically they are becoming worth more than many large established companies, and doing it with less than 5 percent of the employees.   Between them, What’s App, Uber and AirBNB have a combined estimated market value of  $80-90 billion.  That market value is 50 percent more than GM’s. However, their combined number of employees, across all 3 companies, is less than 10,000. 

What this tells us is that to succeed in this new economy, especially in this new “sharing economy,” companies and teams need to make sure that they spend all the time and effort required to truly build high performance efficient teams.  No longer can any employee, or any team, hope to simply hide in the weeds and not be fully measured and evaluated. 

We learned these lessons years ago when launching a product that would go on to become a globally recognized and highly valuable brand.   Today we share those team building lessons with companies and teams from across the world so they can survive and thrive in today’s economy where each person’s performance, especially on their teams, is truly visible for the entire company, and world, to see.

Nelson, a former team leader for Viagra, is CEO and founder of The Nelson Group.