Preface:
The Journey to Boundless

Our companies and institutions today are not organized to deliver customer success; they're organized to accumulate and protect their resources and to extract maximum value from them for their own success. It's an old business model that is grounded in the ideas of structure and control, independence and strength. In times of relative stability it worked very well. However, in this age of accelerating technological innovation, of increasingly empowered individuals, and of ongoing societal crises, we need a new model.

We created that model, and we've titled it Boundless. It's a model organized for the success of not only the company itself but also of its customers and employees—as well as of all other partners and rights owners, including community and environment. It is a model that lives in flow, in connectedness, and in responsiveness. It is a model that is optimistic; it sees opportunities where others may only see danger, and it sees value in gratitude and reciprocity. Boundless is the redefinition of resource management, the operating model for the future of success.

Our Journey to Boundless

The two of us were on quite different paths when we first recognized Boundless as an emerging and important phenomenon—but we met at a critical juncture in 2017 and have since continued the journey together. We'll next share our individual paths.

Henry's Path

For me it started a long time ago, in 1995, when a friend recommended I read Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. I had already begun to turn my attention to the complicated relationship between nature and technology, but this book exposed me to new ideas and in some ways changed my life. I became impatient for Kelly's next book, and was intrigued to learn that he was asking himself a non-obvious question, namely, “what does technology want?” While I waited, I decided to contemplate the question myself.

I started with something that was already close to me: the origin of storytelling. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were core texts for me as a former student of classical literature, and one of the perennial questions regarding these epic poems is the nature of their origin. Did they start as oral stories that were later written down, or were they written down from the start? Another consideration is the difference between the two models in story creation: performance and repetition. In the oral tradition, stories are recited from memory and are adapted, or not, as appropriate for the occasion and the audience. Repetition and dispersion of the story are a slow process—in which multiple tellings from multiple storytellers produce multiple variations.

By contrast, the written tradition requires no memorization because the story has been recorded—or captured—using at a minimum the products of two technologies: a marking device and a markable surface. This act of capture separates out the acts of creation, memorization, and performance from one another and in doing so enables at least four remarkable things: accurate retelling of the story, accurate reproduction of the story (even in multiple copies), greater speed, and range of reproduction and/or transmission.

In 2009, the year before Kelly's book What Technology Wants finally became available, Brian Arthur published The Nature of Technology. In that book, Arthur's definition of technology as “phenomena captured and put to use” gave me the confidence that I was on the right track. The word captured, however, now felt like a confluence or conflation of three ideas that could be usefully teased apart. The first is the idea of stopping or arresting. It's difficult to capture something while it's in motion, and so stopping it becomes central to the process. The second is the idea of decoupling. Capturing something or someone requires that they are taken out of their environment or context or community. The third is the idea of containing or storing or imprisoning. Arresting/stopping, decoupling/extracting, containing/storing: three powerful and related but distinct acts—given perhaps too little attention within the single word capture.

I soon realized that it's not just phenomena that we capture and put to use. We apply the same logic to just about anything we think can be useful to us. We have turned the world into a world of resources. All of our industries are involved in capturing resources and putting them to use.

And yet there are exceptions: experiences and products and business models that seem to be more concerned with freeing up resources, sharing them, enabling and supporting their flow, instead of capturing them. In their article “Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows” in the January 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison highlighted this distinction in regard to knowledge resources, urging their readers to abandon stocks of knowledge and instead embrace their flow. I realized this could apply just as equally to other resources, and set out to explore what that might mean.

Fast-forward nearly a decade; by the time I met Vala in 2017, I was convinced that flow was not only applicable to all resources and all industries, but that it could be a compelling and even preferable alternative to the dominant capture or silo model.

Vala's Path

My family and I immigrated from Iran to the United States as refugees. As my parents struggled to rebuild their lives they worked two jobs, seven days a week, for nearly 25 years. I lived a happy life, with two loving parents and a younger sister, but it was a hard life. I adopted a silo mindset—capture resources, protect them, and extract their value—that led to a strong commitment to education and even a stronger commitment to the work ethics I learned from my parents. After spending seven years pursuing undergraduate and graduate studies in electrical engineering, while working more than full-time during the entire journey, I began my career as a software engineer in the technology sector.

My work ethic and ability to establish trust among peers and business leaders led to my being given the opportunity to lead projects and people. After just my first year on the job I was promoted to engineering project leader, and subsequently to vice president of engineering, chief customer officer responsible for global service operations, and chief marketing officer of a public enterprise company with $650 million in annual revenues. I believe that my career was fast tracked when I strayed from my silo mentality and began adopting a mindset based on optimizing flow of value and shared success.

My mindset and leadership philosophy was strongly influenced by Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce—particularly the importance of collaboration and the social enterprise. It was 2009, at Salesforce's annual conference. Benioff's keynote focused on the importance of social collaboration, minimizing business friction, and creating a culture where it's not the best titles that win, but the best ideas. In a social business, the ideas are heard and seen throughout the fabric of the organization, not just at the top of the organizational chart. In 2011, I filed for a US patent for technology that would invite machines to the business social graph. This patent includes the ability to communicate with internet-connected devices using public social networks and public cloud computing infrastructure. I'm proud to say I was awarded the patent in 2018: for a machine-to-machine and human-to-machine communication platform using public and private social networks—Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce Chatter.

In 2012, I coauthored a book titled The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence, which referenced my invention and the importance of using customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to improve the connections, mobility, and speed of value creation for all stakeholders—employees, customers, and business partners. I emphasized the importance of deliberately removing friction in business, in part by employing the success factors of culture, people, process, and technology. The book also outlined the core competencies of being a customer company, highlighting core values, culture, and servant leadership as key drivers of sustained momentum and growth in business. This book led to a practice of writing weekly articles for major US publications and producing a live weekly video show DisrupTV (launched in 2013) on disruptive innovation, leadership, and business practices. I have written over 750 articles in the last decade and interviewed more than 1,300 executives, authors, and entrepreneurs on my weekly show—which has been watched by more than 2 million viewers.

The most disruptive change in my behavior was using social media, specifically Twitter, starting in 2011. When I recognized the power of social collaboration on Twitter my silo-based mindset began shifting to a flow-based mindset. Today, I have over 1 million followers on Twitter, and I produce billions of impressions every year. In 2015, after a 12-year journey of being a Salesforce trailblazer customer, I was invited to join Salesforce as their chief digital evangelist.

In summary, Boundless opportunities have been offered to me on account of my shifting my mindset from one of silos to one of flows. When I met Henry in 2017, we...