But now things are different. Things are much more transparent, communication and collaboration is much easier…and keeping the knowledge and power close to the vest is much harder.

And yes…this is a result of Enterprise 2.0…Web 2.0…social networking…all of which mean that people at all levels in an organization are talking and sharing.

Harder to control, but infinitively more productive. And the smart managers will take advantage of this.

If you poll the consumer Web apps developer crowd, you’ll see the extreme of what Tapscott talks about–independent contractors, many of them, and most of the rest are at small companies. Digg had six people or less for years. But that sort of work is often solitary anyway–it’s go off and code for hours, then come back and get some feedback, then go off again and code….. Purely online environments require the custodians to become part of the machine, really, to borrow an O’Reilly observation.

That’s hardly the only kind of work there is. Even highly analytical work can be highly interactive, and it often benefits from teams being quite close together physically. Then there’s the scale economies of firms who specialize in good execution…. Sure, companies benefit from fresh ideas from the outside, but what Tapscott didn’t mention about Goldcorp was what happened after they reviewed the suggestions from the public Web. A lot of good execution had to take place for them to mine and process all that gold efficiently and effectively.

It’d be an interesting exercise to ponder the inside/outside benefits of strategy and planning vs. execution. My guess is that execution requires a lot of standardization, which requires a lot of working closely together, and frequent feedback and response…. Insiders, mostly, in other words, even if they’re ostensibly “contractors.” Meanwhile, good strategy requires timely, but less frequent infusions of insights from the likes of the Tapscotts and the Weinbergers….. Objectivity and reflection are important in these circumstances….