by Patricia Sellers
Facebook claims more than 400 million users. Skype has over 20 million users at peak times. Ten billion financial market price movements happen daily.
In a world of information overload, another winner: Thomson Reuters , whose EVP and chief strategy officer, David Craig, was on a panel that I ledon Saturday at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Thomson Reuters, purportedly the world’s largest financial real-time data network, spews out 750,000 updates of security price changes, quotes and news per second.
Which goes to show, TMI — too much information — is relative. “Fifty percent of professionals we surveyed felt weighed down by information,” Craig says. “However, most of them still said that they needed more.” No wonder Thomson Reuters’ traffic has risen an average 20% annually these past 20 years.
The panel was titled “Intelligence, Intuition, and Information: The Promise and Peril of Big Data.” The takeaway: Not only mighty information vendors, like Thomson Reuters, and 21st century media phenoms, like Facebook, can benefit from the modern information explosion. John Hagel, who co-chairs Deloitte’s Center for the Edge in Silicon Valley, noted that many companies in many industries can win if they reorient toward “knowledge flows” vs. “knowledge stocks.”
By that, Hagel means, as he says in his new book, The Power of Pull, most organizations are built around knowledge stocks of proprietary data, content, or products. Think Big Pharma, with multi-billion-dollar R&D budgets and drug patents. In general, values of knowledge stocks, Hagel says, “are depreciating at increasing rates, with the possible exception of Coca-Cola’s formula.”
To “knowledge flow” companies go the spoils, he contends. Hagel’s example of a winner in a world where information networks are more valuable than ever: Hong Kong-based Li & Fung, the global sourcing company that functions as a middleman between manufacturers and retailers. Li & Fung, with a vast knowledge of manufacturing expertise around the globe, helps a coat maker in France find the best place on earth to buy buttons. It also helps Wal-Mart and Target source their merchandise most efficiently. Wal-Mart recently cut a deal with Li & Fung that positions the $16 billion trading company to source $2 billion worth of goods annually for the world’s largest retailer.
If “knowledge flows” really do trump “knowledge stocks,” whither media companies that live off of proprietary content? Hagel says they should reposition themselves as “trusted advisers” (i.e. knowledge flow-ers) rather than vendors of exclusive content (knowledge stock-ers). As to whether the advantage today flows to news aggregators, like the Huffington Post and Drudge, another panelist, The Atlantic‘s James Fallows, noted, “The original news aggregator was Henry Luce.” Fallows was referring to the founder of Time and Fortune, owned by Time Inc. , my employer. “The basic function of explaining the world will only become more important,” Fallows added.
And, the panelists agreed: In an ever more complex world, whoever delivers answers to questions that consumers don’t even know to ask will win. One person, I noted, does this better than anyone else: Steve Jobs. Not only is Apple No. 1 on Fortune‘s list of the world’s Most Admired Companies. Fortune, in its new issue, names Jobs the Smartest CEO in Tech.