She could be from anywhere. In her case, she works in high-tech. She’s sharp as a tack. She sees things the guys do not see. They quietly ignore her. She does not give in. They pay a bit more attention. She’s a bit frustrated, but she keeps smiling. She knows that if she tells them they’re a bunch of insensitive males who overstate the firm’s bargaining power with customers, she will be rejected as weak. And so she bobs and weaves in macho land, day after day.

The sad thing is she’s right and they’re wrong. The firm’s power is still strong, but has eroded. With her feminine sensitivity, she sees that in every meeting. She’s in a good position for that. She’s the account manager for one of the largest customers of the firm. She knows what she’s dealing with. They coach her from behind, because they’re more senior than she is. They tell her how to leverage the firm’s position for advantage and be tough. She’s a soldier in another nation’s army.

She’s on her second career. She did well in the first and rose to executive rank once already. But she had cancer and had to stop working for a while. She restarted at the bottom and is working her way up again. But she’s not any younger. She knows she’s under-utilized and wants to do more. She has a million ideas for collaboration, people she’d like to go see, new joint programs she’d like to initiate with partners. She was born for co-creation.

But then there are all these guys who look at the world in this strange left-brained way, searching for killer algorithms within the walls of the firm, rather than seeking to engage the firm’s customers in new opportunities. Because she’s afraid of looking soft, she too speaks of business intelligence, clickstreams and support assets, rather than co-creation initiatives. She envisions a collaborative ecosystem, but they’re thinking dominance. She believes in people, but they want systems. Her organization has an increasing number of women in power, so herein lies hope for her. Perhaps women who’ve done well will reach out to her, although she’s not sure how strong women’s solidarity truly is. After all, women executives have their own battle to wage.

The guys drink a bit less than in the TV series Mad Men and the sexual harassment has become a bit less blatant. As for the rest, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

A frequent objection to co-creation in pharmaceutical research – which we will define here as the sharing of research data and cost in the hope of discovering new therapies for major human conditions – runs something like this: “co-creation is fine and dandy, but it runs so orthogonal to the commercial interests of large pharmaceutical firms that it will never work.” My timid encouragement toward co-creation across private and public entities in the healthcare sector has usually been dismissed as a sign of my ignorance of how the industry really works, probably coupled with some Marxist-Leninist drift attributable to my European ancestry.

Fortunately, a few pharmaceutical scientists decided to take the matter into their own hands for research on Alzheimer’s disease. A recent article in the New York Times describes how back in 2003, a group of scientists decided they needed to build a common database and research protocol to identify biomarkers that may lead to Alzheimer’s. As a result, they sweet-talked their respective employers into this co-creative approach – from the very public National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to very private players in the pharmaceuticals and medical imaging industries.

I find it particularly interesting that the scientists themselves took this initiative. They knew what needed to be done from a scientific standpoint – the idea was to accelerate the pace of research and get to results faster – and they were the only ones who could sell this approach to their business colleagues and bosses. The typical corporate strategy approach driven by businesspeople and shareholders, with its focus on deals and industry restructurings, might have suggested a merger or an acquisition, perhaps an alliance, but it would not have produced this syndication of such a strategic step in the research process.

The software industry has followed the same evolution. Software scientists have also bypassed the corporate proprietary imperative and established a social community of co-creators, leading to the development of the Linux operating software and Apache HTTP Server, for example.  Interestingly, a booming private industry has developed on top of these community-developed programs, proving that co-creation does not lead to socialistic mediocrity, but to a different model of capitalistic vibrancy. There is every reason to believe that the same will be true for the Alzheimer’s diagnostics and drugs industry when it finally materializes. The article in the New York Times reports that many promising papers and experiments are now hitting the market, based on the research work initiated back in 2003.

Another important constituency in healthcare is the patients themselves and their families. One does not feel the pain of undeveloped software with the same intensity as the lack of an Alzheimer’s drug. We all have friends or relatives touched by Alzheimer’s. In some cases, patients have themselves created communities where they share immensely private data about their symptoms and medication, in the thin hope of finding treatments where the pharmaceuticals industry has not deemed it commercially attractive to direct resources at the issue. PatientsLikeMe.com offers a window of such human distress, where patients for example analyze whether lithium can help in the treatment of ALS disease.

In the end, corporations and public agencies have little compassion. But the scientists who populate them do. And thank God for that.

I don’t know much about government. I’ve been a private sector person all my life and I find it difficult enough to solve corporate problems without attempting to tackle public sector issues. I’m naturally intimidated by the thought of formulating recommendations for education, healthcare, or national security when I already struggle to corral a corporation toward a common goal.

Lately though, I’ve felt the pull. It’s a mixture of personal and professional things. My daughter just started as a young policy analyst working in Washington, DC, and I’m slowly discovering through her enthusiasm how the US government works. I’m also increasingly drawn to public issues through my partner consulting firm PRTM, which has a strong government practice. After all, government is quintessentially about engaging a wide set of constituencies in the co-creation of a common agenda, and this happens to be what I teach and write about.

As if the pull were not strong enough already, a colleague of mine recently attracted my attention to an interview given to the Japanese Asahi Shimbun newspaper by Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of policy planning at the US State Department, and I fell in love.

I do not know much about Mrs. Slaughter, except that what she says in the interview makes me want to meet her and follow her anywhere. Her view is that we are unduly pessimistic about the US because the next century will not be about whose economies and military power are growing, but about who’s the most globally interconnected. Her view is that it does not matter if Asia is rising and Europe is declining in military and economic power, with the US probably somewhere in the middle. It is about who will set up the best platforms for interconnectedness. And that remains the US.

I happen to believe she’s right, unconventional through this wisdom may be. My European colleagues keep sending me empathetic messages about the impending demise of the US. My response, like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, is: “Just you wait”. What matters is to control what we might call the platforms of co-creation, i.e., the human and technological places through which the US influence will exert itself globally. Mrs. Slaughter points to the fact that these platforms are first and foremost human, and that there is generally more power to providing a human inspiration than in offering a massive deployment of technologies. We define co-creation platforms in business exactly in this fashion, i.e., as a combination of human and technological influence.

She also points out that government-to-government relations matter less than the mobilization of grass-roots people around certain global ideals, making governments only a proxy for the collective wisdom of people, rather than the source of their country’s collective thinking. This is also largely what is happening in the corporate world, as  companies are challenged to engage with their stakeholders, forcing leaders to open the governance of the firm to other stakeholders than managers and shareholders. In that sense, global entrepreneurs and thought leaders will probably do more for world peace than governments.

The sirens of government may be calling, but I remain skeptical of the tendency of the public sector to launch broad policy initiatives than do not amount to much more than stating the obvious in big thick reports. I dream of small focused pilots where we fix Rhode Island before taking on the world, and where citizens coalesce in communities to co-generate the local agenda with their Washington reps. I’m also dreaming of a massive acceleration in the speed with which things get implemented. As you can see, I have a lot to learn about government work.

I always love it when someone like LeBron James creatively bends the rules of a traditional marketing-run organization like the National Basketball Association.  The place is full of league-centric rules aimed at packaging the experience of the fan around its self-defined view of “the brand,” using a ’60s view of marketing management where logos and TV ads are viewed as more important than the creation of an authentic fan experience. Those of you who want your kids to emulate the behavior of NBA stars at home, please raise your hand.

The same “I’m in charge of your experience” philosophy applies to the relationship the NBA has with its players. The player’s experience is regimented by rules such as the salary cap – a team’s payroll shall not exceed $58 million for the 2010-2011 season – and the interaction between players, agents, and teams – players shall not negotiate with soon-to-be free agents before July 1. These rules proceed from a league-first paradigm where the league defines acceptable behavior and players are passive recipients of an employment product defined by the NBA.

Fortunately, LeBron James just exploded all of that. LeBron may not have been authorized by the NBA to negotiate with any team as a free agent until July 1, but he had the right to talk with two of his fellow players, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, also free agents. Together, they decided they would co-create the terms of their future employment. They built a group package, defining the length of the contract (6 years for all three of them), how much each of them would be paid ($14 million to $14.5 million per year per player the first year, with a gradual increase every year after that). They intentionally lowered their collective salary by about $50 million over the length of the contract, to allow their new team to put a couple more players on the court (I’m a soccer guy, but I understand a basketball team has five players) and still stay within the salary cap. In the end, the Miami Heat turned out to be the winner, as many people discovered in an extravaganza show on ESPN a week ago.

The new James-Bosh-Wade collective has the two crucial ingredients of co-creation. It produces a better experience for the individuals involved, since they now stand a great chance of winning the NBA championship in the next six years. It also saves the Miami Heat a bunch since the three players have left money on the table for the chance of playing together, not to mention the fact that the American Airlines Arena in Miami should be full from here on. (In case you’re worried about LeBron going homeless on such a meager pittance, the money he makes from endorsements with Nike, Sprite, Glacéau, Bubblicious, Upper Deck, McDonald’s, and State Farm Insurance dwarfs his salary as a working stiff.)

The evolution of recruiting from a one-way, company-centric process to a two-way co-creative interaction where recruits engage with future employers on their own terms, often as part of a group, is a global phenomenon. One of the most innovative companies when it comes to recruiting is the Indian call center company 24/7 Customer, which allows young people in Bangalore to come and interview as a group. The firm even allows the groups to staff and manage themselves as a unit within the firm if they get hired. 24/7 Customer has devised this group recruiting process to find talent in the highly competitive IT industry in India.

Employers beware. From LeBron James to the call centers of Bangalore, madmen recruits are increasingly in charge of the recruiting asylum.

In goal, I’d put Phil Kotler, and he’d play like Gianluigi Buffon of Italy. Kotler would not have the youngest legs on the pitch, but he’d still be sharp and none of the whippersnappers on the other team could get a lot past him. In addition to goaltending, he’d also manage the team brand, redesign the team jersey and improve the customer relationship process of the team, particularly when the Italian team has to explain back in Milan why their ultra-defensive boring game has failed to produce any goal in the last twenty years. He’d also be masterful at explaining how marketing has opened up to co-creation since his pioneering conceptualization of the 4Ps of Marketing in the late 19th century.

Robert Kaplan and David Norton would be my two center backs, like Gerard Piqué and Carles Puyol of Spain.  This would help lower the goals-against metric on the team’s Balanced Scorecard. Like Piqué, Kaplan would be precise and efficient, making opponents work so hard in each game that their activity base would end up costing them in the end. Norton would play more like Puyol, with less hair and more glasses, keeping the team’s work force strategy-focused at all time. The challenge would be to keep both of them on the team in spite of the fact that they command an execution premium.

Mike Hammer would play right back, like Maicon of Brazil. Like the force of nature that he was, Hammer would have reengineered his processes all the time, basically oblivious to the strategic concept of defense and offense and simply running all over the field getting things done. And yes, occasionally, he would be left stranded in strategic no-man’s-land, but when you’re that good, does anybody really care?

Henry Chesbrough would play left back, like Philip Lahm of Germany. He’d start with the basics of R&D defense, then start running up and down his lane, poking holes into the traditional funnel-shaped defensive process, and opening up new pathways for outside-in and inside-out innovation. Like Lahm, he’d also be a gentleman on the field.

Jack Welch would be the other defensive, in-your-face midfielder, like Javier Mascherano of Argentina. He’d teach his teammates about leadership and show each of them how to win, continuously praising the top 20% of performers on his team and counseling out the bottom 10% on the opposing team through the intensity of his studs-first sliding tackles. His Six Sigma focus would allow him to root out performance variation, trying to make the Argentineans look as much as possible like a German team in the hope that they will one day manage to beat them.

Gary Hamel would be the attacking midfielder, and he’d weave and bob like Wesley Sneijder of the Netherlands. Both are short, frantic and creative. Hamel would challenge the team’s orthodoxies and start a management revolution leading to soccer 2.0. He’d reorganize the human beings on the team into a soccer lab. He’d speak so fast the opponent would end up tackling imaginary balls.

I’d put Chan Kim at right wing and Renée Mauborgne at left wing. Kim would play like Lionel Messi of Argentina, and Mauborgne like Diego Forlan of Uruguay. This way, we’d have an all-blue-ocean-strategy attack – Argentina and Uruguay have the right jerseys for that – and they’d clobber the opposing red-ocean teams which are hopelessly stuck in the old Porter paradigm of soccer. Kim would nail the opponents on a strategy canvas, while Mauborgne would weave a six paths framework around them.

The lone striker would be my friend and co-author Venkat Ramaswamy, and he’d play like Asamoah Gyan of Ghana. He’d be the future of the team, relentlessly pushing the opponent’s defense and confusing the heck out of them through his unbounded ability to co-create new moves. The confusion would occasionally extend to his slower partners, who’d sometimes beg for a soccer best-practice before inventing the next one. His interaction with opponents would produce a “win more-win more” experience for his teammates and a lower cost for the owners of the team, since he’d get the entire stadium to move onto the pitch with him and play for nothing.

His argument is that if the US continues to focus solely on the “knowledge component” of its economy, it will develop a society comprising a few wealthy people playing at the edge of technology development, along with a large number of unemployed folks wondering why their government let their manufacturing jobs go to China. I love seeing Grove make this ostensibly left-leaning argument because his leadership in the development of the highly successful, eminently capitalistic Intel protects him from the bipolarity of debates about free-market vs. protectionism, Republican vs. Democrat, and no industrial policy vs. industrial policy.

The most convincing part of Grove’s argument to me is that, beyond the social fracture this laissez-faire attitude may create, it will eventually produce an erosion of the technological edge for the US, because large-scale manufacturing is the foundation of future technology developments.

The shop floor and the design lab do indeed participate in the same process of technology co-creation. Product engineers design for manufacturing, but the experience of manufacturing – and the experience of customers with the manufactured products — fuels the next design. If you disconnect one from the other on the argument that the brain can function without the muscle, think again. The brain is in the muscle and the muscle is in the brain. Yes, there are a few cases of pure lab-induced disruptions in technology – e.g., new molecules in drug industry, new generation of materials and components in electronic parts. But most innovation comes from the creative confrontation of science- and engineering-induced ideas in the lab, machine and operations design considerations on the shop floor, and customers pushing both shop floor and lab to come up with the next generation of products.

I spend a lot of time these days trying to reconnect faraway suppliers in India, Brazil, or China with their business-to-business customers in the US. Some of these conversations do take place in person with interpreters, but the sheer logistics forces many of these conversations to take place in broken English on bad-quality Skype connections, with the noise of Bangalore, Sao Paulo, or Shenzhen traffic in the background. The stress of these conversations is high, and the generative content of the conversation nearly non-existent. Most of these calls end up with the OEM manufacturer imparting its specifications and a one-way determination of how the supplier’s performance will be assessed, followed by a few grunts generously interpreted as assent by the OEM. Twenty or thirty years ago, the meeting would have taken place live, lasted a whole day, included a plant tour and discussions with shop floor operators, quality, engineering, and plant management, and ended up with a recap in a local restaurant about the ten things we’re excited about doing together over the next six months.

Nostalgia won’t help us here, because the location of suppliers and the state of supplier-customer relationship are what they are. I am also not sure that an industrial policy driven by the US government to encourage more manufacturing jobs in the US is a good idea. While I love the US where I live and it grieves me to see many people suffer as a result of this failure to maintain the crucial link between design and manufacturing, I have an equal passion for the awakening of emerging nations that these expatriated jobs allow.

The solution, I believe, lies in a better analytical understanding of the high strategic value of connecting design and manufacturing in a rich, co-creative dialogue. Standard accounting does not recognize the value of this interaction, leading companies to overstate the benefits of cheaper labor. Standard accounting shows the cost of individual activities; and in fact, one of the modern approaches to accounting is aptly called activity-based costing. What we need is an accounting that computes the cost of interactions between activities, or more precisely the cost of missing interactions, such as the huge value companies routinely destroy by disconnecting manufacturing from design. At this stage, the solution lies in both helping China and other emerging nations build new links to design in the US and encouraging American companies to keep some manufacturing jobs in the US.

As for Andy Grove for President, I’m told this can’t happen because he was born in Hungary and escaped it in the dark of night in 1956 at age 20. Now, that’s one protectionist feature of the US political system I’d like to change.

So what’s the problem? Well, it seems Adidas went for great technical features, but forgot to co-create its design with players. In great German tradition, the engineering is spectacular. I am strangely fascinated by a video put out by Adidas, which shows the manufacturing process involved. If you want to dedicate 4 minutes and 26 seconds of your life to this silent exploration of a state-of-the-art manufacturing process, you will discover that there are only eight panels in this ball, down from 12 at the last world cup and 32 historically, which gives players more surface to kick at – although the artistry of soccer used to involve utilizing the unevenness of the ball for advantage, which had its fans. You can watch the eight panels made of ethylene vinyl acetate and thermoplastic urethanes being molded and thermally bonded – forget the stitching that formerly produced occasionally inaccurate trajectories. The Adidas promotional literature also praises the “aero grooves” or microtexture indentations, aimed to give the players more control – although someone clearly forgot to tell the Danish drunken sailor about that.

In the end, though, this wonderfully engineered product yields a terrible experience for players and spectators alike. The design disconnect is neatly summed up by Brazilian soccer star Robinho: “For sure the guy who designed this ball never played football.”

Adidas has produced some lame response, stating that the ball has been in use since January 2010 and that most of the feedback had been positive so far. There is some question about the objectivity of that feedback, as many players are under contract with Adidas – although the counter-argument has also been presented that critics of the new ball are under contract with competing suppliers such as Nike or Puma. The firm also points out that there has always been some criticism of new balls during World Cups, and the criticism has typically died out quickly after the event.

In the end, though, there is little doubt this ball has significant flaws. Why did Adidas not open up its design to many of these soccer stars and get them to dialogue with the designers during the design, rather than simply test the product at the end? Daniel Agger, Alvaro Arbeloa, and Robinho undoubtedly would have had ideas about choice of material, number of panels, thermo-forming, and micro-textures if they had been engaged in the dialogue with designers.  But designers would have to open up their kitchen and allow the players to do more than test the ball when it’s all done and decide they don’t like it, which is pretty much what happened. We never stop relearning that lesson: the experience of products needs to be co-created between users and product developers. And now that we’ve straightened out what’s wrong with the soccer ball, let’s turn to the vuvuzela.

In the end, this intellectual high-wire act is a gratuitous and self-absorbed display, however. People’s frustrations are emotional. They do not look to their President to display an ability to intellectualize the answer, but to relieve them of their frustration. The answer to emotional frustration is engagement. If you’re a fisherman in the Gulf, you want to go out and do something. You may not be able to dive in a wetsuit and go plug the hole yourself, but you want to be out there with the Coast Guard and set up some kind of barrier against the approaching oil. You want to go scoop some of the orange stuff with a spoon. You want to go clean up a brown pelican or wash a turtle. You want to take ten square feet of marshland, clean it up with your own hands, and show your kids how it’s done. But the last thing you want to see is a President trying to impress you with his command of the facts.

Of course, understanding the facts is a good thing, if it serves as a foundation for engagement of all available resources, particularly those impacted by the disaster. I still do not understand why President Obama had figured this out as a candidate – he pioneered the use of social media in his campaign – but is proving so inept at involving people in his Presidency. This is where the suspicion of arrogance lies. Of course, few of the Gulf people would exhibit the technical competence required for solving the leak problem itself, but they could be heavily involved in the damage control if coached properly. In the face of a spill of such magnitude, would you rather have a few thousand experts from BP and the government doing something by themselves, or have them use their expertise to orchestrate the work of millions of local people in dealing with the crisis?

Great wars are won by volunteers, guided by the expertise of a few. In the end, mobilization trumps expertise every time. Miracles come when both are brought together. Barack Obama needs to climb out of his own head and ask his administration to co-create new solutions with the impacted populations. President Obama keeps saying he’s open to “all good ideas.” This is itself an arrogant statement, because it assumes the solution is an analytically generated solution that he himself is in the best position to evaluate. The solution will not come from a President-centric idea contest.  It will come from a massive engagement process.

Hurray for Floyd Landis, I say. At last, a star (albeit tarnished) athlete had the courage to break the conspiracy of silence that surrounds cycling. Transparency at last! Now, the process of co-creating the future of the sport can start in earnest, with collective denial out of the way. Finally, bikers, sponsors, sport regulators and the press can interrupt their shameful co-dependent embrace. Journalists can stop feeding their readers cancer-survival myths about Armstrong rather than write about the evidence that has been mounting against him for years (a sulfuric Italian doctor, testimonial of a team nurse, tests whose results have been known but never made official for procedural reasons, a systematic peloton intimidation toward anybody expressing doubt about Lance’s integrity). Sports regulators can feel excited that their role has now been legitimized.  Good reputable sponsors can step back in – most of the good ones have left – knowing their names won’t be muddied any longer by repeated scandals. And young athletes can now join the sport, knowing that it now has a level playing field.

So everybody’s waking up humbled this morning and doing his mea culpa, right? Well, not quite. Since I was in transit between Boston and Paris, I watched what people say in both countries about the Floyd Landis revelation. Believe it or not, most articles and TV segments so far express doubt about Landis’ motivation and truthfulness. Landis has not helped his case by spending four years and $2 million fighting the allegation and his disqualification from the 2006 Tour de France, including a book on the topic. So, he’s not exactly been jumping out of the redemption starting gate, but better late than never! There’s probably some revenge motivation in Landis, but like mafia witnesses, we shouldn’t expect him to only have pure intentions. And he may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he can describe a syringe when he sees one.

A fellow called Pat McQuaid, head of Union du Cycliste International (UCI), the organization charged with regulating cycling and enforcing its performance-enhancing drug policies at the international level, was telling anybody who’d listen last night that Landis was not to be believed. UCI has been out to lunch for years on the doping issue and if it were not for cops in a few countries and some national federations stepping in, we’d have even more junkies in cycling than we do now. Why would UCI attempt to discredit Landis if not to excuse their own incompetence over the last 20 years?

The cycling system is so broken that nobody’s even attempting to reinvent the sport as it should be. We need to put in a room a small cadre of honest people that includes some riders and managers, a few sponsors, a few race organizers, a few regulators and medical people, and a few journalists who care. It’s time to co-create the new cycling ecosystem. Let me recommend they invite Floyd Landis to the first meeting to get them focused on the right issues.

OK, enough about this European sport nobody cares about! Time for some baseball! Big Papi, Matsuzaka, Boston Globe writers, Boston Red Sox management, Senator Mitchell – it’s your turn to come clean and tell us what you really know.

(Continued from Chapter One – Cooking Soup)

“You were right, wizard,” the manager said. ”We’ve been visited by large groups of people demanding new products.”

“New products?” the wizard inquired.

“All kinds of new soups,” he said. “With new ingredients. Some fellow wanted to add wine to it. Another guy wanted to add more potatoes for the cold winter days. Some dark-haired fellow wanted chopped vegetables in it. Another wanted to use chicken bouillon as the base.”

“So did you accept this proliferation of products?” the wizard wondered.

“Of course not,” he exclaimed. “At least not at first…. I showed them the 400-gallon soup cauldron and told them the product is not to be tinkered with. I made it clear we won’t do “specials” and only want to address the standard leek and potato soup segment. My soup maker was equally appalled at their suggestion. He told them we couldn’t have all these new soups cooked in tiny little kettles and still sell each bowl for only 2 guilder.”

He paused for a while, contemplating the horror of it all.

“But they wouldn’t go away,” he pursued, somewhat anguished at the recollection. “I did not have much choice, did I? They were howling right in front of the castle, and I could see pitchforks glistening in the sun. I had no idea how to cook this new stuff, but they insisted that they did. So we opened up our kitchen and let them in.”

“You made your place into a co-creation platform?’ the wizard said, incredulous. 

“My soup maker did not like it one bit,” he said. “They’re going to mess up our kitchen and the place will smell,” he said. “They will bring frogs and toads and it will become the devil’s kitchen.”

“A co-creation platform can be a confusing place,” the wizard chuckled to himself. “Well, how devilish did it become?”

“It was quite messy for a while,” the manager acknowledged. “We did have some weird concoctions brewing in there, and some cooks scared our women. But it got better over time because the good cooks chased away the bad ones. Now we have several new cauldrons fired up year-round all over the kitchen, new smells in the castle, and some of these new people seem to know how to make soup.”

“Is the soup still served in the refectory?” the wizard asked.

“That’s the amazing thing,” the manager stated. “Our soup is now served in all kinds of places. In the dungeon. In the torture chamber. In the catacombs. We have skull bowls, toilet bowls, helmet bowls. Our soup is served lots of places.”

“How’s your soup master adjusting?” the wizard inquired.

“He complains a lot,” the manager said. “He personally makes less soup than before, so he’s had to let go a bit. Now he’s mostly discussing options with the peasants, advising them on how to use the kitchen, what ingredients to use, which place to go to for what. I think he’s actually pleased that he’s learned new tricks. Of course, he pretends to be upset.”

“Was there a turning point?” the wizard asked.

“The most difficult moment was when peasants asked him to share the recipe and the cooking process,” he reflected. “They wanted to understand the steps involved in making it.” “If I give them the recipe and the process, what will prevent them from making their own soup?” our soup master said.

“Yet without transparency, there is no co-creation,” the wizard whispered. “Perhaps they thought they could improve both the recipe and the cooking process?”

“That’s exactly what they said, wizard,” the manager said, suddenly feeling a bit suspicious. “But we have the only kitchen for miles around, so they couldn’t very well start competing with us. Once they understood our process, they started adding to it. A tall guy in the first row said he could bring smaller, tastier leeks from his garden. We’re now adding parsley just before the boil. We’ve learned that a slow fire makes for a better soup. And over time, we’ve developed a whole menu which has allowed us to get wealthier. Our volume has tripled, particularly with the catacomb extension which is very successful. A lot of the peasants working in our kitchen are not even paid. They just do it for the fun of cooking and to have access to our kitchen.”

“Do you like the new model?” the wizard asked. “Is this experience co-creation approach with the peasants worth the trouble?

“I’m not sure yet,” the manager replied. “We’ll have to wait and see. We’re learning new things. We are able to create new products and approaches. But I miss the old days when my soup master and I were in control. I miss my 400-gallon cauldron!”