Acknowledgments

We recognize and appreciate the work and support of many who have made this book possible. The first opportunity for us to work together occurred while Tom was on sabbatical from the University of Dayton in 2015. Sabbatical support came from Department Chair Jay Prasad, Dean Paul Bobrowski, and Provost Paul Benson at the University of Dayton. While on sabbatical, Tom was a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California (USC), thanks to the support of Ann Majchrzak, Omar El Sawy, and their department chair, Yehuda Bassok, of the Marshall School of Business at USC. We also wish to thank Dean Jim Ellis, Marshall School of Business at USC, and Dean John Mittelstaedt, School of Business Administration at the University of Dayton, for their support.

The Marshall School of Business is the home of the Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM), a consortium-funded think tank dedicated to understanding how technology is changing our view of business and how business is guiding the way technology drives changes to markets. As director of CTM, Jerry constructed a series of linked research projects from 2015 to 2017 designed to shed new light on the technology-driven changes that are redefining a company’s culture and behaviors of their served markets. With the support of Dean Ellis and the USC Marshall CTM members, a group of faculty experts were assembled to focus on a piece of a much larger puzzle.

As a visiting scholar, Tom was responsible for one of those projects and worked with Jerry to compile the components into a more cohesive story, but we would not have been able to write this book without key contributions from the expert researchers responsible for the CTM projects. That work, which we reference throughout the book, helped us develop insights related to the real-time revolution. We wish to pay tribute and acknowledge the substantial contributions made by USC as a whole and to several key contributors specifically.

  Arif Ansari is a professor of clinical data sciences and operations at USC-Marshall as well as an expert in the area of data mining, business intelligence, data warehousing, and intelligent systems and technologies, a field in which he has fifteen years of research experience. He has published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Professor Ansari received Marshall’s Golden Apple Award in 2006.

  Mehdi Bagherzadeh is an assistant professor of innovation management in the Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at NEOMA Business School, France. He is also a research fellow at the Research Center for Open Digital Innovation (RCODI), Purdue University. Mehdi was a visiting PhD student at the Marshall School of Business and at RCODI between December 2014 and September 2015. His research revolves around governance dynamics of open and collaborative innovation projects and its effect on innovation performance.

  Sabine Brunswicker is an associate professor at Purdue University and is an internationally recognized scholar with a particular interest in open digital innovation, describing new ways of using information technologies to organize the collective design and use of innovative digital goods. She is also the founder and director of the Research Center for Open Digital Innovation (RCODI) and an adjunct professor of digital innovation in the School of Information Systems at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Sabine is a computational social scientist, bridging social science and computing when studying open digital innovation. Her interests include open-source software communities, civic crowdsourcing, open data app competitions, collective software design and reuse, and collective energy conservation through interactive home-energy monitoring applications and visualizations.

  Pete Cardon is the academic director for the MBA Program for Professionals and Managers and a professor of clinical business communications at USC-Marshall, where he teaches a variety of business communication courses. He researches team communication, the role of technology in leadership communication, and intercultural business communication. Professor Cardon previously served as president of the Association for Business Communication. Before working in higher education, he held several marketing and management positions in the tourism and manufacturing industries where, along the way, he has worked in China for three years and traveled to approximately fifty countries for work and research. He is also the author of Business Communication: Developing Leaders for a Networked World.

  Omar El Sawy is the Kenneth King Stonier Professor of Business Administration and professor of data sciences and operations at USC-Marshall. His expertise is in digital business strategy in dynamic environments and business models for digital platforms. He served as director of research for Marshall’s Institute for Communication Technology Management from 2001 to 2007 and is the author of over one hundred papers. A seven-time winner of the Society for Information Management’s annual academic paper award, he is currently senior editor of MIS Quarterly and on several editorial boards. He has served as advisor to the United Nations Development Programme in Egypt and as a Fulbright Scholar in Finland.

  Ann Majchrzak is a professor of data sciences and operations and associates chair in business administration at USC-Marshall. She teaches digital innovation and holds concurrent appointments as a visiting professor at ESADE Business School, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, and at LUISS, Rome School of Business and Management, in the areas of innovation and organization. She is also an external expert for the Information Systems and Innovation Faculty Research Group in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics.

  Kyle Mayer is a professor of management and organization at USC-Marshall with a research interest in understanding how firms govern relationships with other firms, with particular attention to the contract and its role in establishing a framework for the relationship. His research has been published in Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, and Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. He served on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, and Strategic Management Journal. He received a Golden Apple Award in 2003, Marshall’s Educator of the Year Award in 2006, and a Mellon Mentoring Award from USC in 2006.

  Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. There, he studies the economics of IT and digitization with a focus on the value of crowdsourcing, and how these topics relate to the future of work. His research interests include free digital goods, cybersecurity, and generating strategic predictions from unstructured big data. His work utilizes large data sets derived from online social networks, financial market information, and surveys of enterprise IT usage. He currently advises the OECD Working Group on Innovation and Technology Policy and has consulted for the World Bank, the US Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration, and various companies in the technology, defense, and energy sectors. Prior to joining HBS, he was an assistant professor in the Management and Organization Department at the Marshall School of Business.

  Lars Perner is an assistant professor of clinical marketing at USC-Marshall, where his research interests focus on nonprofit marketing, sponsored fund-raising, consumer behavior, consumer price response, branding, and bargain hunting. His work has been published in the Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Marketing Education, Journal of Consumer Affairs, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. He currently serves as a faculty coordinator for the Department of Marketing’s undergraduate introductory marketing course sections, which serve approximately 1,600 students every academic year.

  Pernille Rydén is head of studies and an associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark and lecturer, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Marketing. Pernille is a mindset specialist, an executive trainer (EMBA and coach/facilitator), author, and public speaker. Her work in the areas of strategic cognition, management, and customer-focused digital transformation provides well-founded practical as well as disruptive solutions to management challenges of tomorrow’s enterprises. She is also ambassador of the Academy of Management’s Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division.

  Neil Siegel is the IBM Professor of Engineering Management and professor of industrial and systems engineering practice at USC-Viterbi. His personal research contributions have centered around the systems engineering problem of developing large, complex (both technically and social) societal systems. He has been the actual lead designer and/or program manager for several such systems and has drawn from those experiences to create new insights into the root cause of process failures with a set of novel techniques that provide better outcomes for such programs. He has also sponsored important research in the field of human-computer interaction.

  Nick Vyas is the founding executive director of the USC-Marshall Center for Global Supply Chain Management and academic director for the Master of Science in Global Supply Chain Management program. As an assistant professor of clinical data sciences and operations, Nick is educating the next generation of business leaders. He is a specialist in operation excellence using digital transformation and an expert in global supply chain management (GSCM) at USC-Marshall. Nick has implemented large-scale enterprise-wide transformation projects for over four hundred projects globally that have increased efficiency for clients in the fields of health care, service, military, retail, and end-to-end supply chain.

  Cheryl Wakslak is an associate professor of management and organization at USC-Marshall. Her research focuses on basic questions of cognition and interpersonal connection, establishing the way that people use different styles of thinking to help them connect with those closer to them and those farther away. In much of this work she explores the role of abstraction in facilitating connections across distance. She uses these insights to look at a range of organizationally relevant outcomes, including communication, learning, leadership, venture capital investment, and decision making. Her findings have been published in numerous scholarly outlets, including top journals in management, marketing, and psychology.

  Yumi Huang is a versatile and capable researcher who provided a great deal of assistance to the entire team and kept everyone on track.

  Cecilia Ledesma is a graduate student of the Master of Science in Global Supply Chain Management program at USC who aided in our understanding of the future of supply chain ecosystems.

  Jinting Liu is a PhD candidate in applied mathematics at USC who helped us understand how companies are using analytics.

We especially would like to express our gratitude to Ann Majchrzak, Omar El Sawy, and Pernille Rydén, who provided the inspiration and encouragement we needed to tackle such a complicated topic. Steve Piersanti, our editor with Berrett-Koehler Publishers, helped us shape our theme into the real-time revolution. We also wish to express our thanks to Ed Lawler III, director of the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) in the Marshall School of Business at USC, for introducing us to Steve.

Throughout the book we have cited numerous published sources that provided examples of real-time organizations and relevant references. We express our gratitude to all of these authors, organizations, and sources.

Converting our initial draft to a published book has involved the work of many people. We are thankful to all of them. For example, they include the reviewers who provided feedback on our initial draft and the artist who designed the cover. They also include all the staff of Berrett-Koehler Publishers who worked on this book.

A special note of thanks is extended to the CTM member companies that include AT&T, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, the City of Los Angeles, Telus, Verizon, CenturyLink, TDS, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox. Special thanks are due to Chris Sambar, Dave Abbott, Liz Huszarik, Gnanasekaran Swaminathan, Ibrahim Gedeon, John Devine, Joe Hanley, Justin Hertz, Lani Ingram, Pam Allison, Peter Taft, Steve Garske, and Will Somers.

We ask forgiveness from those we have not specifically thanked here that we should have.