I believe that as organizations take social design more seriously, it will reinvigorate interest in established disciplines like Six Sigma and C3I (Command-Control-Communications-Intelligence), frameworks to make flow more laminar in nature by eliminating or minimizing the factors that hinder flow. That being said, there are some real opportunities to dramatically recast roles in 21st century businesses using people-powered flow as part of the design process. If the 20th century was about learning how to scale the manufacture and distribution of stuff, the 21st century is about learning how to scale ambition.

The first Redbox kiosk got its start about two blocks from where I live today (and not too far away from where the first Chipotle launched 15 years ago). The cable and satellite companies were so preoccupied with each other that neither one saw Redbox or Netflix as anything more than a niche player. I was a Netflix subscriber for six months and pooh-poohed their earlier efforts. I was wrong to believe that would always be the case. The combination of widespread broadband wireless combined with a much larger on-demand library transformed their JND into something far more lethal. So when I think about Square, the logical competition is the credit card processing equipment manufacturers, who seem to have done as little as possible to wi-fi enable their payment processing terminals. I think these guys are inconsequential. These manufacturers serve a greater master, who could end up being the next Blockbuster failure. Will it be the credit card processing arms of banks? Or will it be the merchant account itself? Brian doesn't need multiple accounts for his money. He needs to take orders, pay vendors, himself, and Uncle Sam, with as little friction as possible. Square is not a bank, but if he could have a bank account integrated with his Square, that little fob just might be all the bank that Brian would ever need. So if I hear that Square is buying a bank, perhaps that will be the game-changing event that turns the Square JND into a killing blow.