Blockchain Man and Woman will have to wait
Companies are not ready for them
By Andrew Hill
Walmart is using it to track Chinese pork. AP Moller-Maersk is applying it to marine insurance. Banks hope it will simplify cross-border trade finance. BP is experimenting with it to streamline oil and gas trading.
As the blockchain expands beyond its original use as a platform for digital currencies such as bitcoin, techno-evangelists are also bigging up its potential to do more than point to the provenance of a pork chop.
“Business leaders have another opportunity to rethink how they organise value creation,” Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott wrote in last year. Enthusiasts say the blockchain — a distributed digital ledger — could even bring down traditional management and the organisations that have supported it.
Entrepreneur Nick Tomaino, in one recent blog post, forecast “the slow death of the firm”. As the technology cuts transaction costs, he writes, it will erode the rationale of the company, laid out by Ronald Coase in 1937, as a place that can co-ordinate many activities more cheaply than if they were done outside the organisation.
Another post, on the Ribbonfarm blog, predicts the replacement of the conformist, corporate drones critiqued by William Whyte in his 1956…
