work for any car—not just a Daimler-made
vehicle. Last September, Daimler’s innovation group in Germany started piloting Car-
2Gether, which offers an app to match local
drivers with people looking for a ride. Riders
submit a request to a driver—who can be
driving any kind of car, not just a Daimler—
and both profiles are linked to their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. After the ride,
both driver and passenger rate each other.
“We want to make this a social network on
wheels,” says Michael Kuhn, project manager of Car2Gether, who doesn’t even know
if Daimler will—or can—commercialize the
service. “It’s all about access trumps ownership,” says Kuhn, sounding far more Silicon
Valley than Stuttgart, Germany.
The carmaker realizes that sharing systems are going to be created whether it joins
the party or not. “If you don’t build a value
cycle,” says economist Haque, “one will be
self-organized. And it will commoditize you.”
Whether it’s moms opting to buy baby clothes
from other moms through ThredUp rather
than visiting Baby Gap, or neighbors borrowing a drill through NeighborGoods instead of
going to Target, consumers—or, perhaps
The Cure
continued from page 111
this problem. You’re going to solve it.”
To encourage fresh thinking, Lassiter
and Manns devised “odd-couple arrange-
ments,” putting together doctors, nurses,
techs, and other managers. The teams
drilled into vendor contracts and challenged
their own habits. Take the kit used to test
newborns’ umbilical-cord blood, a $96.50
item. A simpler tool does the same job for
29¢. Is the more-expensive device better?
How much better does it have to be to be
worth the extra $96.21? ACMC had been
choosing the premium option, at a cost of
$322,000 a year. Now, the teams decided,
ACMC could not afford it.
Looking for new revenue, they identified
areas the system was especially good at—
like rehabilitation and diabetes care—and
came up with ways to treat more patients
more efficiently. Lassiter also pushed the
more appropriately, citizens—are being con-
nected in a way that cuts out the corporate
middleman. “We often think about this stuff
purely as secondary markets,” says Haque,
“but I think there’s a deeper truth here, which
is we’re learning we don’t have to obey these
industrial rules of producer versus consumer.
We can take the stuff we have and cycle it.”
The sharing economy is at one of those
interesting junctures where no one knows
how big it might get or how many industries
and companies it might affect. Best Buy and
Lowe’s, to cite two relatively unlikely candi-
dates, have started to contemplate how it
might impact retail. “I would say this notion
of sharing is something we’ve been talking
about in the last 12 months,” says Lowe’s VP
of new business development Jay Rebello.
“Social networking is impacting the defini-
tion of what a community is, and, in the past,
people wanted to accumulate more stuff.
More recently, we’re seeing people view that
differently.” And in sectors like banking,
where Wall Street’s behavior has led to
immense consumer distrust, disintermedia-
tion via sharing is becoming a reality. “We
benefited enormously from the banking cri-
sis,” says Giles Andres, CEO of Zopa, one of
the several peer-to-peer lending sites, like
Lending Club, that have emerged over the
creation of an electronic network that links
dozens of community clinics to the health
center, significantly boosting referrals to its
best services.
“We kno W you’re from Texas,” a union chief
said to Lassiter at their first meeting. “Texas
is not union friendly.” This was early 2005.
Lassiter had been offered the job, but he
hadn’t officially started. There was still time
to back out.
“Let me tell you my view, and I think we
could really work well together,” Lassiter
remembers responding. “At the end of the day,
I’m more accountable to the employees than to
the union. I’ve got to treat them well because
there are a lot of places they can go work. If our
focus is on the best care for patients—knowing
employees have to be treated well to get
past several years. “That was the catalyst for
going from early adopters to a more mass-
market crowd.”
“I think P-to-P banking is going to be
hugely disruptive to the banking industry,”
says Haque. He may be right. Still, it’s hard
to envision a big peer-to-peer market in
$1 million mortgages, for example. As he
himself says, “The finance guys are proficient
on maintaining their stranglehold on the sta-
tus quo, trying to convince us that without
them we’ll fall apart.” But Haque’s faith is
based on the principle that’s at the very heart
of the new sharing economy: the resilience of
distributed systems. He offers as parable the
way that villages and communities survived
the Irish banking crisis of the late ’70s, dur-
ing which bankers—yes, bankers—went on
strike. They warned the public that the econ-
omy would collapse without a banking sys-
tem. “What happened instead,” says Haque,
“was a P-to-P banking system emerged out of
nowhere. The local pubs became the de facto
banks, lending money to their customers. If
you think about it, who is a better judge of
character in Ireland than the bartender?”
He laughs. “The economy did not stop
growing—it didn’t even falter.”
sacks@fastcompany.com
there—we won’t have a lot of fundamental dis-
agreement.” He recalls that “some of them
looked at me like I’d just landed here in some
spaceship. Like it was complete BS.”
Lassiter had never had to deal with unions
in Dallas or Fort Worth because workers
there weren’t organized. Manns, with his
Michigan experience, was steeped in union
issues. In Oakland, the two men inherited a
history of hostility between management
and labor, represented by the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), and
collective-bargaining agreements so restric-
tive that nurses could not be transferred from
a department with a decreased workload to
one that was understaffed. That meant hiring
temps at significant cost.
Jim Hubbell was an emergency-room
nurse at Highland in the 1980s when AIDS
was on the upswing. Like many who choose
to work in an inner-city ER, he enjoyed what
he calls “cowboy medicine.” But “the place was
completely dysfunctional,” he says, largely
because it seemed impossible to fire anyone.
“I had to leave because of conditions—blood-
caked gurneys, soaked mattresses from a
variety of bodily liquids. The housekeeping
guys usually had a card game going.”
“It was hard to do something as simple
as mount a TV monitor on the wall of a
waiting room,” says UC Berkeley professor
