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After spending countless hours over the last week thinking about, researching, designing, paper prototyping, and generally becoming an online proposal, a thought occurred to me, "Is the Independent Consultant (i.e. my audience) ready to walk away from the Paper Proposal?"  It’s not an easy question.

On the one hand, there’s no shortage of griping about the current proposal process, and rightfully so.  It’s a time sink, no matter how you look at it.  No one I know looks forward to creating or adapting pages after pages of Cover Sheets, Self Promotional Marketing Pieces, Tables of Contents, Executive Summaries, Project Scope Statements, Approach Summaries, Deliverable Overviews, Pricing, Discounting, and the kicker, Terms and Conditions associated with the proposal.  You might not have to add each of these to every proposal, or you might be lucky enough to leverage boilerplate language for a bunch of the pieces, but any paper pushing is too much paper pushing for most.  Next in line you get to deal with the inevitable discomfort associated with putting yourself and your hard earned prospect at the mercy of a couple of bound pages.   It would be one thing if the waiting was short, but everyone knows yes’s never come fast enough.  How long do you have to wait before you burst through your Client’s door demanding a response?  Polite email and phone follow-ups can only sustain you for so long.

On the other hand, the upside of so much time sunk into the development of your paper proposal is that it might be quite good.  If nothing else, every word that jumps off the page reflects you, your business, and your blood, sweat and earnest brain strain.  Some of you might even say the paper proposal is a differentiator for your practice.  You’ve read Allan Weiss’s "How to Write a Proposal That’s Accepted Every Time" 15 times, and can’t wait for the Client to utter the magic words "Shoot me over a Proposal".  Even if you haven’t had the chance to get your own Ph.D. in proposal writing, others amongst you might rightly appreciate the opportunity a paper proposal presents to express yourself in another medium to your Client.  Some things are easier said in a logo, a page layout, or a well-crafted paragraph.

My new perspective is one of fascination.  I don’t know if we can put any more thought into ways to make the proposal process better by bringing it online.  Even Dr. Weiss would be proud of our efforts to focus on the collaboration and communication between the consultant and the client above all else, taking advantage of the online world to promote a highly interactive process.  Having said that, I’m sure once we release it you’ll give us plenty of good recommendations for improvements, and I look forward to the learning.  But what I’m really anxious to find out is how many amongst you will be able to once and for all leave the paper behind.  Mavenlink is going to let you choose whether or not you want to attach that paper beauty, and I can’t wait to see what you’ll decide.

We’ve just updated our blog to have a new style - we hope you like it! As we’ve mentioned to many of you in our community, we’ll be rolling out many new, exciting features over the next couple months. We thought it would be a good idea to update our blog to use better software and make it more attractive for our upcoming announcements.

In addition to rolling out the new blog, we have also updated our RSS feed to use FeedBurner. Please update your RSS reader accordingly by subscribing on the right. The old feed address will be pointed to the wrong place!

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As we wrote in our first installment of this series, important trends in productivity, disruption, and individual responsibility are re-shaping the way that people work. We are witnessing the emergence of the Network Economy, distinguished by decentralization and openness. These trends are having an impact on the structure and behavior of organizations and their internal systems. In addition, their impact is being felt at the individual level, particularly in how people think about, plan, and conduct their careers.

Network Opportunities

In the Network Economy, de-centralization and openness lead to more widespread distribution of, and access to, knowledge and resources. Individuals have ready access to a vast array of research, production, and distribution tools; agile teams can form within or across organizational boundaries to accomplish specific tasks; organizations can access a wider range of talent and a larger, more varied store of knowledge. And as networks grow, they become more valuable, since each node can provide additional resources to all others. Cultural observers and theorists recognize the enormous collaborative and transformative potential of the network; as Kevin Kelly notes, “…we are just beginning to scratch the surface on how people come together to collaborate and get work done.”

Network Challenges

However, the network also presents challenges to traditional business models. As we pointed out previously, and as others are actively working to put into practice, decentralization and openness tend to weaken traditional command and control hierarchies and organizational boundaries (silos), and ultimately lead to diminished value of intellectual property as a business differentiator.