“Once you start from the idea that the unit of competitive advantage is not necessarily the corporation, as conventionally defined … it’s like in biology, going from thinking of competition among animals to thinking of competition among genes. The generation of strategic thinking we’re now entering challenges the earlier ontological assumptions. It says that the only irreducible unit in this picture is the person—the customer, worker, or executive. It says that people engage in transactions, broadly defined, that may be competitive, or may be cooperative, but what emerges is a network. As technology drives down the costs of transactions, breaking the constraints of distance or of institutions, those networks become more fluid.”