Last week Iranian’s went to the polls to vote for their next President. Going into the polls the consensus thinking was that the economy was the prime voting issue and on that issue the incumbent Ahmadinejad was facing a difficult referendum on his economic leadership. When the results of the election were announced hours after Iranians went to the polls it had appeared that Ahmadinejad was the winner by a 2 to 1 margin. That’s when acting small to solve big started to take effect.In the hours after these incongruous results were announced, Iranian moderates started to mass and self-organize via social networks. The Iranian mullahs being aware of the power of the Internet went to work banning sites like CNN and Facebook thereby, in their minds, quelling the uprising’s tools for self-organizing. But like any good entrepreneur these organizers routed around the barrier and began to push information to their peers and to the world through a fire hose of 140 characters tweets.

There are multiple levels to this story no doubt this will renew the new media specialists talk of the power of Twitter and in fact already the Twitter revolution is being recast from the witness to the crash in the Hudson to the tool of the Iranian Revolution (I’ll link to stories about this below). However, I’m not really interested in Twitter per se, I’m much more interested in this thought of amassing small wins to achieve something massive. Each win, in this case a discrete Tweet or video smuggled out by YouTube, is a stone cast at the citadel of tradition and orthodoxy. While alone these stones will not break the walls, millions upon millions of stones eventually will break down an unresponsive Iranian theocracy. Similarly in business we cannot just focus on building massive boulder launchers, but rather on the inspiring and coordinating millions of slingshots to fire on our competitors. That transition will require new ways of leading, new ways of allocating resources and new metrics for success, but it is the way forward and the only way to be competitive. In a hyper-connected and enormously competitive world diverse improvement is the only way to maintain competitive edge. And if you are the citadel, recognize that your competitors will break you down eventually if you do not respond in kind; not with boulders that take out huge swaths, but with as many slingshots as you can amass.

The world is changing and speed and distributed scale are of the essence.