My favorite topic and avocation is strategic innovation - how to make money from technology. These columns will focus on actionable issues, and we'll leave the deep theory to the references.
Let's get started. Consider that there is a growing body of evidence that most of what we have been taught about business is outdated and just plain wrong in today's global, Information Age economy [1].
Some pay a very high price for that education, while others prosper. Many experts believe that the human race now faces more change than at any time in all of recorded history. The consequences are all around us, and the focal point of this stress is on business, economic policy, and jobs.
There are many implications, but one of interest will be the potential impact on your career and the ability of your employer to prosper, or even survive. I think it is clear that the things that worked in the past won't work in the future. Why? Because they are not even working now.
That's hard for successful firms to accept. Size used to be a predictor of future success, but no longer. Only four of America's 25 largest firms in 1960 were still on that list in 1998. Most had emerged with other companies, but two had gone totally out of business [2].
Extrapolating from past successes to predict the future doesn't work if the future is different. The New World is quantum, not linear. It has become almost a joke that winning the Baldridge Award or getting into a book like In Search of Excellence brings down a curse of the gods that causes total destruction. Thus, it was with DEC, Wang, and many others.
Fortunately, most of the news is good. The future can be hopeful, given the right choices, for the flip side of the above story is also true. Eight of America's biggest firms in 1998 either did not exist or were very small in 1960. Three of those that did not exist in 1960 were among the world's ten biggest in 1998 [3].
Better yet, there are useful guidelines - not prescriptions, but guidelines-that can help you steer your career, and perhaps your firm, toward the hopeful outcomes. Such learning starts with unlearning, and my first message is this: "There is no one best way."
Few realize it consciously, but a little-known man who died almost a century ago rigidly shaped today's business thinking and processes. Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" held that all jobs could be reduced to routine and then adjusted by standard processes to improve efficiency [4].
Taylor's methods became pervasive as technology al1owed better measures and increased spans of control. They eventual1y became almost a religion. The efficiency experts of the 1920s evolved into today's reengineering and TQM gurus and bureaucracies.
Advocates bless "the system" because it improved productivity. Almost certainly, that is why America won World War II. Critics Curse it because notions like talent, meaning, empowerment, or a sense of identity never appear in Taylor's Work. Almost certainly, that is why so many firms have lost their purpose and are now desperately trying to shrink their way to leadership.
I don't think that standard, mindless process is a hopeful future for two reasons. First, "In today's global Information Age economy, anything that is standard and routine quickly fal1s to third-world wages and razor-thin margins" [5].
Continuing at low wages and margins is the best outcome. The worst case for firms that continue with the old methods is death. Innovation and breakthrough thinking soon make static business models and products irrelevant. Just as the PC kil1ed DEC and Wang, the record "labels" and their cartel, the Recording Industry Association of America, are at risk because of the Internet and MP3. The new industrial order is becoming, as Gary Hamel says, "Incumbents versus insurgents." Firms that are caught in the middle and are unable to change risk becoming the living dead. Their imbedded processes and best methods are killing them, and they don't even know it. I expect that Dilbert works for one of these companies.
You can contact John through The Trudel Group, 33470 Chinook PL, Scappoose, OR 97056; +1 503 638 8644; fax: +1 503 543 6361; email: jtrudel@gstis.net; www.trudelgroup.com.
References
[1] G.Ungson and J.Trudel, Engines of Prosperity, London: Imperial College Press, 1998. Part I (Chapters 1-4).
[2] L.C.Thurow, Building Wealth, New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Chapter 3.
[3] Thurow, op.cit.
[4] R.Kanigel, The One Best Way, New York: Viking, 1997.
[5] Ungson and Trudel, op.cit.