Arik Johnson on the organizations of the future

November 19, 2009 · Filed Under Management, Management ideas, Organizations, business models, leadership · Comments 

The most important implications of any strategic trend is usually not that your organization must do something drastic, it is that your organization is obsolete and can’t respond effectively at all.

Case in point: newspapers and the Internet. It’s not so much that newspapers could have done something to maintain their business model of classified advertising, it’s that they need a brand new business model and structure to survive. If that is the major implication of the trends we track as strategic analysts, then we almost must develop skills to help organizations change quickly and painlessly.

On that note, check out this talk from Aurora WDC’s Arik Johnson on the future of organizations, recorded at last month’s Intelligence Collaborative meeting in Washington.

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Douglas Rushkoff on the future of value creation- why the web broke everything (but it’s a good thing)

April 18, 2009 · Filed Under Economic Development, Economics, Entrepreneurialism, Futurism, Geopolitics, Globalization, Management, Management ideas, Marketing, Media, Organizations, Society, Sustainability, The Future, business models, forecasts, government, human resources, internet, leadership, markets, social media · Comments 

I am glad to see Douglas Ruskoff weigh in on our current situation. He’s a fantastic thinker, humanistic and often contrarian, the author of many books including the recent Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, which is about the foolishness of senseless innovation. If I read Rushkoff correctly, he sees economics as a distinctly human, connected enterprise, and the absolute opposite of where our commercial leadership has taken us.

He presents some major, major ideas:

  • The recent goal of business has been to make every company a holding company, one whose purpose is the acquisition and/or management of debt as opposed to a group of competent people who do things for other people
  • People at all levels have become more interested in the perceived value of assets (homes, shares of companies, CDOs) than the actual value that they might ever produce
  • Most of these ideas are supporting people who may not even be in the system – long-gone investors, maybe even dead guys
  • The monetary system is not about encouraging trade, but often preventing trade
  • The American Revolution came about because England forbid people from providing each other with services
  • LOCAL CURRENCIES used to be very popular and could be again
  • We were probably better off economically in the Late Middle Ages (the Black Death notwithstanding)

We need to revisit our total concept of value creation. It’s great that Rushkoff is lending a hand.

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The high-resolution society: the future is in small companies

December 31, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Management, Organizations, business models, forecasts · Comments 

Stop everything you are doing, click here, and read this fantastically thought-out article from Paul Graham on why the future of economies will no longer depend on giant, hulking organizations, but small, nimble startups – and why this is socially disruptive.

Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they’re no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn’t want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that’s rapidly growing into one. If they’re really ambitious, they want to start it.

This doesn’t mean big companies will disappear. To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century.

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