Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

trust your instincts

< £ Salon Bloggers & >

	March 9, 2003

TODAY'S WORDS OF WISDOM "The dumbing down of America is an overt strategy for subverting democracy. You create a society where people look to the corporate media to tell them what things mean because they're incapable, or believe they're incapable, of thinking things through for themselves. If you oppress an educated and informed citizenry you get revolution. But if you oppress an uneducated, insecure and uninformed citizenry you get Eminem. And if you're smart, you can even make a profit from him." - Caller to a CBC Radio program on how the media influence culture "If they can put a man on the Moon, why can't they put them all there?" - T-shirt seen in the mall yesterday 2:01:10 PM  trackback []  comment []

BUILDING AN ADAPTIVE ENTERPRISE I subscribe to Cap Gemini's Perspectives on Business Innovation magazine. The theme for the latest edition is The Adaptive Imperative, the need for enterprises to be agile and alert to environmental changes, almost like living creatures. While I think the analogy is a bit forced, the model presented by the magazine's editors is an intriguing one. It prescribes six ways to make your organization more adaptive: Sense & Respond, Learn & Adapt: Install sensors and feedback capabilities in your business processes and your markets; Use feedback loops in your products; Develop institutional learning mechanisms Self-Organize: Establish rules for employees that enable flexible processes, and manage the rules, not the employees; Encourage boundary-less communities of interest to form spontaneously and to organize themselves, and use their collective intelligence Recombine: Improve the cross-connections between ideas, processes and people from across the organization; Increase diversity; Encourage sabbaticals, secondments and exchanges Seed, Select & Amplify: Use simulations and experiments to try out and test more solutions; Use scenarios Destabilize: Develop culling processes and exit strategies for everything; Make everything upgradable and customizable by the customer; Reward high-quality failures Monetize & Liberate Physical Assets: Free your people from fixed offices and your product from fixed plants and production processes; Miniaturize, Mobilize and Transplant; Shrink your inventories to near-zero; Use nano-technologies The mantra for the adaptive enterprise is Experiment, Don't Plan . I've been reading about, and trying to implement, business strategies and ideas for almost thirty years. I didn't think there was anything new and useful to learn. But thinking about these principles, and how they can apply in good times and bad, perhaps there still is. A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION My comprehensive paper on this topic can be found here. 12:50:08 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 19/02/2004; 2:41:10 PM.