Once a year HBR publishes a set of "breakthrough ideas" for business. The February 2008 edition
has this year's collection. Some of them are the usual psychobabble,
technophilia and corporatist leader/strategic management nonsense that
pervades most of the business journal echo-chamber, but there are seven
interesting ideas in the list (the italicized prognoses are my own):
- The Coming Peer-to-Peer Economy: This gets top ranking in the HBR list, though the writers clearly don't know what it is all about. As Umair Haque explains so well, it's really about
walking away from the corporatist economy of artificial scarcity,
oligopoly and imaginative poverty and creating a new economy with no
zero-value-added intermediaries. It's about getting rid of the massive
distortions in the marketplace that allow wealth to accrue to those who
do nothing to earn it. If HBR really understood this, and how much it
threatens the economic orthodoxy of which they're a part, it wouldn't
have been on the list. Prognosis: It will come, later rather than sooner, but big business won't like it.
- Projects, not Careers:
This is the idea that in the future we will spend our work life working
on a series of projects, with different partners, each doing what we do
best, rather than working in one company or one series of positions.
It's an interesting idea, and one that technology makes more possible,
but it won't work for two very human reasons. First, the best work is
collaborative, and collaboration requires trust and knowledge of one's
collaborators. And secondly, because we get meaning and satisfaction
not only from what we do but from who we do it with. Many people are
doing work they don't particularly like because they love who they're
working with. We're not all meant to be taxi drivers. Prognosis: We'll try it, but it just won't work.
- The Brain-Friendly Workplace:
We are meant to be constantly on the move, standing, walking, running,
fit. I've been working standing up for the last two years and it's
improved my productivity and stamina. HBR goes a step further, saying
that treadmills in the workplace and constant movement would make us
all more productive. Prognosis: Way too unorthodox to become mainstream business behaviour.
- Open Space Events for Problem Solving:
The HBR writers use the term BarCamp, but what they're describing is
essential Open Space: When you have a problem you can't solve, engage
your customers, employees and others in a self-managed workshop to
surface and explore ideas and decide on appropriate actions. The Wisdom
of Crowds. Prognosis: Only the smartest businesses will dare use it.
- Virtual Worlds for Simulation and Scenario Planning:
Virtual worlds ("metaverses") that have thousands of participants are
complex systems, just like the real world. But it is much less
expensive to bring people together and test out ideas and scenarios in
virtual worlds than in the real world. Prognosis: The technology isn't there yet, but it will come.
- Virtual Worlds for Marketing and Sales:
If you can do anything, including watching TV, reading and listening to
radio in a virtual world, to the point many people can and will spend
their whole lives in such worlds (looking beautiful, with huge
mansions, fast cars, and friends and lovers to enjoy them with), will
business need to reorient itself to customers that will only buy
'inworld'? Or will the peer-to-peer economy be such that everything
inworld will be free? Prognosis: They once thought there was money to be made with blogs and other social software. When will they learn?
- Knowing When Not to Use Experts: Surowiecki's
The Wisdom of Crowds explained that most of the things executives and
experts do they cannot possibly do as well as a reasonably informed
diverse crowd of people who care about the issue at hand. In his
contribution to the list,Mike Mauboussin explains (see graphic above) how rarely experts and executives should be the key decision-makers. Prognosis:
Executives still think they know everything so this isn't going to
happen; besides, given the obscene amounts many executives and experts
earn, they don't dare admit they don't have all the answers.
Category: Business Innovation
PS: Today is the 5th anniversary of How to Save the World.
I
love, and read, all your comments and e-mails, but I can't promise to respond to
them. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
