Beancounter 1: "Our new widgets business — we think it's amazing".
Beancounter 2: "We've ridden the learning curve, the product mix is optimized, the supply chain's streamlined, the market's tightly segmented."
Beancounter 3: "But we've got a burning question for you, Umair — will it scale?"
UH: "You know what doesn't scale? The point. Dudes, welcome to the 21st Century. It's so not about pushing more toxic junk at people."
Beancounters 1, 2, and 3: (enraged, attack UH with pitchforks).
That's what happened to me not so long ago in one of the anonymous boardrooms of the universe. And it's happened quite a few times over the last few months. So in the interest of my own personal safety, let me explain the scale every business should strive for today.
Here's what the economic historians of the 23rd Century are going to say about the 20th.
"They built giant, globe-spanning organizations, that employed tens of thousands of people working around the clock, to produce... sugar water, fast food, disposable razors, and gas guzzlers. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the paradigm of 20th Century capitalism was its astonishing lack of ambition. Rarely in history has such a void, a poverty of imagination been so deeply woven into the fabric of humankind's economic systems."
The old scale was about stuff. Do your distribution channels, your factories, your giant evil marketing campaigns, your cashflows scale? Sadly, today, that's the first question most CEOs, investors, and assorted execs ask. But it's the wrong question.
Everything scaled in the 20th Century except what mattered most. What never scaled was ambition. That's what 21st Century scale is about — and it's the basis for both next-generation advantage and a more authentic prosperity.
In the 21st century, "stuff" is a commodity. The stuff of scale — low-cost labour, materials, processes, even service — can be bought from the lowest bidder with a mouse click. Foxconn, Gokaldas, and Pou Chen are, respectively, Apple's, the Gap's, and Nike's biggest (or close enough to it) suppliers — and increasingly, anyone with a few million can buy yesterday's scale from them for peanuts. Try leasing a pop-up store in your local mall or high street, to sell it — again, for peanuts.
The real question for today's builders is: what are you going to do with that raw stuff? Are you going to use it to pump out more sugar water — or are you going to do something radically constructive instead? Are you going to do something merely innovative — or something world-changingly awesome?
If it's the former, wave bye bye: an organization that has a bigger ambition will do radically more with the same resources — yielding an almost inexorable, unstoppable advantage. It's what Google did to big media, Apple did to big music, and Wal-Mart's doing to...itself.
From whence, then, ambitionlessness? By design. 20th Century organizations were built to have strategic intent. The point of a strategic intent is merely to best rivals. That's the opposite of an ambition: it's just combat. Yesterday's organizations were missing the burning desire to improve on yesterday in their very DNA. That's what reduced them to passionless machines — and it's what ultimately made our lives smaller, our economies less vibrant, and our societies poorer.
A real ambition, in contrast is a living expression of how an organizaton answers the four-word challenge of 21st Century economics. Twenty-first Century businesses have ambition — at giganto-mega-universe-sized scale instead. "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible:" now there's an ambition at scale.
Twenty-first Century scale is about ambition, not stuff. So here's a killer question to kick off 2010: Does your ambition scale?
An ambition that scales is one that takes an organization already creating thick value, and expands it to affirmatively answer the three questions below:
- Is it globe-spanning?
- Is it world-changing?
- Is it life-altering?
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