A few thoughts, numbered for clarity:
1. Every management guru worth their name, every consulting firm has tried to tell us, in very urgent tones, that the world is changing very fast. And they have been saying this since the Sixties. But at no point in time in the past was it as true as it is today. Technology is changing very, very fast, faster than we predicted. The most startling thing, however, is the convergence of multiple technologies aided by exponential energy, compute availability and sheer human progress. It all points to one thing: This is the Promised Time, and what we were told earlier were more like False Dawns, especially as compared to where we are headed to, in the future. As the song goes, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet. (I have created hashtags of technologies that I think are going to converge and redefine the coming 30 years)
2. Our organizations are still stuck in management concepts and organizational designs of the last century, or variations thereof. There is a generational lag, and I am not referring to demographics. That’s actually a less important issue at this time.
3. All the talks of Resistance to Change etc. are turning true today, more than ever. Many of us see and know the change, but don’t (can’t?) do much about it. Example: we know our office tech lags at least two generations behind say, social media websites or other apps that we access regularly. You could say, the gap between your office laptop and your personal mobile phone is measurable in generations. But our organizations (we) are unwilling or unable to change beyond the cosmetic.
4. Those willing to adapt technological change are going to get disproportionately better than legacy firms. In any sector you can think about. Again, you have heard these statements before, but the difference is, at no time were they truer and more relevant than they are today.
5. Ergo, business model redesign and the resultant org redesign are going to provide long-term, consistent and more importantly, disproportionate advantage to organizations that decide to adapt. That advantage will be difficult to overcome for a decade or so. The difference between the first movers and the laggards will be even more extreme than it is right now.
There is simply no better time to rethink business models and rethink organizational design than today.
#organizationaldesign#strategy#consulting#industry3point0#nanotechnology#artificialintelligence#biotech#compute#robotics#materialsscience