• Blog
  • About
  • Archives

elemental links

brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company

April 3, 2012 By brenda michelson

“In a big company, you never feel you’re fast enough.” Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of GE, is talking to me by phone from the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California, where she’s visiting entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She gets a charge out of the Valley, but her trips also remind her how perilous the business climate is right now. “Business-model innovation is constant in this economy,” she says. “You start with a vision of a platform. For a while, you think there’s a line of sight, and then it’s gone. There’s suddenly a new angle.”

Within GE, she says, “our traditional teams are too slow. We’re not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change.”

…

“The business community focuses on managing uncertainty,” says Dev Patnaik, cofounder and CEO of strategy firm Jump Associates, which has advised GE, Target, and PepsiCo, among others. “That’s actually a bit of a canard.” The true challenge lies elsewhere, he explains: “In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That’s something our current systems can’t handle.

“There’s a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve,” Patnaik continues. “Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They’re absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems–when you don’t know what you don’t know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

“Uncertainty is when you’ve defined the variable but don’t know its value. Like when you roll a die and you don’t know if it will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. But ambiguity is when you’re not even sure what the variables are. You don’t know how many dice are even being rolled or how many sides they have or which dice actually count for anything.” Businesses that focus on uncertainty, says Patnaik, “actually delude themselves into thinking that they have a handle on things. Ah, ambiguity; it can be such a bitch.”

…

“Technology forces disruption, and not all of the change will be good. Optimists look to all the excitement. Pessimists look to all that gets lost. They’re both right. How you react depends on what you have to gain versus what you have to lose.”

Yet while pessimists may be emotionally calmed by their fretting, it will not aid them practically. The pragmatic course is not to hide from the change, but to approach it head-on. Thurston offers this vision: “Imagine a future where people are resistant to stasis, where they’re used to speed. A world that slows down if there are fewer options–that’s old thinking and frustrating. Stimulus becomes the new normal.”

via This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company.

Filed Under: change, economy, innovation, leadership, talent management

Cloud Watch now underway… Lawyers, Data and Money

November 13, 2009 By brenda michelson

This week, I’ve started up the Cloud Watch section of Elemental Cloud Computing.  Cloud Watch items are snippets from cloud computing industry news, business and technical publications, and thought leaders.  These snippets may be as short as a 140-character tweet, or as long as a few paragraphs.  Cloud Watch items will be posted throughout the course of the day, and may be expanded as more voices and sources cover a hot topic.  Cloud Watch items may include a short Elemental Cloud Computing perspective.

The opening cloud watch items are a mix of business and economics, and data, contracts and legal issues:

  • Bessemer’s 8th of Cloud Computing and SaaS: Leverage and monetize the data asset
  • Workload Metrics: Business Transactions per Kilowatt?
  • Microsoft Exec: Customers Embracing "Cloud Computing" <– But whose?
  • GigaOm: 10 Open Source Resources for Cloud Computing
  • Lawyers, Clouds and Warrants
  • McKinsey to CIOs in ‘New Normal’: Rethink Procurement…
  • Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Cloud Computing is Relevant for (mostly) everyone
  • Joyent is First in China: Launches Commercial Cloud Computing Platform

From Elemental Cloud Computing, there several ways to follow the cloud watch.  The Current Cloud Watch section on the homepage, the Cloud Watch tab of the Recent Posts navigation element in the sidebar, the Cloud Watch tab of the site navigation, via the Cloud Watch or Full Site feeds and email, and on Twitter. 

Filed Under: business, cloud computing, economy, open source, sustainability

What are your ‘Rings of Defense’?

July 8, 2009 By brenda michelson

I’d like to attribute this recent ‘catching up on my reading’ to long sunny summer days in my Adirondack chair, but no such luck.  On the few rainless days, Zephyr has commandeered my chair.  Despite these obstacles, I’ve still managed to find time to read, and share some interesting articles.  Today, an article in June’s Fast Company caught my attention.  The article is entitled “Through the Fire” and shares strategies Cisco, Corning, IBM, Intel and Schwab are using to survive in the current economic crisis, and emerge even stronger as the economy rebounds.

Of the profiled companies and strategies, Corning’s Rings of Defense clicked with me.  I can see the connection to business architecture, the business of IT, and business IT alignment.  [As readers know, I prefer “business-IT integration”, but I’ll go with the crowd this once.]

Corning’s Rings of Defense (emphasis is mine)

“If anyone should be able to build a shatterproof fortress, it’s Corning. But during the telecom crash earlier this decade, the specialty glassmaker for everything from medical devices to consumer electronics to cars saw revenue nosedive from $7 billion to $3 billion in 18 months; Corning almost burned the village trying to save it. “We vowed never to let that happen again,” says president and COO Peter Volanakis. Corning’s executive team, the same senior managers as during its epic fall, instituted an early-detection system to identify signs of trouble as well as four “operational rings of defense” to help it manage through a crisis in a measured, strategic way.

The first step? A good offense. Corning created its own market-research system, relying not just on its customers but also on its customers’ customers, even checking stores to measure demand for the products it helps to create, such as LCD TVs. Corning also stockpiled cash, which enabled it to absorb a $400 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2008 without selling off part of its business, as it had to in 2002 to make a debt payment. And it helped that the company modeled worst-case scenarios and a response to each.

As trouble started brewing last year, Corning implemented its first ring of defense: discretionary spending cuts, reduced production, and hiring limits. As things got rapidly worse through the fall, management quickly implemented the second and third rings: shorter work weeks in Europe and Asia, limiting its use of contractors and temps, and, finally, layoffs. But as hard as it was to trim the staff by 13%, that was a far cry from the telecom crash, when it shed 21,000 of its 43,000 workers. This crisis feels more under control, the actions “more thoughtful,” Volanakis says.

Most important, Corning has avoided the last ring, which would include reducing its $630 million annual R&D spending. Its lifeblood is new products, such as those it’s aggressively pushing this year — scratch-free touch-screen glass for cell phones and laptops, smaller next-generation data centers, and a laser-light engine that turns a laptop into a projector. “We’re an R&D-based company,” Volanakis says. “R&D is the absolute last thing we’d cut.””

So, what stood out to me?  First, the use of scenario planning.  A long standing practice to envision the future and craft responses, which unfortunately many companies neglect to do when things are going well.  Clouded by ‘bubble fever’, perhaps.  From a recent WSJ Article:

“Use of scenario planning rose following the 2001 attacks, to about 70% of executives surveyed by consultants Bain & Co. in 2002, up from 30% in 1999. Since then, Bain’s surveys have found fewer executives using the tool, though the consulting firm expects heightened interest this year, because of the recession.

“It’s sort of like flood insurance,” says Michael Raynor, a corporate-strategy expert at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Everybody runs out and buys flood insurance the year after the flood.””

The second thing, was the “rings of defense” concept.  The diligent and deliberate articulation of responses, in this case cuts, that provide short-term relief, while protecting the future, in Corning’s case, R&D.  Too often, in bad times, unilateral cuts are made, disregarding long-term implications.

So, my questions for you to consider:

1. Does your organization do scenario planning?  Is this purely a business activity?  Or does IT participate?  Is the practice extended to the business of IT?

2. Has your organization articulated rings of defense?  Is there general knowledge of what business activity should be in the center, protected by the last ring?

3. Has your IT organization articulated its rings of defense?  Do the IT rings, the activities and capabilities being protected, align with the business rings?  Or, do the IT rings subvert the business rings?

Filed Under: business, business architecture, business-technology, economy Tagged With: archive_0

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

(BIO)

  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Recent Posts

  • Experts Sketch
  • PEW Research: Tech Saturation, Well-Being and (my) Remedies
  • technology knowledge premise
  • The Curse of Knowledge
  • better problems and technology knowledge transfer

Recent Tweets

  • Finding the lead refills and simultaneously misplacing the mechanical pencil appear strongly correlated. Yesterday at 4:30 pm
  • If it’s taking 20+ years to define the thing, maybe it’s not actually a thing... February 25, 2021 5:29 pm
  • Adventure Tourism for your brains. (credit to the esteemed @ruthmalan) https://t.co/7Z9478WagA February 24, 2021 3:49 pm
© 2004-2021 Elemental Links, Inc.