Action: "List results for which you are responsible. What specialists are you dependent on to get these results? How can you improve coordination among these specialists?" Dr. Peter F. Drucker
In a recent interview Steve Jobs called Apple a software company. Who am I to argue with the 'man'? But I just don't see it that way. To me, Apple is the System Integrator par excellence. Taking known technology and knowhow and integrating them all into something special and new, with style. Maybe that's because one of my majors was System Design Engineering. I just see the world that way.
Peer to Peer networks are ubiquitous now, whether in our personal lives or in business or development. Success is determined by our ability to effectively communicate with each other at multiple levels.
Car manufacturers no longer 'manufacture', they assemble multiple level systems from a myriad of strategic partners and vendors.
We have recently seen the negative affect in the financial sector. Creating financial products based on faulty risk assumptions, as those risk levels changed is just another example of 'specialists' not coordinating at the appropriate time.
One particularly interesting application of this day's Action call is to look at your organization. Are you still 'subject' or product focused? Or are you making the necessary shift to be 'end use' or 'market' focused? Knowledge is increasingly being used across disciplines and subject areas, and our high performing organizations need to reflect that.
Example: What is an organization anyway? In very early work for a large 'innovations' company, one of my teams had the privilege of looking at approximately 150 'end use' facing production environments or value chains (in old lingo). We borrowed the term 'Ecosystem' from Biology and did extensive work on defining not only the players (at multiple levels) in those business ecosystems, how cash flowed, but where value (wealth) was being generated, and where it might migrate to over time, as markets matured. The strategic implications on positioning for maximum value generation in multiple end-markets were, of course, astounding and wide ranging. The key point here is that we are not only talking system integration of design, but also of organization. This kind of thinking then allows the manager of businesses to begin deliberate acquisition, divestiture, and partnering with the right peers in order to gain maximum value for shareholders. The organization of company resources into each 'Ecosystem' became fluid, and was the harbinger of further disaggregation of 'organization', as we knew it, in the future. Ecosystem alignment against end user markets became the driver of organizational structure, rather than subject matter expertise as in the 'old' corporation.
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