Where Information Thrives

This is the first in a series on Design Thinking. This audio presentation is an open interview with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto conducted at NBBJ in Seattle, Washington.

Roger Martin is at the forefront of Design Thinking:

“The most successful businesses in the years to come will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay that I call design thinking.”

Intro:

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Discussion:

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QA:

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I want you to enjoy Rogers’ own words without any of mine in this part of the series, so I will comment in the next part. Yes, there will be a test!

Enjoy!

I recently enjoyed an article by Zern Liew titled, “The Gravy Train Trap”.  In his article Zern makes the statement “Conventional businesses are designed from the ground up to run gravy trains”.

He goes on to say, “Once a train is up and running, all new thinking stops. The default behavior is keep things running as smoothly and consistently as possible. Occasional incremental improvements aside, changes are kept to a minimum. “All aboard…” etc.

Of course, as he so correctly identified, the problem with this way of thinking is that things change.

The world however continues to change. But in it’s avoidance of change, a gravy train business is also blinkered to all change. This is exacerbated by many other factors – rear-view-mirror steering (over reliance on numbers from what has gone before), and the demands of shareholders for consistent returns.

As a gravy train gains momentum, it also gains carriages. More businesses hop on board the same model. All eager to cash in. Fast.

When you run a gravy train for long enough in a vacuum, without any awareness of the external world, a crash is inevitable. And the larger, the longer running a train, the messier the crash.

Does this sound familiar? Do you know some companies like this? Do you own one of these businesses?

Witness the recent messy troubles of the financial crisis. Companies derail, livelihoods are tossed and splattered like ripe plums. Entire economies clearly can and do collapse when enough gravy trains derail in a short period of time.

We live in a time when even the biggest and most “secure” gravy trains – the financial industry – can go splat. Everyone is affected – like dropping cow pats into a woodchipper.

The gravy train mentality is a form of denial. It is most definitely short-sighted thinking. So many factors make it attractive of course, especially give how well it hooks into our most base psyche and desires: safety, comfort, predictability, greed, laziness.

Zern Liew ended his article with this thought:

As many others are saying, the time for reinvention has come. Although it seems that most so-called leaders are still advocating fixes using the same system that cause the problem to start with. Insanity at work.

At the end of the day, I hope who dares wins.

I agree with this, of course, but I think the reinvention that will turn gravy train companies around will be a deep understanding of their construct defining their business and their customers.

At the end of the day, “The purpose of  a business is to create a customer” (Peter Drucker). As a both a consumer and business strategist,  I believe most companies can completely reinvent themselves by a renewed focus on clients. To think through the relationships between both parties and how it should be conducted.

This is the fist in a series of articles I will post on the relationship between B2C.

At BPM2 we really like working with Small Businesses. We provide strategic Information Management Services to help them  grow and innovate using strategies and technologies not available to small organization just a few years ago.

While it is true that working with larger companies usually means larger budgets and more resources, working with smaller entities usually involves less resistance to change. Personally, I find working with entrepreneurs to be exhilarating and filled with great satisfaction.

The key to the recovery of the US economy can be found in the entrepreneurial spirit which is alive and well in small businesses throughout our great country.

Small business firms:

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms
• Employ half of all private sector employees
• Pay 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll
• Have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade
• Create more than 50 percent of non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP)
• Supplied more than 23 percent of the total value of federal prime contracts in FY 2004
• Produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms. These patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited
• Are employers of 41 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers)
• Are 53 percent home-based and 3 percent franchises
• Made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 26 percent of the known export value in FY 2002