Themes
This is a list of themes that I'm planning for Upcoming Talks.
Theme List
- It's not just products that get commoditised but processes and all other forms of activities.
- How an activity's characteristics change from innovation to commodity, no matter what it is.
- Why management is complex and why there are no magic bullet solutions.
- Why outsourcing often fails.
- Why good management often leads to the death of a company.
- How companies evolve between various stages from disorganisation to getting it together and finally "we need more innovation".
- The inefficiency of organisational structure where similar types of activities are grouped together (such as marketing and IT) rather than the stages of an activity's lifecycle (transitional, commodity, first mover)
- Why you need to constantly adapt to changes in the market place in order to just stand still and survive today (the business equivalent of the Red Queen Hypothesis)
- The difference between commodification and commoditisation.
- Why you need to constantly innovate in order to survive tomorrow (creative destruction)
- Why commoditisation is both friend and foe.
- Why change is the norm.
- Why you need to constantly balance creative destruction and adaptation in an organisation and how this leads to a paradox of order and disorder. The innovation paradox.
- Why Google's 20% rule was an efficient way of balancing this paradox and a continual source of competitive advantage.
- Why marketing and branding for a vendor constantly creates a disadvantage for their consumers.
- The shift of IT from a product to a service based economy (what we used to call utility computing many years ago, and now is unfortunately called cloud computing.)
- Why open source standards are an essential part of our future.
- Why organisations only exist in the intersection between people and activities and how traditional forms of management are inefficient.
- The need for more dynamic methods of management.
- The limits of ROI and why it is only suitable for certain stages of an activity's lifecycle.
- Why you can't plan the future and why every organisation needs some chaos.
- Why today's organisational structures often fail people and why innovation is not everyone's job.
- How strategy varies with lifecycle.
- Why innovation markets will only work for post-event inventions and discoveries.
- The limits of open source and closed source technology and the domains where those techniques are particularly strong.
- Why fortune favours the brave and how the future value of an activity is inversely proportional to the certainty we have about it.
- Why transparency and portability matter in cloud computing.
- Why you have no choice in the long run over whether you adopt cloud computing.
- Why fuzziness in processes is valuable information.
- Why single methods of project management (for example six sigma, prince 2 or agile) are inefficient and often harmful
- Why getting it wrong doesn't matter as long as everyone else is getting it wrong.
- Why web 2.0 is important and why now.
- Why commoditisation leads to more innovation and a faster rate of evolution (extension from Herbert Simon's work on the Theory of Hierarchy)
- The difference between innovation and product or service innovation (whether radical, incremental or disruptive)
- Why KPI's and attempts to make management easy can seriously damage your wealth (extension from Ashby's law of Requisite Variety)
- The three accelerators of innovation in web 2.0 - network effects, componentisation and bridging the divide between opportunity and ability.
- How the growth of 3D printing and the commoditisation of manufacturing processes will create new languages.
- Why IT organisations are under increasing organisational stress as they try to balance the needs of commoditisation and innovation.
- Why competitive life just seems to get faster and faster.
- Why the transition from one domain (such as products or services or bespoke) to another causes major disruption.
- The difference between ideas, invention, discovery and innovation.
- The effects and failure of organisations to deal with the commoditisation of human, physical and social capital.
- How social networks allow us to challenge traditional views of management.
- Why organisations need explorers, colonisers and town planners.
- Why the role of the enterprise architecture is so important and never completed.
- Why organisations should use both X & Y managers and something in between (the XY Manager).
- The problem with patents and why the length of term of a patent should vary according to the innovation and how long society could be expected to independently discover it.
- Why tailor made can be bad for the consumer.
- Why failing and gambling are important management traits.
page revision: 3, last edited: 22 Feb 2010 17:21