Digital Big Bang – Implications for Big Business

14Apr09

The digital big bang (see last post) starting 2010 will enable large businesses to get bigger, increasingly global and yet more nimble. Their employees will be perpetually connected by practically limitless bandwidth tethered to them via both fixed and wireless networks. Employees will exist as on-demand objects for their employers unless new management techniques and novel approaches to organizing people are applied.

Laptops, tablets, PDA’s, iPhones and smart phones will carry office and communications software that is standard today on hi-end PC’s. They will support email, messaging, Internet telephony, video-calling, multi media file sharing and business applications. These devices will track your workflow, your movements, your tasks, your admin and your hours. For they will be permanently on, forever working you and for you, and most importantly of all – they will always be with you.

Large organizations and corporations will be able to organize themselves in different ways and those that want to take best advantage of the digital big bang will re-organize around specific work groups rather than around old departmental lines. Workers will be disconnected from central locations and instead gather in places of like projects or disciplines. Their surroundings will match their tasks/projects and or roles.

Marketers will work in creative surroundings close to markets and suppliers rather than head offices. The intelligent walls will create a beach or a wave or a skateboard park – whatever gets their juices going the most.

Designers will huddle in tight groups around specific projects. They will choose their surroundings with creativity and productivity in mind. They will require greater attention and support since they will work longer hours and be ‘humans on-demand’.

Greater attention will get focused on employee education, health and well being as organizations thriving in the global knowledge economy recognize that they now require fewer employees but ever-greater output per employee. This will bring employers full circle back to valuing and generating loyalty more than any other corporate value.

With the tools and technologies that the digital big bang will make easily and cheaply available, large organizations will organize themselves like massive networks of small organizations (and small organizations will tether together virtually through independent networks to behave as and compete better with large organizations).

The typical work-team unit will have around 10 employees and behave like a small business/start-up of 10. The only difference will be that they will exist within a large corporation with unified customers, shareholders, training, brands, values and systems. Most employees will be attached to multiple work-teams, each with their own strategy, identity, culture, tools and leader(s).

Managers will think in terms of amoebic, fluid ‘special forces’ like teams and not departments or matrixes. Team leaders will be coaches and organizers and not autocrats. They will be lent team members – they will not own them. Leaders will own products/projects, processes, tools, objectives and outputs – not people.

Loyalty will be fostered through the fluid movement of employees from work group to work group as though you were moving from small company/start-up to small company/start-up.

Leading corporations will analyze and develop small company mentality and performance metrics. They will study, perfect and apply start-up processes and they will have work-teams compete with other corporate work-teams within, corporate work-teams without and independent start-ups.

Corporate leaders will select projects and work-teams to develop and invest in as Venture Capitalists select start-up companies to invest in and coach. Corporations will be more successful places to develop effective work-teams (start-ups) because they better understand how to manage, organize, train, tool and motivate employees whereas Venture Capitalists generally do not.

So the corporation of tomorrow will succeed by understanding and repeating the entire start-up process from idea right through to mass-market repetition. Not all of their start-up’s will go all the way to successful product or project launch and market leadership – but the leading corporations will be those that have the greatest track record of success.

For tomorrow’s corporations will be measured by operational excellence (for existing products/services and processes) as well as and most importantly for innovation.

Work-teams will be given full license to take their idea to market and beyond with no attempt to stifle or slow them. They will always be encouraged to take risks, challenge thinking and compete from within. The next Google should be built within Microsoft and not without.

Everything and anything can and will be outsourced. Greatest value will accrue to the creators, developers and marketers of ideas and customer relationships/understanding, and not their producer. Product production will become an outsourced commodity – not a core competency (except perhaps for extremely ‘heavy’/capital intensive industries or highly bespoke products).

Post digital big bang corporate leaders will hire experienced and successful start-up experts as consultants and team leaders. And their track record will be rewarded with bigger funds to invest and more cutting edge projects. Corporate leaders will care less about ‘going up the ladder’ and more about winning the most cutting edge and greatest potential projects.

Corporate strategists will be innovators and inventors more than number crunchers or researchers – they will have systems to support the latter. Each new product idea will be seen as a start-up company – not as a product development process. GM will not buy the next Hummer – they will invent it and build a start-up company around it.

Digital big bang corporations core competencies will be culture, systems, flexibility, start-up processes, new organization, venture capital style internal financing, corporate governance, leadership development, training and employee well being, brand, market facing product/service synergy and shareholder and customer relations.

Corporate CEO’s will be communicators, motivators, visionaries and entrepreneurs first and managers and politicians second. They will be more like Richard Branson than Dick Parsons.

The most desirable companies for employees to work at, customers to buy from and investors to invest in will be the most innovative organizations and not the most efficient. Efficiency and value creation will a given – not an end!

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