What are the key lessons from business history that will still apply in the future?
My most loyal readers will know that this is the question I’m currently trying to answer, as part of my project to describe the future of business. Continue reading “Here’s why we need to balance management and leadership. And appreciate business history more.”
What are the key lessons from business history that will remain important in the future? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer in my recent posts.
My answers have in no small part been informed by a conversation I had with business historian Chris McKenna of Saïd Business School at Oxford University. Continue reading “Horizontal first, vertical second”
So companies need to play the long game. They need to leave short-term focus behind. They need to be system builders. And they even need to be boring.
But do companies need to be companies? Continue reading “Business isn’t everything”
A dominating assumption these years is that time is moving faster. Which in turn makes it impossible to say anything meaningful about the future.
Timeframes are supposedly getting shorter. And so is business strategy. It’s not 10 or 20 years strategies. It’s not even three years. It’s the next quarter. Continue reading “Play the long game”
So, one of the great lessons of business history is that you need to be a system builder. Like Henry Ford. Or Elon Musk.
But how do you go about building a system? Is there a particular approach which has proven to be more successful than others? Continue reading “Build to local needs”
Real moments of change in business and society are best identified by looking at developments in price. When the price goes down, mass adoption awaits.
But what is the right business strategy if you want to win the market? Continue reading “Be a system builder”
If the pauses between the industrial revolutions are as important as the industrial revolutions themselves, then what are the real moments of change?
It’s an important question if we want to understand the future of business. Continue reading “When the price goes down”
So, change is not accelerating. But change isn’t a constant either.
In modern history, the most accurate graph to illustrate societal change consists of continuous or overlapping S-curves. Continue reading “Mind the pause”
How is it possible to say anything meaningful about the future of business? I mean, we’re all witnessing how things are changing so rapidly, right?
It’s exponential change. As described by Moore’s law from 1965. Back then, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Continue reading “Change is not accelerating”
On Friday, I did the very first interview for my “Lean Is Fun” book project. And I’m happy to say that a number of my assumptions about the future of business were challenged, if not to say debunked.
The interviewee was the esteemed Chris McKenna of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, and the main purpose of the call was to find the answer(s) to the question I posed in my previous post:
“What are the key lessons of business history that will still be relevant in the future?” Continue reading “Business is consolidating, not splintering”
