Author Archives: Jonathan Wichmann

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.

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 …

Continue reading “Business is consolidating, not splintering”