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What tools does your organization provide? Why do they provide them? Are they business necessities, or another example of legacy thinking?
Gordon delivers a keynote address to Codice, a specialist IM Consulting Services company in Brisbane, Australia.
I heard an interesting story the other day about automotive companies. Apparently after the Model T went into production, Ford concentrated on selling cars to people who didn’t have cars. Now, as far as marketing strategies go, this seems like a really good one. After all, most people didn’t have cars. The production model meant that this kind of new-fangled transport was now available to all. And, despite some initial adoption barriers, it worked. Ford sold lots of cars. The problem came about when General Motors arrived, a bit later on.
Turns out GM couldn’t sell cars to people who didn’t have cars, because everyone already had one. So, they decided to sell the car as a ‘status symbol’ — to entrench the car as a reflection of its owner. Obviously, this too was a brilliant marketing strategy. It was at this point that GM began to surpass Ford as the number one car manufacturer. Ford, meanwhile, was still trying to figure out what to do with its profits — and still hunting for customers among people who didn’t have cars. “Look! No Horse!”
History repeats itself. Microsoft completely missed the Internet thing. They were firmly focused on the extremely profitable business they invented: selling consumer software. When they did finally engage with the Internet, they saw it as though it was consumer software. Even today, Microsoft are still talking about “Software + Services” — as though the Internet is some kind of Add-On pack to their consumer offerings. In a sense, they still seem to say, “Look! No more IBM mainframe!”
Companies seem to think that the way to beat the Idea 1 legacy thinking problem is to get crazy obsessed with finding Idea 2. Microsoft are trying to be, among other things, an advertising company. Google has gone from Internet search engine to enterprise software/hardware vendor, mobile phones and even virtual worlds. Both companies acquire startups regularly. I can’t help but be skeptical of these efforts. I think that there’s no doubt that they are possible avenues for success, but looming large over all of these is the legacy of Idea 1.
Success seems to be a fertile breeding ground for legacy thinking. In a way, it’s like we’re all striving to find a point where we don’t have to think any more. Or perhaps it’s just that every new idea has to be seen through the lens of the idea that proceeded it. People are innately more inclined to protect against loss than to seek out ways to gain. The advantage of Idea 1 is that it carried no risk of jeopardizing existing profits, unlike Idea 2 and all subsequent ideas.
Anyway, it’s an interesting paradox, but me musing on it isn’t getting this startup any closer to its Idea 1 release. Back to Vark!
Dean and I are leaving the Burrow today to visit the kids at George Marshall High School. We’ve been invited to talk to a couple of senior classes about running a startup, our product, our business plan, and generally share how Infovark came to be.
We’re really excited to be given the opportunity to speak, so we took a few days out from our hectic schedule to put together some slides and prepare a talk.
Thinking back to when I was a fresh-faced young graduate, entering the business world for the first time, one of the really important lessons that I remember was when I realized that business systems tend to change much slower than I would have liked. And not just the adoption of new systems — but the very ideas that underpin the design of those systems take a long time to evolve.
I like to refer to the problem as one of legacy thinking — so as to distinguish it from legacy systems.
Take for example, the replacing of paper filing solutions with digital systems. This has happened over a period of about 20 years (and it’s still going on today). But initially, these computer systems were just electronic versions of those paper systems. They held onto a lot of ideas from the past:
And so the systems that we built were kind of like Virtual Filing Cabinets. Files within folders within drawers and so on. But none of those points apply to digital information. We had new tools to manage the data, but we were still using old paradigms to organize it.
It wasn’t until the rise of the Internet search engine — and particularly Google — that people started entertaining the notion that you could perhaps manage information without a comprehensive underlying taxonomy.
People’s willingness to let go of old ideas is the only thing that can really facilitate new ways of working.
On that note, we’d better go. We don’t want to be late for class!