Pensieve

• In networking, even dead-ends count as legitimate travel (and distance covered on the way to destination)
• Don’t die wondering

There are a few things that make me wish I had been the creative genius behind them. If I was, it would be the ultimate fulfilling experience that one can ask for from a profession or livelihood. Having created them, I could say with absolute certainty, “The best is not yet to come. I’m done.” Then pick up my suitcase and go travel the world aimlessly for the rest of my life.

Yes, a lot of these things are made by a group of people, not just one person. But my intent is to put a benchmark on the vision and collective quality of work that went into making these. Here is the list:

• Calvin & Hobbes
• Google Earth
• Apple iPod
• MacBook Pro
• iPhone
• Costco
• Harry Potter
• Trader Joe’s
• Crate & Barrel
• WordPress
• ifttt
• pbwiki

If you have heard Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford Commencement speech, there is not much to add here. I love the end message he gives “Stay hungry. Stay foolish”. That, i think, is the key to a fulfilling life.

I’ve been trying to single out good strategies that have created new markets for emerging concepts/technologies, and now some patterns have started emerging. The following is a living list of what seems to make good sense:

• Always think platform- A foundational approach to new products is perhaps key in breaching new markets. This is more about abstracting your value proposition so that others can build on top of it. Makes for a more sustainable market. Examples- iPhone (app store), Facebook (fb connect), Linkedin (apps), Microsoft Healthvault (peripheral medical devices), Google Health (personal health data), Ooyala (video syndication), WordPress/Typepad (blogging).
• Foster an Ecosystem- This strategy is about growing the whole pie, rather than getting a bigger piece for yourself. Get partners and 3rd party providers to add value to your offering, and share revenue with them. Microsoft does it the best. Overlaps with the ‘platform’ approach somewhat because having an enabling foundation is key for ecosystem to develop. Examples- Healthvault (lining up numerous medical device vendors), Apple App Store.
• Offer Service, not products- Consumers want risk-sharing and dependability. These are more amenable to a service model. SaaS, SOA are the central approaches here. Everything can be a service. Examples- RollsRoyce offering jet engines as a service, Salesforce (the SaaS pioneer, of course). Some people like to call this way of doing business as ‘solution-centric’ offerings, not services… but i think the core idea is the same.
• ?

I’ve been reading about this in multiple places- and since is a very interesting concept, wanted to collate it all in one place. This business observation states that excessive capacity in a given industry is often the much needed precursor to subsequent innovation. Examples are (still working on some of these):

• Railroad expansion in 1800′s – led to the increase in trade
• Industrial revolution led to large number of factories and overcapacity – ?
• Massive fiber-optic cables laid down in dot com era lead to cheap connectivity
• Surplus silicon and wafer cutting technologies after the semiconductor industry slowed down after dot com bust were picked up by a fast-growing solar energy industry
• The downtime created by the collapse of the Internet bubble gave people spare cycles to think up of new applications that we now collectively know as Web 2.0

There are some examples of last-mile networks that are becoming clearer to me. Consider:

• Telecom: Verizon, ATT or some major company owns the ‘last mile’ of actual physical network that runs from the street into your living room. So irrespective of who provides the actual service in the central routing point, these last-mile owners rake in part of revenue generated.
• Cable: Same with Comcast or Cox. They own the physical last few yards of cable that brings the entertainment to your TV.
• Local healthcare providers (general practitioners, family physicians) can be seen as the last-mile network that big IDNs (Integrated Delivery Networks) and hospitals miss. The big players are always in need to bring in the last-mile players into their network.

Now lets see how new generation companies are changing the rules of game by obviating the need for ownership of ‘last-mile’ networks.

• Vonage and VoIP companies disrupt standard telecom-providers by circumventing the need for specific telephone wiring to the home.
• Dish and DirectTV  work around cable providers  with satellite communication. So does Joost, in terms of content distribution.
• Telemedicine and remote monitoring technologies make it possible to take care of chronic diseases without actually visiting your big hospital ER.

I’m not sure what exactly, but there is a pattern here. Something around the impending value-depreciation of last-mile networks. Stay tuned while I sharpen my mental axe to trim this overgrowth..

A good analogy occurred to me today.

My professional career has been a lot like learning to snowboard. Initially, as a novice snowboarder, it was the board that drew a path for me downhill and presented good (speed/thrill) and bad (flat on my face) outcomes. Likewise, it was the profession I chose (medicine) that carved out the path for me initial few years of my career. After med-school, I had the medically-aligned path ahead of me (even though I took a bit detour, it was still related to medicine ).

True, engaging career is perhaps more similar to snowboarding (once you’ve learned to make your own way down the hill). Now that I’m more in control of both the board and my career, I feel like I’m carving the way, according to my will. Gives me the same underlying feeling- an energetic mix of almost-being-in-control and thrill of unanticipated outcomes.

Today as I was listening to yet another story of corporate maneuvers, I had an epiphany.

If you don’t know about march hares, look it up on wikipedia or on pubmed. During my random TV surfing, I once landed on a Discovery Channel documentary about weird animal behavior. They showed the wild, back-and-forth, almost violent ‘dance’ of hares that gave rise to the phrase “Mad as a march hare”.

The connection to business world here is by analogy. Big corporations do something similar the mad hare dance when they are in trouble.. jump here and there, create a turbulent, distracting scene that takes attention away from the real problem.

Countless number of times I’ve seen mega-projects fail or customers voiding contracts because of valid reasons on their part. But instead of resolving the core problem or admitting their fault , the default reaction of a corporation is the mad hare dance. Almost instantly, a senior VP is thrown in front of the customer. The guy/gal acts as a sandbag for initial outburst, and soon enough gets transferred/resigns. The new person coming in starts by promising stuff and subtly hinting that since he/she is new, it’ll take sometime to catch up. Once the high-level shuffle is done, it starts in a more implicit way at lower levels. And so on..

It never ceases to amaze me how big corporations stay big inspite of the exponentially increasing chaos, inefficiency and dumbness with size. As a enormous headless entity, it’s almost all muscles and skin, but no brain or heart. Or conscience.

I work for a well-diversified multinational company that has been around for ages. Recently at a business dinner, the casual talk about company performance morphed into multiple rounds of pessimistic discussion about excess process, unrealistic policies, slow market response, and a plateaued stock price. At the tail end of it, a distinguished colleague commented “…but our company has been around for years, and is a de facto leader in many areas; so we must be doing something right to be surviving all along”.

I offered a biological analogy for the apparent success of big corporations inspite of obvious internal chaos and inefficiencies. I called it my ‘Unicellular Organism Theory’ of business, (hope the name catches on someday ).

A unicellular organism (amoeba, for example) has only a couple of aims in life- eat and survive. Likewise, big corporations (fortune top 10, for example) are in a blind race for growth and (implicitly) survival. An amoeba will make progress (move) in a direction by extending a shapeless mass of cytoplasm, and if it gets a pin prick in that process; the shapeless arm quickly retracts and another one projects out in a different direction. In a similar way, big organizations with their inherent chaos make apparent ‘progress’ in a given domain/market in a giant, often shapeless move. But as soon as they get a stimulus painful enough, the ‘progress’ improvises and starts in a different direction. But the overall game remains the same- eat and survive.

So what is the tieback to my colleague’s question? Simple. It’s not ‘we must be doing something right to survive all along’, it’s more like ‘we can’t doing anything wrong enough to die’. My theory is that corporations have a dominance threshold- after reaching a level of market dominance, they simply can’t make a mistake big enough to perish. If a major project goes sour, you throw some executives at it, get the press to take a positive spin on your failure and move on in another direction. The enormous size ensures that there is always a positive balance, no matter how serious the insult/injury. Just like the unicellular organism- it consumes food much smaller than itself, and works around any painful stimuli it encounters…eating and surviving forever.