Fellow Enterprise Irregular and a great friend Vinnie Mirchandani is coming out with a new book :The New Polymath - Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations, due for release last week of June 2010. He shared an early review copy with me for my reading – what a pleasurable and stimulating read it turned out to be. I was impressed with the theme of the book , the very powerful examples therein ( who won’t be impressed to look at the striking success of the likes of Apple, Google, General Electric and scores of others in other industries in a new light) and the recommended practices therein. The present era of mankind is seeing lot of excitement and promise all around. Around the world, everyday in our lives bring lot of changes – fast , unpredictable and may times we have to struggle hard to understand what the change stands for. Globalization, Technology has transformed the playing fields across continents, industries and sectors. Very powerful forces of change have shaken the beliefs in many aspects of governance and social thinking. Fortune 500 companies list is changing faster than the fast pace that we have seen in the past. Powerful brands have suffered huge damages and many industries have gotten transformed substantially so much so that many successful leaders today claim their business need to adapt and transform faster than ever. Leading edge corporations run faster in this direction to ensure that their rate of change inside is ahead of the change seen in their external environments. Looking at these developments, its clear that the time to re-imagine the future is now, and it is best done by a fresh school of thought that governs our thinking frameworks to enable a fundamental rethink and envision what is desirable and sustainable.
Now about the book: What does the term Polymath mean? Vinnie explains, “Polymath,” as in Greek for someone who excels in many disciplines, like Leonardo da Vinci, who was an artist, sculptor, architect, and so much more, Isaac Newton, the English physicist, astronomer, and philosopher, and Hypatia of Alexandria, who was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and teacher Ben Franklin - author, journalist, scientist, inventor, political philosopher and statesman. In this book, Vinnie focuses on Polymath enterprises, who are setting out a strikingly successful path in business.
Vinnie, the quintessential polymath as defined in the book, starts by observing that for the most part today, most of us seem to specialize and highlights the fact that we are monomaths in a world of exploding knowledge and passionately argues for more and more polymaths to be nurtured both at the institutional and at personal levels. (Being a monomath is a direct teaching of many management thinkers of recent era – for example, as recently as in the last two decades, Jim Collins adopted Peter Drucker’s thinking and brought out in his book “Good to Great” that leaders need to think and act like hedgehogs , not foxes. Hedgehogs are more like monomaths and foxes are more like polymaths ). With monomaths around, Vinnie argues that many ecosystems are going through a phase aka the dark ages, where there was plenty of living, but there was little forward movement in terms of progress. It was defined by its relative “nothingness”. Drawing a parallel to the current time, he points out, in the information technology, there is lack of nutrition—so much of the spending is wasted. In sustainability, there is lack of agreement—there are so many rancors in spite of so many global concerns. In health care, it is about lack of availability—so much of the world does not have access to all the advances in technology—or even basic health care. The core of these problems Vinnie argues amongst others centers on monomath thinking and execution.
At the same , Vinnie brings out the modern day success stories of polymath enterprises and individuals and argues that in them he sees the potential to capitalize on the promise that future holds for business and mankind. He succinctly points out to the fact that well-designed enterprises are taking individual monomaths, leveraging a wide array of technologies and becoming the new polymaths. The good news is that as in the European Renaissance, there are plenty of polymaths that are around. Though a lot of attention these days seems to go to innovation in mobile and social technologies, plenty of complex, hairy “industrial innovation” is also going on. This is encouraging because we face a daunting series of challenges at the global, enterprise, and individual level. We need polymaths to help deal with a range of challenges – big and small, of various size and structures.
Let's looks at the new business that are shaping many emerging industries - The successful enterprises spanning established corporations to upcoming start-ups—are creating incredible value by succeeding in a new way: by bringing together various streams of technology (biotech, cleantech, healthtech, infotech,Nanotech etc) to create new form of processes, products and services to create value . These are the poster child of Vinnie’s definition of the New Polymaths.
What I see in the book are a rich set of examples and metaphors that talk the story of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and multinational companies innovatively leveraging technology to tackle big problems, “grand challenges,” related to health, hunger, and natural disasters—and, of course, information technology. In their own ways, these big and small enterprises in their spheres of influence are reshaping the world . Vinnie highlights that examples represent a range from a triangle to an eight sided octagon to a ten sided decagon to a twenty sided icosagon to a 50 sided pentacontagon! The “more-sided” polymaths are trying to solve the really big, hairy problems. The “fewer-sided” ones are a bit less ambitious, but they are helping us run our enterprises and lives much better. The book rightfully brings out the range, recognizing that we need a variety of such forms of organizations.
The easy to read book is structured into three parts :
Part I sets the stage for the challenges of today and opportunities for polymaths of today and profiles GE, a new polymath.
Part II is organized around an acronym—R-E-N-A-I-S-S-A-N-C-E—each letter of which discusses a building block for the new polymath to leverage.
Part III is focused on how helping you groom your own new polymath. It profiles the BP CTO group, its tools and processes, and its vast ecosystem of innovation ideas, besides bringing together common threads from the seven other polymath profiles and the 11 building blocks
Leaders who disrupt to succeed in business need a framework to navigate their way and Vinnie provides that through his key building blocks of the R-E-N-A-I-S-S-A-N-C-E framework (each letter is a chapter that discusses a building block for the New Polymath), we learn about 11 key ideas: Residence; Exotics; Networks (Bluetooth to broadband); Arsonists; Interfaces; Sustainability; Singularity; Analytics; Networks (social); Cloud Computing; and Ethics. He further brings in the ethics dimension and urges integrating this into the warp and weft of innovation that the Polymaths unleash. This is a nice read explaining the need for these changes and how to effectively leverage them for success.
Do all these things thing look theoretical? - No way!. Look at the rich examples that Vinnie is parading: Apple, Google, Salesforce.com et al... Marc Benioff in the preface to the book captures this very well.–“Being a Polymath isn’t that difficult—and it always yields multidimensional rewards”. One of my favorite in this book is the chapter on steps to becoming a polymath – and the book lays out the key steps to becoming a Polymath enterprise.
Vinnie’s closing comments captures the essence that if we add up all the personal interests and skills that do not show up in job descriptions, there are plenty of other modern-day, mainstream polymaths and urges business to craft the right blend of monomaths that can lead to running successful polymath enterprises. And that we need these polymaths to solve the world’s wicked problems that Aristotle and al-Tusi and Jefferson never even imagined. In Vinnie’s dream, in such a world, Michelangelo would propose a toast to the uomo universale, the Italian term for polymath, and invoke his contemporary, Leon Battista Alberti: “A man can do all things if he but wills them.”
When In Search Of Excellence got published in 1981, it was a time when every good business idea seemed to be born in Japan, and most did not appear transferable to the United States. That’s the time, Tom Peters & Robert Waterman, the authors of the book examined several successful American companies and detailed readily transferable attributes shared by most of them. It helped American executives look into the mirror and see that some of the things they were doing were not bad at all, that others were excellent, and that they could borrow excellent ideas from each other. That, in turn, paved the way for many wannabes to create successful business. With the examples showcased in The New Polymath, Vinnie is again demonstrating the extraordinary ways in which the New Polymaths of the American business are winning in the international arena – he tops it by laying a robust framework for others to get there. When we extend these concepts to new strata - the likes of the emerging world, the non profit institutions etc. the results shall turn out to be much more significant. A very important reference book for business, entrepreneurs, management students and all professionals who dream and are working to create a better world.
Barack Obama's victory creates historic global demand for web content. In the US, almost everyone talks about how Obama managed his campaign in an extraordinary way in the last eighteen months. I first heard face-to-face the impressive strategy behind Barack Obama’s social networking leverage from his web strategists and advisors in the forbes leadership network last month in the valley – particularly the part where they focused on first building the community and how the money raising mechanism got fired up in the primaries. Jeremiah Owyang captures details of the momentum that the campaign gained with the social networks. It is common knowledge that the campaign had been heavily leveraging the web platform in very many sophisticated ways. The campaign spectacularly succeeded in integrating political infrastructure with the web infrastructure that they managed to create. A peer-to-peer, bottoms up campaign seemed to be the strategy that finally delivered results. Volunteer participation, feedback synthesis and citizen vote drives were successfully brought out in massive scale hithertho unknown with the web platform. The campaign heavily shaped by the power of social networks and internet energized the youth power in unimaginable ways signifying the triumph of technology power. Obama's online success outclassed his opponents and there were 150,000 or so campaign-related events over the course of the campaign, aided by more than 35,000 groups related by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. With 1.5 million accounts Obama campaign raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web. That reflected in building record war chest of contributions to the campaign – and in many ways engaging the millennials in unknown ways. It is now clear that the young voted for him in droves. It is the conventional view that IT is Business. Now comes an extension, IT shall also become almost the nerve center for presidential campaigns. With all this the new president elect has a big job ahead.
Update : The Internet As A Force In Politics: “Obama Would Not Have Won Without The Internet” .”The Internet played a disruptive role in the 2008 election in the same way television played a disruptive role in the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy to president. Neither medium was new in the respective elections, but both “came of age” and swung the election towards the winning candidate”.
I wrote an op-ed piece for sandhill.com on the emerging role of the CIO. Successful CIOs – and their vendors – must understand and embrace the dramatic evolution of the technology leadership role in order to remain a productive part of enterprise management. Globally, the business demands are increasing. Recent surveys show, three out of every five enterprises are looking to expand their market share. Their executives expect the CIO and the IT organization to play a significant role in improving current business processes, controlling enterprise costs and raising workforce performance.
These are the near-term business expectations. Longer term expectations for IT call for building new strategic capabilities that will use information to attract and retain customers and create new market opportunities. Outside the enterprise, an increasingly sophisticated market in outsourced IT services is offering efficient, low-cost enterprise IT operations on demand — and at unimaginably massive scale. Inside the enterprise, the IT organization is applying sourcing decisions to move away from lower-value activities and towards higher-value ones. This is pushing the CIO beyond the traditional role of improving existing business processes to a more strategic role of activities aimed at improving growth, innovation and competitive advantage. Proactive CIOs are looking to grow IT’s contribution by connecting with growth and competitive advantage in substantial ways.
In the course of time, clearly some CIOs may need to shed—partly or wholly—their dominant focus and energy on the supply realm. The call of the age is to relentlessly get better business value from IT and this needs technologically savvy business leaders. Now is the time for CIOs to step up to the role—the challenges are many, but the opportunity has never been more ripe. IT is now becoming clearly relevant to enterprises and is receiving its due share of recognition as in the “dotcom” era. Please read the full article here
M.R.Rangaswami writes on what ails the enterprise software industry.
They say that youth is fleeting. In the enterprise software industry, the youth are fleeing.One need only look at the hairlines of today’s software leaders. The current wunderkinds are not looking to create the next wave of corporate computing applications, but are instead gravitating toward emerging fields, such as web 2.0, biotech, and anything “green.” Bill Gates was 19 when he founded Microsoft (MSFT). Steve Jobs started Apple (AAPL) at 21. Even Marc Benioff was in his 30s when he founded Salesforce.com (CRM) — and at 42, he remains one of the industry’s youngsters. Software companies need to do more to attract the next generation of business leaders who will drive the evolution of the industry for decades to come.
MR is very perceptive in his observation that the industry is dominated by old hands.His prescription for rejuvenating the industry is indeed insightful and the approach very fresh. To be fair, the enterprise software industry continues to chug along with some advances. SaaS applications enable business to experience an increasing number of best-of-breed solutions for features such as ecommerce, human resources (HR) performance management, and product life-cycle management, all of which have been extended to incorporate on-demand delivery options without IT overhead required. Improved implementation methodologies, from preconfigured templates to expanded professional services resource capacity characterize the ecosystem today. Faster rollouts, global scale ups – all these are becoming commonplace. The future of the market leaders in this space will be largely defined by their ability to win over business users by addressing their pain points and helping them achieve common corporate goals I think innovation –accelerated innovation is the key to advancements in the enterprise software industry. I think innovation – accelarated innovation is the key to advancements in the enterprise software industry. I think the wave of consumerism engulfing the tech world is challenging the halo of enterprise software. As I wrote here, In this age of contribution economy – a phenomenon that we are seeing ever since the Internet started to connect everyone to everyone else all the time, people from around the world can more easily contribute leading to exploding results - caused by the coming together of energy, ideas, and knowledge. Some of the more familiar examples of these collaborative efforts include blogs, open-source software, podcasts, and even the nonprofit online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We are also seeing customers leading the charge of innovation and the economist article on user-led innovation exemplifies a new form of collaboration. The rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon. I am optimistic about the enterprise software world embracing innovation centered around consumerism sooner than later - The impact of consumerization on enterprise and opportunities to leverage such advances are all groomed in the consumer space itself. The transition of such things into enterprise IT thereby happens automatically – in a way, advances in consumer space dictates the corresponding fallout in the enterprise space. True, but difficult to believe – right? Someone referred this phenomenon as akin to a civil war. An analysis of the past shows that in a significant number of cases the technologies that were originally focused on consumer space have made deep impact over time have made deep impact on the enterprise space – Personal computers, search, IM all are shining examples of this powerful trend. Native web companies keep coming out with a lot of full blown but trial offerings that entices lot many more consumers and many a times a revenue and utilization value evolves out of more and more usage of such offerings. In the process the consumer space gets more and richer forcing successful offering to be pushed into the enterprise –in larger numbers and faster pace.
MR is in a way definitely right – a mixture of more young people along with some of the best minds (who could be older)driving the enterprise industry would make this transition happen faster.
John Dvorak writes about Bubble 2.0. To me his perspective looks shallow. Growth won’t be linear everytime and it is sees growth and adoption takes a journey similar to the S –Curve. In such a scenario amidst, failed realization, comes out a few shining success stories. As I see it, the industry is stabilizing and maturing and resource allocation is getting done with more sound reasoning. Technology continues to evolve and angel and VC investments may not be fully rational(that’s the way these have got to be). There would be some failures but not enough to paint the doomsday for the the industry with a broad brush. Look at this carefully : The previous dot com bubble has very little to do with disappearing markets or businesses going bankrupt. The bubble was all about people that would blindly invest in internet stocks and businesses. After awhile when the overvalued internet companies started to fail, and all that stock was worthless, it caused a huge impact on the economy. Today people are more judicious in their choice of investments and seldom chase unproven web businesses. We still have that WWW rush as we see more and more services move to the web and the first adopters start to mature - see Wikipedia and Google Maps as second generation web services versus movie rentals like Netflicks, which are a relatively new experiment. The money, on the other hand, is there but everyone is considerably more controlled about their investments. Today investors definitely seek a solid business model or more likely a working implementation first, before large swathe of funds get allocated. All the net majors today are following this – starting from Google, MySpace to Facebook.
My colleague Chandra and a few others pointed me to Charlie Munger’s higly acclaimed commencement address at USC Law School recently. There are some people who in life would have reached identical levels in their chosen fields, irrespective of the discipline chosen or the start. Charles Munger is one amongst such great people, who have reached the highest possible realm of acheivement and hearing them speak out their governing ideas and mental models are very uplifting are are of inestimable value. Reportedly the 84 year old man’s first law school commencement address in his lifetime, it is full of great wisdom. His emphasis on trust – earning and keeping it and the need for constant learning that’s measured almost on a daily basis are amazing pieces of wisdom – one that every living person need to ponder upon. While I liked the whole speech like Atanu Dey, I particularly liked the opening part:
Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
There is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust. And the way to get it is to deliver what you would want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.
I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
…so if civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.
Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning.
I went through life constantly practicing (because if you don’t practice it, you lose it) the multi-disciplinary approach and I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, its made me more helpful to others, its made me enormously rich. You name it, that attitude really helps
You’re outcome in life will be way more satisfactory and way better if you work under people you really admire
His caution on embracing extremely intense ideology deserves special mention : Extremely intense ideology should be avoided ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life.
He points to Epectitus saying that every missed chance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every missed chance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and that your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in constructive fashion.
His final piece of advice is the icing in the cake : "The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust".
Read the fulltranscript of a marvelous address, or the condensed Cheat Sheet – I read and reread the address, repeatedly and am sure would do countless number of times in future.
I was reviewing the sandhill showcase innovators list when Vineet Jain, the co-founder of Egnyte pointed me to his company’s web 2.0 product. An interesting product addressing an important need. Lets look at this - today's information worker uses a variety of devices and applications to create information and works with distributed teams. As a result , it is getting harder to find , organize and share relevant information easily. A lot of time is spent finding and piecing together information on a topic. Despite advances in collaboration technology, there is a void for a powerful, yet, easy to use solution that lets individuals and teams archive, organize, find and share information. The current choices are, either expensive and complex Enterprise tools, or inexpensive but lightweight Web tools. Egnyte is a Web 2.0 content sharing solution that combines sharing, automatic organization and a powerful search capability. Using continuous synchronization, Egnyte seamlessly integrates the desktop with the web.Egnyte delivers a web based application that uniquely combines sharing, automatic organization and a powerful search capability. Egnyte has drawn on web 2.0 concepts like tagging and search and blended them with traditional concepts like file versions and folders to deliver a powerful, yet easy to use application. Once posted, facilities are enabled to search data using the search field, create tags below to classify data, create a shared view to start sharing data with contacts. It is in the same space as the likes of Microsoft Groove or Tubes: applications that helps users categorize information in the desktop, back it up into the internet cloud when it changes, and upon need make it accessible across multiple computers. Egnyte focuses on more than just files, letting users store and organize files, emails, IM and share this with others. By eliminating the manual posting (a major issue with large files), manual versioning and emailing that occurs when working in a team, Egnyte seamlessly 'synchronizes' the desktop to the web, automatically creates versions when changes are made , and notifies the team with the latest updates. The search and "browse" capabilities help quickly find any information using keywords or a range of other techniques. Egnyte is focused on consolidating information across multiple computers of an individual and the team that the individual works with. Egnyte offers search capability across all this informationEgnyte is targeted for small to mid-size teams and offers free 1 GB account. Egnyte claims that it has paying business customers and also have usage among certain classes of consumers. You can signup here.
The direct model has been a revolution, but is not a religion, says Michael Dell in an internal memo. He positions this thinking as an improvement to its business model, and go beyond it, to give its customers what they really need. This is done, he claims by making improvements in pricing, product development and fulfillment, and customer experience. (Months back, his predecessor Kevin Rollins defended the direct sales model that Dell had embraced for a long time). I like this part of the memo where he talks about embarking on a bold, long term initiative to radically simplify IT for our commercial customers. Centered around, what he claims as a set core beliefs of Dell, he outlines it : • Information Technology shouldn't be as complex as it is.
• You should spend less on maintaining I/T and more on innovation.
• Every IT project should not require an army of consultants.
• Computing should have minimal environmental impact.
• Superior information drives efficiency in your IT environment.
We know our competitors drive complexity and needless cost into customers' environments. These so-called "service divisions" create a never-ending cycle of activity with unclear return on investment. We intend to break this cycle. We will build different kinds of services and offer key technologies that will help customers escape this complexity trap and unlock the true potential of technology.
Can Dell really move from a supply chain winner to that of a services player? Can its research efforts rise wide and fast enough to match those of IBM, HP and Sun? From pricing as a weapon in its armoury, it used to muscle in – a game which players like Acer and HP are getting better at.
I was speaking to a very senior ex-Dell executive few days back and solicited his views about Michael Dell returning at the helm of Dell Inc. My friend, now a colleague used to report to Michael Dell himself in the past,while working at Dell. He told me that things can only get better at Dell – He opined that Micheal would make a huge difference to the fortunes of Dell Inc, for sure.
Just came across this development -Michael unveils two new components of Dell’s digital media strategy: Dell IdeaStorm and a new functionality in StudioDell that will allow users to upload their own video testimonials. Dell IdeaStorm is aimed at allowing users submit their ideas about improving Dell's products and services, and the community votes on the best ideas. Its like a combination between a message board and Digg.com. While it was the case that partner/customer sites and user forums used to host messageboards – they would be normally hidden under authorizations for access. Dell is taking a refreshingly open approach in making it accessible by the public at large. I saw Mr.Dell’s video introducing the new features. It’s a great feeling to see business trying out true community building initiatives like this. By bringing a focus on business related issues while retaining the flavour(as promised by Dell) of user generated content available – Dell Inc is taking such applications to new heights. This is something that other business need to closely watch nay imitate /innovate likewise to reach out to customers.
Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld "All views expressed are my personal views are not related in any way to my employer"
