I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Here are excerpts from Chapter 15 which focuses on being Speedy. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.
(Charlie) Feld also describes periodic “field trips” with route drivers who stocked Frito Lay snacks at various outlets. There were constant reminders that their product was perishable and no amount of sophisticated industrial engineering or computing could ignore those basic principles of nature.
Charlie Fine, an MIT professor, wrote a seminal book in 1999 where he introduced the concepts of “clockspeeds” and “temporary advantage.”2 He also suggested businesses learn from fast-paced industries as geneticists do from the short life span of a fruit fly.
A studio executive is discussing the challenges of demand forecasting in the business. How many BluRay versus traditional DVD copies of a new movie to ship to each city? How soon before we can plan for streaming video even for new releases? Then he confides that with the speed at which his industry is moving, he has considered recruiting candidates from the poultry farming industry.
“They are much more sensitive to short lifecycles.”
Potatoes, fruit flies, poultry, and technology—welcome to the new world of perishability.
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James Politeski, a Senior Vice-President at Samsung Electronics America says in an interview, “As fridges and other home appliances get smarter and become more like computers that can connect wirelessly to smartphones, tablets, and other devices, Samsung is harnessing this transition to take business from appliance leader Whirlpool and other manufacturers,”8 Whirlpool is used to competition from GE and Kenmore and globally from Electrolux and Haier—but a phone and electronics company like Samsung?
Jeff Brown, vice president of business intelligence for UBM TechInsights wonders l“The question for traditional medical device companies is whether their designers, marketers, and IP staff have factored the smartphone platform into their thinking,” He continues:
Smartphones provide medical technology companies with unprecedented access to an enormous consumer market. To capture this opportunity, they must think carefully about how they develop new technologies and protect their intellectual property innovations. Otherwise, they face the same fate as makers of stand-alone GPS and MP3 players—a slow decline to obsolescence
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Demand forecasting has always been about working around peaks and valleys. So technology companies have learned to factor seasonal adjustments for back-to-school campaigns, “Black Friday,” home entertainment around major sporting events, and so on. Now, try estimating demand for a brand-new product category for which there is no history to go by. Planning for sales of 25 million iPads in little over a year10 or 2.5 million Kinects sold in the first 25 days11 requires juggling between being stuck with too much inventory of perishable product and disappointing customers and opening their doors to competitive alternatives.
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With products evolving so quickly, can the back office – accounting, human resources, procurement - continue at its old pace? Can ERP global rollouts take years?
Look at Groupon, one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, which has added on average one new country to its operations every three weeks. Not surprisingly, it is in a hurry in every aspect of its business. In three months, 26 international markets went live on the ERP software, NetSuite, replacing hundreds of spreadsheets.
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