Crisis | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

The change that could not happen…

November 15, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Economy is experiencing minor troubles, bringing about few bankruptcies, leading many players to feel lost into emptyness.

But what really happend ?

• Lawful practices of which it was possible to guess they would lead to a major crisis if taken to their paroxysm. “But dont worry, we master the system and know when to stop”.

• Always more. Why being satisfied with 7 when you can get 10 ? Because the 3 you’ll take will make it impossible for you to get 7 next year. “Tomorrow is another day, I have targets for today sir”. “And what if you reach it ?” “I’ll be asked to do more tomorrow”. “Do you find this logical, Perhaps one day it will be impossible to do more”. “That’s the way things hae always been…”. “Of course…and it always ended the same way”.

• Transfering risk. I optilize my ‘local maximum’ without taking care of macr equilbrium. I pass the “hot potatoe” to someone else, I reach my targets and the others just have to do the same. But one day the “hot potatoe” becomes a bom that explodes in someone else’s hands and I realize that my success is conditioned by the other’s, and that when my partners or even my competitors fail it makes me fail too.

• Many warning signs. Nothing was discovered those last weeks and people were pointing at the system’s weaknesses for years…but people in charge decided to wait untill it’s too late. “You’re true, it’s impossible to run a 100m race in zero seconds and a regular and sustainable growth is better than jerking forward and distroying in one day what took years to build. But things are like that and there’s no reason to change, there’s no other model”.

• Doomsters can’t be right. “Because the current system is the only one we know, it’s always been like that and will always be. It’s undestroyable. Do you imagine the major banks collapsing ? Wall street on its knees ? The state being forced to buy it all ? Stop dreaming, it’s impossible. And since it’s impossible, your reasonning is wrong, so there’s no need to change a thing”. “You remember Titanic ?”. “But Titanic was only a movie…”.

Everybody knows what happends. It couldn’t happen….

Does it remind you of something ? Something that is very close to us in our every day job ?

As Umair Aque says, we have to reinvent the way we do business, which will not be without impact on the way we work. New goals, new realities to take into account….

That is not a matter of business model, strategy,processes, it’s about a paradigm shift. As Aque says, we need to put sense back into business. Not only in day to day job but something collective, something that makes people being something more than a productive ressource in a chain. If not history will repeat again and again.

Learning to live in a world of interdependance where both success and failure will be collective and built the organization that fits this reality.

So the very enterprise DNA has to be reinvented. As Hamel wrote in “The Future of Management“, businesses will have to deeply change but, sinc change is not a part of the corporate DNA, some companies will need a major crisis to change. Hoping they’ll be able to survive..

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: bank, change, crisis, gary hamel, management, organization, strategy

Is web 2.0 dead or is business replacing buzzyness ?

October 29, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

You must have felt this agitation that went through the blogosphere these last day, but that was also relayed by traditional medias. Web 2.0 is dead. The rumor didn’t start from this note from Michael Arrington but since he’s got a bigger loudhailer than most of the population his voice carried farer. Then hundreds if not thousands of people predicted the end of web 2.0.

I can’t see anything particularly cleaver when some people say that when the economy’s going through hard times, the more fragile companies may come off badly. Among those companies there’s no need to have a second sight to guess all those that operates on an emerging market may be concerned, which is the case for web 2.0 startups…but not only. Not enough to convince me of real soothsayer abilities, nor to applause such perceptiveness, knowing it’s easy to ring the alarm when the city is burning just when you’ve been knowing fire raisers were at work for a long time. Those who were pushing for “everything 2.0″ even without sense or business model, prefering the “buzzyness model” could wonder about their past analysis. They themselves killed “their” web 2.0, turning it into a hudge holdall where they put everything and anything. But once smoke will be gone, many interesting things will remain, the only things that value creation can rely on, that makes it possible to build real business models. For this reason, I see these troubled times we’re experiencing as a salutary stabilization phase. I’ll end with a comparison with our late web 1.0. Even if some babies were thrown with the bathwater, companies that adresses a real need, that delivered a real valuable service, survived the crisis and are still alive.

In brief, I’d rather rank the “web 2.0 is dead” buzzword in the “who lives on noise can only survive making more noise” category.

So, what’s about Enterprise 2.0 ?

Logic without good sense leads to catastroph

October 26, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Two weeks ago I attended a graduation ceremony. In such events I often find speeches boring, but this time I was really interested to ear the message that would be delivered to youn managers/entrepreneurs who will need to find their way in the business world in a time of crisis.

Finally I liked the way things were said, wih lucidity. I left with the title of a book I should buy and a very meaningful quotation : “logic without good sense leads to catastroph”.

What’s logic ? It’s what allows to draw certain consequences from established facts, most of times upon an experience based reasoning.

Good sense ? It’s what makes possible for people to realize that something obvious isn’t that obvious, that a good a priori choice will have negative effects, that avoiding complexity isn’t always a good thing. And that, sometimes, logic has its limits.

Logic is reassuring. It puts things into systems, into equations and gives us certainties about what the future will be. It’s consecrated bread for companies. We earned so much this year so if we do the same the same year we’ll earn as much money. A salesperson had such figures this year, so he’ll do at least the same next year. This way of doing things always worked…so it will work again. If an option matches such scoring criterias it will increase our performance…

Good sense tells us logic does not always work. Examples : the 100m world record is improved by 1/10 second every year. Logic tells us one day people will run the 100m in zero seconds and will break the sound barrier. Good sense tells us it’s impossible. Logic tells us a salesperson car improve his performance by 10% a year. Good sense tells us one day he’ll reach a ceiling unless you are ready to assume one people would be, one day, able to generate the equivalent of French GDP by selling peanuts at the corner of the street.

Logic, when applied to performace, makes us want to brings everything back to a linear function. So companies make promises and built models based on that. Good senses makes us say performance is rather a curve which asymptotic character is often forgotten. It tends with more and more difficulties to something but never reaches it. Do you remember when you studied functions limits in methematics class.

The two functions seem to coincide during a long time, during decades. Sometimes the performance curve can even be better than what’s expected. But the day comes then they cross each other, split. And what happen then ? [Read more...]