Investment | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

The problem with knowledge economy : it does not exist !

December 14, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Enterprise 2.0 or social business initiatives aim at crafting organizations that fit what we call the knowledge economy. And that’s quite hard…for one reason. The knowledge economy does not exist. Knowledge work and workers do. Not the economy. What’s missing ? A global environment that would help its blooming, its take-off rather than forcing enterprises to make industrial decisions on matters that are not industrial. Education, law, tax system, accounting has to be rethought from a new angle. In the meantime, anything undertaken by organizations will be bricolage : it will need lots of efforts for marginal or even futile results regarding to the deep transformation challenges that are at stake.

When we talk about new organization or management approach, about the tools that support new ways to communicate or collaborate we often use the knowledge economy as a justification. Moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy means a deep change of context and responses of a new kind from businesses. That’s an obvious fact and none of the current social business or enterprise 2.0 expert has coined anything new : there already was an abundant literacy on these new forms of organization while most of os where still learning writing and counting at school. If we take the technology side apart, any old book from Peter Drucker could be a best seller if published today with the same texts and a socially fashionable title.

So knowledge economy is there and both organizations and people have to deal with it. But what do they do it so slow, with so much reluctance, fears and doubts ? Why can’t we see this draught, this collective march that happened when the world faced its last similar evolution ? The answer is easy : because the knowledge economy does not exist. Not because it’s a dream kept alive buy a few passionate and lunatic people but because it’s not a concrete reality, foundations on which we’ll be able to craft the future.

A field was not enough to craft the agrarian economy. A factory and some steam or electricity did not found the industrial economy. There were organization models designed for the factory. Labor laws evolved to lead the change. Financial mechanisms were set up to make the requires investment possible, what made industrial economy grow. A factory did not made the industrial economy but a set of rules, practices, mechanisms did. They turned a need and an opportunity into reality.

So, what’s about knowledge economy ?

One swallow doesn’t make a summer and a knowledge worker does not make a knowledge economy. Knowledge work exists. Knowledge workers too and they represent each day a bigger part of the working population. They are the resources that may help to build a sustainable growth for the future. But that won’t happen unless some requirements are met.

As a matter of fact, even if the potential exists it’s poorly exploited. First because businesses don’t do everything possible to make the most of it…but that’s an easy pretext. Businesses also are looking for sense, for reasons to do things. They don’t find these reasons because they are operating in an environment that did not change that much during the last 50 years. Consequence : they struggle to reinvent their model, to reinvent themselves. Evidence is those that success, that find the way of a new durable growth, are those who made choices that were both “obvious” regarding to where the world is heading and crazy according to the current environment in which they operate.

What’s missing to craft the appropriate environment ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Society, strategy Tagged With: accounting, contribution, economy, education, Enterprise 2.0, extarnalities, growth, Human resources, income, Innovation, investment, knowledge-economy, knwowledge workers, labor law, law, participation, remuneration, social business, strategy, tax system

Borrowing profitability from the future ?

December 1, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : in the knowledge economy economy era, investing on human capital development is key but stays marginal because of short term profitability logics. But does this vision actually creates value ? Locally, for the enterprise, it seems so. But globally speaking the question is worth being asked because the related costs does not disappear but are shifted to the society or the future of the enterprise what, in fine, backfires in a long term perspective since it’s becoming harder to pay the debt caused by decisions made in the past. As cycles shorten, it may lead to a dead-end.

A couple of days ago, a started reading again The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business by Umair Haque.This book was already brilliant when it was issued even if it more comfortable to think that the author was exaggerating too much, that his predictions would never happen. Less than one year after, the least we can say is that he was right.

Many concepts and ideas developed in the book look innovating, disruptive…too much according to some even if the news tell us the contrary. A better explanation would be to say theiy’re thought-provoking. Among these ideas, there’s the one according to which enterprises have been borrowing their benefits while shifting costs to others for decades and that, one day, the debt becomes so big that the whole system jams.

Practically speaking it means that profitability is often overestimated because enterprises don’t assume all their costs that are shifted to the society of the future of the organization. Environmental costs, training costs…many of these things are known under the name of corporate social responsibility. If the whole costs was taken into account we would see that lots of enterprises are not socially profitable. Le system works until the day when shifted costs became so big that society can’t deal with them. And it backfires on the enterprise.

Social Business and triple bottom line experts (not the social business used to rebrand enterprise 2.0, the real Social Business) will find here some concepts they know quite well and that I’ll sum up using the words of Antoine Riboud when he was leading Danone : enterprise responsibility does not stop at the enterprise’s doors and making one’s ecosystem poorer to become oneself richer will cause one’s failure because it kills future markets.

I don’t claim I’m able to have such a deep thinking as Haque but, by thinking about these things again and again to assess how relevant they were, I ended asking myself a couple of questions.

Enterprise 2.0 and ROI : beyond numbers it’s about meaningful arbitrations

April 7, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The debate on the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 is far from its end even if I often have the impression that avoiding the question is a common easy answer. Either the “we don’t care” or the ‘it’s different, you can’t understand” answers don’t satisfy me.

When an enterprise is asked to invest energy, time, money, it’s legitimate to want to know what it will get in return. More precisely :

- if their will be any return

The answer is obvious : yes

- if this return will be a vague “better something”, nebulous and unseizable or if it will be measurable in a way or another, in a un unit that would not be too eccentric (money for instance…)

Here, my answer would be double. There are things that have a direct impact on opeations and thant can be measured and quantified. For instance the lenght of the innovation or sales cycle, the time saved by avoiding micro-coordination…

There are things that are not measurable by themselves but impact things that are. This is clearly demonstrated by Strategy Maps.The idea is to implement the mechanisms that will ensure that what’s invested to improve intangible will actually impact value creation. In brief, make sure that everything is conherent with the investments and that the way work is done is aligned with that in order investments are made profitable (it’s seldom said but businesses usually don’t suffer from a lack of talent or innovation…only a lack of coherence that impacts the whole value creation process, preventing processes to harness talents and innovation potential).

3°) If this return can be foreseeable in a mechanical and linear way.

Here, the answer is : no. In the other hand, between the exact prediction and the “we can’t predict so let’s five give up” I think there’s a long work to be done by searchers and specialists to be done. Without this work that will help to implement relevant measurement and predicition means, the risk is high to see managers piloting businesses with indicators that have nothing to do with the current reality, the way operations are done and the matter that is processed.

That said, there’s another side of the issue that should also be tackled. Basically, being sure that the investment will bring some benefits should be enough to start a project, regardless of the quantifiable predictability of the benefit. The latter matter when the point is not to choose between doing and not doing but arbitrate the choice between two possible investments. In this case it’s obvious that the chosen one will be the one with the highest return so both possibilities have to be comparable what implies being predictable.

Investment or consumption : sounds like “déjà vu”

February 19, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

In many countries there is an intense debate to know if governments should stimulate economy by boosting investment or consumption.

It’s about two clearly different approaches : in one case you try to limit the effects of the crisis and their impact on household (and so on enterprises as a side effect), in the other you try to build the foundations for a perenial restart, helping enterprises to build the futures.

Logically, when people and enterprises suffer what’s needed is to calm the pain down. But it prevents from dealing with the deep causes. If the causes are targeted, it helps to build better tomorrows but the effects will came later and in the meanwhile it hurts.

There is no miracle solutions. In an ideal world, people would prepare the future when everything’s all right and keep resources to kill the pain when it will come. In the real world, nothing is done when things are right (of course…since there’s nothing wrong so why change), people refuse to see the limits of the current situation et when things collapse so much resources are needed to fight the pain that nothing is left to deal with the deep causes and think long term;

That’s not without making me think of what happens to enterprises. An obsession for short term that makes them focus on local miracles when a global approach would be needed. By not looking further than the end of their noses, enterprises can only be affected without being able to anticipate. Nursing without really fighting the disease.

Criticizing people is a too easy thing ; if they act this way it’s becasue it’s what they’re asked to make them focus on what’s immediate instead of the core of things. So when something unforeseen happens (and unpredictability is the very nature of today’s economy, one of the key characteristics of knowledge economy) they can only react because anticipation is not in the management DNA. And the resources that are used to react are not available anymore to anticipate when things become more calm. Endless recuring process.

This propensity to be permanently off-beat is one of the causes of wild fluctuation economics and enterprises experience regularly. It’s called cycles. The good news is that a negative cycle always ends one day. The bad news is that so do positive cycles.

consommation, court terme, crise, investissement, long terme, relance