If you ask me what Charles Leadbetter (see October Fast Company, The Amateur Revolution) is calling Pro-Ams - "committed, network amateurs working to professional standards" - and what Bruce Sterling calls spime-wranglers - will have at least as much of a massive structural effect on business as inexpensive, talented labor in Asia, etc. Now this is ultra-cheap and globally distributed taken to the extreme (can you say volunteer enthusiasts self-organizing literally everywhere in the world). And you've heard of how Linux was created, haven't you? But that's another post entirely. And much of it can be good news - there's opportunity in structural shifts - if you can perceive it that way.
In my last post I express sincere concern (even if it comes across trite) that folks feel like the best gamble is to play the same ol' same ol' game - and crank it up a few notches. So they work 80 hours - ok, we'll work 90 and throw in a free gizmo.
Mexico, for example, is losing jobs to China and India. India is beginning to lose jobs to China. Cambodia worries that a good part of its textile business will go to China once U.S. import quotas that favor it are removed. - Confronting Reality, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
Trust me you don't want your position statement to be "we're the cheapest" - it's a death spiral.
Don't play a game you can't win - reinvent it. Play another game. Break the rules. Bend your mind. Ask: Is there another way? Why this way? Here's just one example:
In major league baseball, as everyone knows, the rich keep getting richer and the poor get poorer. Teams in big markets will always be able to outspend those in smaller ones because they have more revenues. Who can compete with Yankees' owner George Steinbrenner's vast treasure chest in hiring talent? The Yankees, along with teams like the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers, have framed a business model based on rich television and radio revenues that provide them with pots of money to bid for highly regarded players.Oakland is a small market team supposedly doomed to also-ran status. And yet with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, [general manager] Billy Beane defied conventional wisdom in one of the most tradition bound of businesses and created one of the winningest records of the past several years.
As related in Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, Beane discovered the reality that more than a century of conventional wisdom about the basics of the baseball business was wrong. He questioned traditional critieria used to judge the value of players such as batting average, runs batted in, and homeruns. They didn't correlate, he observed, with the actual value of the contributions players made to teams. Beane began using new criteria in measuring what is a useful ball player....Scouting players using the new fact-based criteria, Beane was able to assemble a team of affordable players undervalued by traditional measures.
In business terms, Beane had the business savvy to recognize that structural change in the baseball industry had put his organization at a disadvantage. Instead of entering a losing battle by trying to figure out different strategies for success using players selected on the old criteria, as other small-market teams were doing, he rethought the very basis of success. - Confronting Reality, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
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