A Company is like a Sphere
Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit - I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring.
A company is like a sphere.
As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the large a company gets, way more people get embedded and hidden from the end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles.
As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a less-than-optimal thing - what percentage of your corporate attention span is customer-focused?
Our Challenge is to poke some pockets into the surface, and get more surface area exposed to the outside air.
A company is like a sphere.
As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the large a company gets, way more people get embedded and hidden from the end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles.
As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a less-than-optimal thing - what percentage of your corporate attention span is customer-focused?
Our Challenge is to poke some pockets into the surface, and get more surface area exposed to the outside air.
- Will this help a company go farther? It seems to work for golf balls ...
- Will this make the company more human? Perhaps, in a self-fulfilling / reverse fractal kind of way ...
- Will rough edges generate incremental profit? Some counterintuitive friction ...
- Heisenburg KM (July 13, 2004)
- Customer DNA - A Different Take on Understanding Markets and Networks (June 11, 2005)
- Misapplying the Pareto principle (January 7, 2006)
- Interesting How the Mind Works (October 1, 2007)
- Innovation That Matters - Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
- Failing Faster (June 14, 2009)
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Labels: business value of IT, collaboration, communication, innovation, Knowledge Management, people management, SAP, Social Networks
posted by James P. MacLennan at 8:49 PM
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