Monday, June 16, 2008

Ricardo Semler - Catalyst of Change

I am impressed by this Brazilian guy due to his innovative ideas about running a successful business.
Could be good learning point for Higher Management of dull and dump blue chips.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/apr/27/theobserver.observerbusiness7
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/302/
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/308/

I enjoyed these lectures and would completely agree with Ricardo's ideas. There are still things can be improved or changed depending on industry segment but in general this is the way for future.

Inovations - Out of box thinking

There is a lack of innovation in the big companies. e.g IBM, Google, HP, etc.
Let’s talk about Google; the core innovation in Google was from two friends, who develop a search code in the beginning. I do not know any product or service which was developed after that. Only other popular products from Google are acquisition of small innovative companies. The same pattern you can see across the board in all major companies. This is not specific to IT only. We can see this too in other industry segments too.
I think the main reason for this is due to the close company structures. Most of the big companies have a big R&D center and every body working in the R&D center is getting monthly salary for doing an innovation. An innovation never happened in this way before and will never happen in future. Most of the R&D center just improves the product to the next level. For example Intel Processor is always a processor and it is not an innovation to just increase the speed and decrease the size of the processor. The main technology behind it stays same.
Look on Automobile industry; nothing had changed from last 100 years. Around 100 years before you had a car with 4 wheels, one staring, few gears, 2 or 4 door on the side and today you have the same just the speed and comfort changed.
For innovation; out of box thinking is required which could not grow in the legacy form of top down management of business. An innovator can not be judged on his capability to innovate some thing in a specific time period.
I think two things need to be changed to have innovative business. First the company structures should change from top down management to flat structure. Second is to create pool of intelligent people without giving them any target to achieve. Of course an R&D center will be still required to improve the innovation.

Think Cloudy

Business application for sharing business resources. Every big corporate have number of fixed computers with a lot of storage (P2P) and processing resources (Cloud computing). Why not using them together to make it bigger storage and process CPUs. Time shift in the world can help them to use idle resources from one to an other place.

This is some thing where Google, IBM and others are currently working. But in my opinion a new startup could gain the market much faster and easier as compare to big giants due to lack of innovations in the big companies.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=152754

Electric cars - New origin of Innovation

Kathmandu, Nepal, has one of the highest per-capita rates of electric vehicles in the world.
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2008/05/25/rivers.nepal.rickshaw.cnn

The most interesting part is the use of patrol stations as charging stations. Looks like a transformation which can not happen in developed world due to domination of Oil companies and Car manufacturers.

Electric car hits the road in fuel-starved Gaza
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-genius-helps-beseiged-city-survive-a-year-of-israels-blockade-846258.html