Manmeet Singh's List: hive

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  From their current Harvard Business Review article, The Shift Index
• eveals a dramatic increase in performance pressure on U.S. companies. Their average return on assets (ROA) has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965, despite the fact that labor productivity has improved. Worse yet, even the highest-performing companies are struggling to maintain their ROA levels and losing their leadership positions at an ever-faster rate. The paradox of falling ROA alongside growing productivity is explained at least in part by the rising total compensation of knowledge workers and other talented employees, and by consumers’ growing power over vendors that end up “competing away” their cost savings. An even closer look at the situation shows a fundamental mismatch between the mind-set of today’s companies and the environment in which they compete….

• ideas will resonate with those around the Enterprise 2.0 movement, but the reality is that most uptake of those technologies are point, departmental solutions: what Hagel speaks of here is a fundamental realignment of core business processes to take advantage of the new agility.

   

  Trying to teach an old dog new tricks

   

  The bankrupting of General Motors - and sadly presumably of many of their supplier and support ecosphere - and their subsequent rebirth as a new leaner organization is a good conceptual example of the morning after. Will it be business as usual: the command and control, waterfall development models and so on that ultimately failed, or will new concepts and ideas be allowed to prevail?

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