Light foot print strategy (english)

The article of Charles Edward Ring, member of the Executive Committee of Roland Berger in Les Echos, is interesting. It develops an analogy between the U.S. military strategy and the company's future. Taking the idea that military organizations prefigure the future (see or review on this many elements in Transit City). Try to apply these trends to the fields of mobility and transport companies.

Skills selected for this future are “VUCA”: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. These concepts have been mentioned several times in this blog (see in particular the MetaNote 11 Introduction to complex thought). Given these elements, the strategy can be summed up by "light foot print": increase agility, adaptability to future unknown, the learning of new techniques and new environments quickly, form yourself continuously. The proposed seven principles describe in MetaNote 1 to survive across crisis. On the contrary, all wars yesterday were based on pyramidal structures and heavy equipments. Thus the light becomes the main feature, and the footprint the symbol.

Specifically, this strategy results in three actions: Drone, Special Forces and cyber attacks. A fourth element seems necessary: Spy. How can we translate these strategic choices in the industrial world ?

Military Drones are industrial robots

"To automate, emigrate or die" said Jack Welch, former head of GE, the industrial robot aims to reduce your "industrial footprint." Robots will become more versatile, flexible. The automotive industry has already integrated the robot. Some will go very far in automation to produce cars more faster, hyper-specialized to all markets, adapted at the last moment. In addition, reducing the need to produce new vehicles, using existing vehicles, incorporate them into your ecosystem. Every effort to use the minimum amount of raw material involved in the relief of your industrial footprint, of your capacity to change your route.

Special forces become small teams trained in the unknown

A previous article already described this imperative: the future can only be practiced with "crew" highly trained. Like all phases of exploration of new territories, team training is imperative. Military special forces become, in the company, “pioneers” teams that will explore the future of the company, its future business models, its future relations with the customers, its future experiences that will be proposed to the consumer. These crews won’t be organized by traditional hierarchical structures, they operate in network, "reliance" with leaders. Of course, these teams will report to the highest level of the pyramid structure for both to send signals directly, but also to experiment "the power of networks" (read the book of Yochai Benkler, The Power of the networks). Gradually, to survive, but also because these modes of collective intelligence are more efficient for the unexpected (VUCA), companies will configure themselves more as independent and connected crews.

Cyber attacks are obviously mastered the use of cyberspace

To be light, dematerialization is not an option. Anything that can be digitized should be. No longer have in your office, not partition between different services, put everything in the cloud. Considering the potential of these techniques, the company will be forced to rethink its organization, its management, its collaborative processes and innovations. How to Synchronize people "dispersed" in common goals? When people are physically present on the same place, what types of activities are to be carried out? What are the modes of collaboration in cyberspace (read the book of Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: for an anthropology of cyberspace)?

To these three pillars, the knowledge of the other to better anticipate, plan better, targeted actions, also seems indispensable: military spy.

The spy, who knows the 'other', the citizen / consumer for the company

Market knowledge was determined by marketing. This allowed designing products and services. But faced with the multitude (read article Transports to the age of many), new tools, new techniques, new approaches are needed. Consumers become producers / consumers, How to include themselves in strategic processes, identify the "best" consumer, how to influence the influencers, enabling them to participate in innovation. To do this, marketing is no longer applicable, only empathy and seduction may apply.

Robots, crews, cyberspace, and the citizen / consumer

Once you have mastered robots and reduces the use of raw material to a minimum, you have formed several teams to explore your own future, your have digitalized your knowledge, processes and therefore profoundly rethought your organizations, included closer the best customers becoming partners, you will find that the concept of “company” is no longer appropriate.

All these capabilities, these talents, this collective intelligence will no longer focus only in business companies. This pure creativity is fully distributed in peer-to-peer relationships already visible in the "weak signals", supported by production tools which will be also distributed. Pioneers build today these concepts, semantic and ontology of theses coming modes of cooperation between citizens, like Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation).

Evolve in this future need to prepare yourself, and train individually and collectively.