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Flashback
I have received so much positive feedback on Note No.22 last week in which I proposed a different, let’s say business-oriented, reading of Elon Musk’s space mission. Did you read it? At the bottom of this article is the entire archive.
While all our social feeds, in unified networks, were showing us posts with the interior design (video) (made in Italy by Dallara) of the control booth interface and presenters’ sweatshirts (available for purchase here, man, woman)… I wanted to bring to your attention the OMTM, the one metric that matters, that is. $/Kg.
This trip was important because it served to give the space economy a new baseline on the cost of transporting a kilogram of something (instrumentation, people, materials) into orbit.
Improving this metric has instantly unlocked the potential of entire related industries such as tourism, pharmaceuticals, energy, communications, and security.
Therefore I also invite you to ask:
What are the metrics that matter in your business?
What about in your life?
Old Business vs New Business
As the engines pushed the rocket past the Earth’s atmosphere, I realized that there is one constant common to particularly innovative and profitable businesses, which is that of not be subject to the laws of gravity.
New companies, with business models enabled by the cloud and reduced computing power costs, that have no limit to growth precisely because they do not have to move anything but data.
Relentless algorithms designed to redefine experiences by dematerializing them and making them instantly accessible anywhere.
Intellectual works of computational design that give rise to products and services with precise qualities.
They increase their value over time
Unlike the classical industry, which halves the value of its products as soon as they leave the store.
Think for a second about how much your car depreciated as soon as it left the dealership compared to how much the Spotify algorithm’s ability to find music you like has improved compared to the first day of use when it was … empty.
They have no physical and geographical constraints
Simply by changing the text strings of the interface messages you can locate an application in a new market. Often the limitation is not even the device, back to Spotify and the fact that the same algorithm lives in your cell phone, your computer, your smart TV, Google home, and your car. It exists everywhere always available.
They evolve constantly, instantaneously, on a global scale
Imagine the cold sweat of a Facebook developer that the moment he publishes his code, the new feature will enter the lives of billions of people. Contrast that with any other product that needs to be distributed by a physical network…the jump is seconds to weeks.
No more Digital Transformation!
These new businesses are not transformations of existing businesses. They are the result of a new way of getting creative engineers and managers to work together.
Being completely digitally transformed is a given, it is not a competitive advantage nor is it a process from which one can choose to escape. One is simply so because one exists at this particular moment in history.
Even a company that makes mozzarella, bricks or nails today must have an IT department. Software is eating the world. It was 2011.
People often confuse digital transformation with translating all paper forms into forms and tables to delegate to the customer to fill out. There that is exactly the wrong way to transform.
Instead, these new businesses are the result of deeper transformations in the entire operating system of organizations:
- from machine centred to human centred
- from financially driven to design driven
5 ways to beat gravity
A few days a community member wrote to me privately saying, “I am fascinated by this approach but how does it apply to my business? I build real estate…” An activity that perhaps more than any other requires perfect knowledge of the laws of gravity!
I am responding to Andrea hoping to respond to you as well if you think defeating gravity is mission impossible in your industry or business model.
Most important is the experience by which you enable your customers to be better than those who do not use your products or services. What does it mean to be better? That thanks to you they accomplish something important to them, which they probably already do, but with your product they accomplish in a much faster, easier, safer way to do it.
For example, buy/lease a property. How can this be done faster, more securely and on a national scale? Here’s how Casavo does it, blog
You can, for example, evolve in these specific areas where you might have bottlenecks:
If your business is
- travel Intensive → digitizes
- people/skill intensive → produce (does it exist in Italian?).
- low-profit → creates a system
- undifferentiated → make it different
- crowded out by fixed costs → simplifies the operating model
Are you ready to defy the laws of physics?
What area do we start working from?
Make yourself heard.
