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Hey, happy Monday!
The past week has been one of the toughest but also most productive ever since this whole working from home thing began, and today begins a new one that promises to be no less…
I also bought a bigger monitor because seeing the world in a 15-inch screen two months in a row was getting a little too complicated, but mostly because, as I think is happening to you too, you can finally call a piece of the house office. Who would have thought.
Before we begin, I’ll pass the ball to you. What will your week be like? (don’t use that word!)
37,000km under the seas
It would be more appropriate to say along the seas but it would have ruined the pun for the title of this section. The important thing is that the miles are real and are being funded by Facebook and other phone companies to wire all of Africa. The project is in fact called 2Africa.
Why do I tell you about it? Because it is a great strategy for reaching 2 billion customers.
Facebook is now no longer a pure computational product, made of code and algorithms. To support its growth it is also made of iron and fiber optics. But not
owns these cables, as we might easily imagine, to rent bandwidth (perhaps marginally), but to create the necessary conditions so that their experience can be relevant, even in that slice of the planet.
Try to imagine going on today’s Facebook with a low-spec device and at half the speed you’re used to here in Italy. Worse still surfing Instagram with all those pictures, videos and live feeds–like going back 10 years.
Well, if Facebook wants to sell advertising it needs people scroll through its feed as long as possible, but most importantly with the best possible experience. And the feed gets populated with user-generated content, so users need to have the ability to create more sophisticated content to upload… So in between content, it is possible to inject new advertising space that companies that want to enable their business models to take advantage of the potential of the network can buy…
Facebook has fully understood its role in the network. It has chosen partners that are complementary to its product, the telcos, which are outside its industry, to integrate and contribute to the growth of the whole system.
For telcos, the more people who love Facebook, the higher the demand for phones that are always sold with a data plan attached.
Facebook also recently got itself the largest library of memes with cultural references on the planet by paying $400M for it: purchased Giphy.
Gifs are not only the simplest video compression algorithm, with the acquisition thus extended brands’ access to sponsored content, but also a powerful tracking tool outside of Facebook itself, for example Giphy is integrated into Slack.
This strategic ability to merge with system is called the Value Network. And each company is integrated into a different Value Network, that is, a set of relationships in which its products/services are hierarchically grafted into the end-use system.
1 chain for each P
Value Chain × Products
I understand that this may sound complicated so I suggest a simplification. The network assumes that there are multipoint relationships and hierarchies, but you can simplify it by thinking of a chain, the Value Chain.
The chain that is made by a sequence of links. And the links are grafted into each other. Each link therefore represents who in the industry you will use to do your work as well as the next link will need your work to generate new value…
Have you ever thought about your role in the value chain and what you are doing to integrate yourself into this chain, facilitating the emergence of the conditions in which your product/service can thrive, instead of hard persuading people to buy?
Delivery Chain × Processes
Any product, even an idea, needs to be worked on in several stages. It probably goes through the entire organizational chart.
In the previous note, No. 18, I told you the story of Tom Wes opening his competitor’s computer case and exclaiming, “I can see the entire corporate organizational chart in the design of this product.”
But the organizational chart assumes that everyone has a well-established position, and that, you command from the top down and deliver from the bottom up. But is it still possible to do that?
This great Work-from-Home experiment has taught us that the future of work will be increasingly self-organized, decentralized, and collaborative, and people will need to navigate the nodes of the organization and understand not only how the connection to the next link occurs, but they will have to be responsible for how to make the transmission more efficient.
Trust and Decision Making Chain × People
Have you ever heard of Social Network Analysis? It does not apply to social networks such as Facebook or Tik Tok, but to one’s own organization.
If we analyzed it by taking into consideration the actual role played by individual nodes, i.e., people, we might find that information and decisions do not flow as in the organizational chart printed in the company profile.
Social Network Analysis can be conducted with a simple questionnaire or by analyzing the relational dynamics between people, even anonymously and taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence that confidentially, ?, analyzes the messages that are exchanged daily between team members, taking into consideration volume, frequency, recurrence and quality of communications, among other numerous variables.
You may find, for example, that the person you wanted to fire because he or she was seemingly unimpressive is actually a central node in the transfer of trust, delegation skills, and effective decision making. Or differently, a key person is disconnected from the organization but connected to customers.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
– Christiaan Barnard
From which chain do you think it is most urgent for you to start working?
Good work!
Make yourself heard.
