Strategy as Tires: This decision involving a collection of issues has us selecting one n-dimensional normal among many. Among those normals, we have pre-normals, normals, and post-normals. Which ones will teach us the most? .
7:11 . .
Strategy as Tires: So what will each of these decisions teach us? .
7:13 . . .
Strategy as Tires: Which of those lessons being taught are lessons we did not learn the last time? What kept us from learning those lessons? .
7:14 .
Strategy as Tires: Do we have a lesson plan? .
7:16 .
Strategy as Tires: Which of those normal distributions involve our value chain partners?
Strategy as Tires: Does the application do what the surveys said needed to be done? .
8:02 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Do the users actually do what they said they would do with the application? Do they use the application the way they said they would? Is this a new behavior, or have they had problems using the application in the past? .
8:04 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Do the application tails match the user tails? Is this user an expert, knowledgeable, or a novice? Is this user only using specific parts of the application or all of it? .
8:05 . .
Strategy as Tires: Do we need to be trained, or does the user? .
8:06 .
Strategy as Tires: Are we anticipating our needs or the user’s needs?
Strategy as Tires: So we hired you to code? But, you don’t want to code for a project manager. And, you don’t want to code for a product manager. OK, but you insist on getting paid? You missed something somewhere.
6:07 . .
Strategy as Tires: What are we supposed to do with you? .
6:09 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: You’ve been here for less than ten days. Well, you will work for your team lead, your project manager, and your product manager. No, you cannot work for yourself. .
6:12 . .
Strategy as Tires: Your friends say what? Get one of them to hire you. .
6:14 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Ultimately, a client, a customer, or a prospect pays us. We code what they need. You have not done that. Not yet. And, not from here on out. Yeah, you’ve been locked out of your account this morning. It won’t be unlocked. Maybe you should pretend that you have a boss.
Strategy as Tires: Ideas get erased all the time. Have any ideas you subscribed to not only disappeared but were forcibly erased? .
9:07 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Does the erased idea still work? When did it stop working? By what criteria did it stop working? Was that the same criteria under which it worked like a champ? No. Were the original criteria ever held to? .
9:10 . . .
Strategy as Tires: When someone thanks you for the history lesson, do they think they can ignore that lesson these days? .
9:12 . .
Strategy as Tires: The Datapoint 4004 eventually became the Intel 8080 processor. Does anyone ever say that?
Strategy as Tires: Long ago, I did something that my bosses didn’t ask me to do. I got everything else done, so nobody asked me to stop. Everyone wanted to get on board. A boss that wasn’t my boss started doing the same thing for her own reasons. She asked me how I did one particular thing. We were on different platforms, but we were enabling the soon to arrive future. .
6:32 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Several employments later, walking into the hotel that served as the venue where our professional association met, I asked my former boss’s boss how a particular project was going. Not well. She told me that I was ahead of them. .
6:33 . . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Nobody will tell you what to do. Nobody will tell you to improve your processes. Nobody will tell you to be more efficient than we already are. Everybody expects you to get the work done. Nobody tells you to define yourself, to expect more of yourself, to expect more of us, or to change before any of us thought to change. Do it anyway. Want it. .
6:34 . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Nobody will ask others to help you. You won’t ask either. Asking for help is the hardest thing any of us do. They will help you because you are doing something they want to do. Their help might force you to change your processes. Their help might force you to manage when you would rather do. .
6:36 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: When you move on to your next thing, remember that they did it. It wasn’t about you. Thank them, your peers that pitched in. And, thank those bosses that enabled your success. .
6:38 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: When you thank them, this conversation did not happen. When you do something, do it because you are defining yourself. I got you the bosses and the organization that let you define yourself. It’s our future. You already know what future you and we want.
Strategy as Tires: Now, everyone can set up their own twitter server. We will do that as a means of capturing requirements. Each reqtweet will get a unique identifier. We will limit each reqtweet to 180 characters. .
8:32 . . .
Strategy as Tires: A requirement might be too short, but it won’t be too long. Complete sentences are required. .
8:33 . . .
Strategy as Tires: It is an experiment. It will have problems. It will improve. It will integrate into our existing development systems. .
8:35 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Yes, some of you will hate it. Some of you will love it. And, some of you will be indifferent. It is a technology that will undergo adoption just like every other technology around here. .
8:36 . . .
Strategy as Tires: Controlled vocabularies will be enforced. Again, developers do not define the terminology. Yeah, not something you want to hear on a Monday morning.
Strategy as Tires: Every new technology, every carrier, will have a controlled vocabulary of its own—likewise, every new product and productization. Client’s and their verticals have their own vocabularies as well. It’s not the developer’s job to make up words. Nor is it the developer’s job to pick sides in an argument over words. .
7:13 . . .
Strategy as Tires: Arguments over words are vast in scope both inside our organization and out in the real world. Words make meanings. We encode meanings. .
7:16 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Disambiguating means choosing which user uses and the context of that use. That means making decisions. Wide words exist. Wide meanings do not. .
7:18 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Yes, there are implicit meanings. Some jobs to be done are taught by, learned by, and done by doing. Machine learning works well when transferring and realizing implicit meanings. .
7:21 . .
Strategy as Tires: Anyway, much work needs to get done. That’s always a good time to hire. Attending to our long game.
Strategy as Tires: Financial turbulence contextualizes all business processes as multiplicative processes, which have lognormal distributions. As such, they exhibit regressions to their tails. Every company in a given category will incur regressions to their tails in the same dimensions to the same outlier events. .
6:20 . . .
Strategy as Tires: But, this happens to linear systems in financial turbulence. Non-linear systems can get to a lognormal distribution without financial turbulence. .
6:21 . .
Strategy as Tires: Did the market leader introduce a non-linear factor purposefully? .
6:23 . . .
Strategy as Tires: Where did the market leader introduce that non-linearity? Did the CXOs do it or some functional unit leader? .
6:24 . .
Strategy as Tires: When they introduced that non-linearity, did they have a solution at hand that they embedded in their processes?
Strategy as Tires: We’ve noticed that you have not been spending on the usual scheduled maintenance of your organization. My car caught on fire because of that. Don’t do that. Get caught up on the maintenance by the end of the month. Don’t cost manage your way to oblivion. We have plenty of money. .
8:11 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: You’ve demonstrated to us that you should never run a company that is in the tornado. Never. So when we don’t assign you to those opportunities, don’t ask us why? And, don’t ask us to assign you to one. .
8:14 . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: We put you in the continuous innovation organization for reasons. Enjoy it. Don’t worry. You are here for the rest of your life. We can’t in good faith sell the cash cow for which you work. All of our cash cows are sold into acquiring companies that will put their acquired companies through a tornado. .
8:15 . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Those kinds of problems are easily solved if you are a holding company that holds a lot of companies. Discontinuous innovation births lots of companies. Market leaders in their verticals may never become an also ran company in its horizontal. Yes, we’ll leave it there. On to the next technology. .
8:16 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Last night, I had dinner outside because of the pandemic. Somehow, the staff didn’t think that dust covering the table was a problem. It wasn’t, but the napkin I used to clean the table left me with no napkin. And, yes, that turned into a mess during the meal. I’ve had better service elsewhere.
Strategy as Tires: So you were hired to challenge the status quo? You don’t like value-based pricing. Yes, the first time we did it, there were people that didn’t like it. It worked, but that wasn’t convincing for them. I put them in other economically distressed units. Eventually, they advocated for it. Experience teaches. Are you ready to be taught? .
6:04 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Those that didn’t know what value-basing was liked the watered down versions that came along after that actionable version. Like innovation these days, anything except innovating. The proliferation of the vocabulary doesn’t help. .
6:05 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: The old reason to innovate had to do with creating economic wealth. These days it might create wealth, but not economic wealth. Nobody creates economic wealth these days. Investors won’t put money in any such thing. .
6:07 . .
Strategy as Tires: We create new worlds. We create economic wealth. We bootstrap to do that. .
6:09 . .
Strategy as Tires: When you take VC money, you have begun your exit. But, letting an activist investor buy your stock amounts to an exit as well.
Strategy As Tires 