Strategy as Tires: Ideas show up as house guests. Hopefully, someone volunteers to house them elsewhere soon. .
6:17 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Your job isn’t to come up with ideas. Your job is to get them housed elsewhere. But, be picky. Their housing will drive your salary for the next twenty-five years. .
6:19 . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: A new theory will change the way a job-to-be-done is done. Is that job-to-be-done being done under the old theory, the current practice? Does the new theory generate a larger constraint envelope than the current practice? Is the new theory further reaching? .
6:22 . . .
Strategy as Tires: We will be restating the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC) as seven independent finite fields. That should be some useful math. .
6:25 .
Strategy as Tires: A closed-ended question encodes its answers in a finite field.
Strategy as Tires: So you decided to join us as we bring our next discontinuous innovation to life? We will be just barely started after twenty-five years. You are committed for that long haul? .
8:31 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: That means this undertaking is an infinite game. That means short-term thinking is forbidden. You’ve demonstrated that you understood those two things in your work to date. That’s our reason for asking you to join us on this undertaking. .
8:33 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Being an annuity person, you know that we’ve invested in you for the rest of your life. We exist to keep on keeping on. We are not going to go out of business in seventeen years. We are not rushing to get out of business sooner than that either. .
8:34 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Disruptions happen to companies in the late phases of the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC). Taking VC money to disrupt them only makes you a monopolist that doesn’t have much longer to live. .
8:36 . . .
Strategy as Tires: When you become the market assigned, near monopolist in the TALC’s early phases, you don’t have to disrupt anyone. Those companies that get disrupted do so in their own hands.
Strategy as Tires: Strategic alignment happens by phase. Each phase has its own tail. A tail is an ordered collection of factors. The first factor a (a<90°) is the tallest, longest, and steepest factor. The last factor b (b≤0) is shortest and flattest. The last factor might not known to you and it might not converge with the x-axis. Typically, the first three factors cover 80% of the volatility. More coverage is a matter of budget and time. .
6:02 . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: The interfaces between phases are organizational units that report to corporate headquarters. Consider them to be a horizontal. They are wide. They own the chasm and tornado units within the bowling alley. The M&A tornado on the continuous side of the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC) are likewise headquarters interface units. .
6:03 . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: What organization is going to ensure that a departing product and market population is transferred without loss? The interface units see to that. Long before one of the CEOs brings a beef to me, I’ve already heard. I’ve already been to that CEO’s office on one of my management by walking around (MBWA) trips. .
6:05 . . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: You’ve all been trained on how to succeed as CEOs of your phase-specific units. Your staff has been doing their jobs for quite a while. Follow their advice. Talk to your mentors frequently. Ask questions. Some of you will be going into new to us units that never existed before. Teach. We will learn. But, as new as it will be, phase-specificity will we new to you. .
6:07 . .
Strategy as Tires: New means hyperbolic space. New means we don’t have big data yet. Don’t assume normality—no, yet about it.
Strategy as Tires: Reading these descriptions of strategy frameworks makes me glad I’m not running a an organization that does continuous innovation. I hired others to do that. .
6:04 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: The point of hiring others is to hire people that have skills and experiences that you don’t have. What you have to know is how to hire and enable those people. They are unlike you. .
6:05 . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Each phase of the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC) is different. Each phase has its own strategy palette. The company doing business in a given phase will be measured like every other company doing business in that phase. Success is defined by those in that phase. .
6:08 . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Stochastic systems leverage volatility. Without randomness, stochastic systems do not work. Systems built on date-stamped transactions are temporal, rather than random. When a system is assumed to be stochastic, why do we blame prediction? Blame the assumption instead. .
6:10 .
Strategy as Tires: A blame game cannot be won. Stop trying. Own it instead.
Strategy as Tires: Strategy as Tires: I started this morning reading a bit more of Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers. In endnote 8 of chapter 2, she cites Terrence Deacon’sThe Symbolic Species in a discussion of what Oakley is calling the encryption/decryption problem of mathematics. .
8:08 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Terrence Deacon shocked me with his “Differentiation is effectively recursive division, and integration is effectively recursive multiplication ….” Yes, shocked. No calculus teacher ever said that. .
8:11 . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Deacon continues with “… carried out indefinitely, i.e. to infinitesimal values (which is possible because they depend on convergent series, ….” Yes, still getting over the shock, I will now and forever see convergence as the end of a parse, a recursive parse, or the boundary, the constraint, on the recursion. .
8:13 . . .
Strategy as Tires: In yesterday’s post on the Product Strategist blog, Intersection, I wrote about encryption before I read Oakley’s endnote. .
8:15 . . . . . . . . . . .
All of mathematics is a matter of parsing, parsing a realization from some particular point of view while looking at a particular representation. Parsing is based on a taxonomy. That taxonomy is based on the realization of an ontology. That taxonomy is only possible after the discontinuous innovation that gave rise to a new onton, or added that new onton to the tree that is that ontology. That taxonomy is the basis for the parser of the realization of that ontology’s point of view. The new onton, or sortable is realized in a new taxon in the taxonomy’s tree. .
8:16 . . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: I remember my recursive COBOL, my professor was all structured programming, so she hated it. My program had a logic error in it. It was easily corrected. In an ordinary loop, you do n iterations and knowing the n you want to stop at, you do so. In a recursive loop, you don’t use an n, instead you stop when you hit the loop invariant—very old news for a lisp programer. .
8:18 . . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Our corporation is built on Moore’s parse of the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC). We are a recursion. Our addressable markets have fixed sizes, some n0, n1, n2, …. They are finite. Never lose sight of your n. Growth can be such a dust storm. When you sell too far, or too fast, you get lost in that dust storm. The TALC is an asynchronous clock. Beware. Missed quarters, dead companies, an antitrust violations happen when the n is ignored.
Strategy as Tires: We’ve always had concerns. But, we did not organize around them. We organized around functional units and business units. We organized into verticals and horizontals. We got epistemic cultures, aka functional cultures, aka specialist cultures. And, we got generalist culture, aka just another functional culture, but one that captured the priority. Aspect orientation can be expressed in terms of those epistemic and generalist cultures. Or, not, which is a third way, but one that will develop as we go. .
9:19 . .
Strategy as Tires: Apparently, many of our efforts have involved aspects. .
9:22 . .
Strategy as Tires: This time we are talking organizational structure, not code structure. .
9:24 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: These days many are writing if-less code. Eventually, organizational structure will follow. We’ve already realized an if-less organizational structure relative to the technology adoption lifecycle. .
9:27 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Another concern is finiteness. We have operated on false infiniteness. Finiteness puts different answers on the table in some cases, which is not an if-less concern. Correct or convenient, chose one! No.
Strategy as Tires: Well, you think we should be doing disruptive innovation. No, that is not our game. We do discontinuous innovation. A discontinuous innovation disrupts by accident rather than intention. When we disrupt, we apologize and try to help the disrupted over their disruption. These days disrupters on the continuous side of the TALC are doing something else. .
8:10 . . . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: We create new categories, new worlds, new economic wealth, new industries, new careers, new value chains, new employment, new prosperity for all. That last thing is in our vision statement. If you can’t support that, let me know. When you do, tell me what you want to do next with your career. I will make a few calls. But, everyone here must be on the same page. Disruption is not on that page. .
8:18 . . .
Strategy as Tires: See another Linkedin post on the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC) and machine learning, “Chaos and Complexity Take 002.” .
8:20 .
Strategy as Tires: Will the day ever come when I don’t have to deal with nonsense?
Strategy as Tires: To get the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC) machine learning (ML) project started, we need to know our feedback loops and rule bases. If you know these things, let us know. .
8:10 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Last year it was product-led growth. This year it is TALC-ML. They are pop-up projects that were not programmed into the hiatus efforts. These pop-up projects will not be finished before we go back to shipping products in January. .
8:15 . . .
Strategy as Tires: These pop-up projects are becoming a habit, a bad habit. We are not proactive enough. .
8:18 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Next year, we will plan on one pop-up project. We will keep people at hand. We’ve been lucky because any of our people are not traveling far for the holidays. .
8:20 . . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: We will build some processes and staff, to find these concerns well ahead of our need to deal with these pop-up projects during the holiday hiatus. When we deal with these things during the hiatus, we are dealing with unexpectedly building whole organizations from scratch rather than what we anticipated in the coming year. The latter being our ordinary process.
Strategy as Tires: Yesterday, I read a paper on some research that applied machine learning to the long standing problem of determining where a given product was in the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC). It can be done on an existing category that has many years of marketing data. It finds the attraction basins and attractors for the TALC by phase. The results are industry-wide, rather than company-specific. .
8:10 . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Yesterday, I wrote short LinkedIn article about the introduction of a paper reporting how they found the attraction basins and attractors for TALC phases from historical data. I read the whole paper later. Big news! .
8:15 . . .
Strategy as Tires: I could pick some more bones with that paper, but I won’t. The authors never read Foster. Oh, well. .
8:18 . .
Strategy as Tires: If phase confusion had not caused the dot bust, where would we be today? .
8:20 . .
Strategy as Tires: I’ve been looking for new research on the TALC. That paper is that new research. More to come from other researches.
Strategy as Tires: What did you read over the last day? Did you apply what you read? Did you add it to your practices, and then to your doing? Did that reading enable you to do what others cannot? Can you see what others cannot? .
4:47 . . . .
Strategy as Tires: Do the things you read ask you to be someone else? Ask you to reach further? Ask us, our company, to do something it has not done yet. How would we enable that? .
4:48 . . .
Strategy as Tires: What citation network did you wade into while you were reading that book? What social network did that book connect you with. .
4:50 . . . . . .
Strategy as Tires: What technology adoption lifecycles (TALC) were involved? Was the topic in that book hard or easy? Did that book make it easier? Can you do something that you couldn’t do before? Did you notice how you changed your TALC phase? .
4:52 . .
Strategy as Tires: When you changed your TALC phase, do you do that alone, or did you do that with others? Did you go together?
Strategy As Tires 