Davison Creators has just published an interview I did with them. There were some interesting questions, and you can catch the full blurb here.
The company itself has a fascinating 20 year track record of commercialising ideas, and if you have the time, you can dig around the Davison web site where there are some relevant case studies.
It’s one thing to spend time talking about where things are going, it’s another when you encounter some of those things. Sometimes even I fail to mentally move things from the theoretical world to the real world. Two recent examples:
1. Most people know about the potential for hybrid and electric vehicles, but not many extend that knowledge to a business context. I now use hybrid taxis where ever possible, and have some fascinating conversations with drivers. Each one tells the same story about fuel consumption: in a petrol taxi they would spend up to $80 every two days. In the hybrid they spend less than this each week. It’s a quantum shift in the economics of transportation. Note that it’s economics and not the feel good factor that drives cabbies to move to hybrids.
2. On a completely different note (if you’ll excuse the pun) I was listening to an interview with David Byrne (ex-Talking Heads singer). He said that the last music-superstore just closed down in New York, and now it’s no longer easy to buy CDs in this type of retail environment. People know that digital music is the leading format, but it’s not until this sort of shift happens in the real world that you start to see tipping points.
Here endeth the lesson for today…
From the Dec/Jan 09 issue of Fast Company magazine comes a great article about Cisco. Several paragraphs of note including:
Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, [CEO John Cambers] says, is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”
Chambers is convinced that the role of the CEO has to morph. He recalls a lesson he learned working for An Wang of Wang Laboratories, whom he has often called one of the smartest people he’s ever known: “One person cannot anticipate a market transition. At Wang, we transitioned four times, but we missed the fifth, from mini computers to PC and software. If you don’t catch them [all], you leave your company behind.”
It is Ron Ricci’s (Cisco VP) job to translate Chambers’s ideas into action — as he puts it, “I’m John’s scaling machine” — and he was the chief architect with Chambers of the new quasi-socialist Cisco. They were inspired in part, Ricci says, by management guru Gary Hamel’s ideas about the need to democratize strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation.
Full article here.