Last couple
of weeks I’ve been giving a number of speeches about the future of business
organizations. At the start of the talk I ask the question whether one can
imagine a completely ‘virtualized company’, in other words: ‘could a company
of, say, 40B$ turnover be managed and operated by one single person?’
Well, could
it?
In each of
the corporate divisions we can actually see some trends emerge that, if taken
to the extreme, would signify a complete virtualization of this function;
- R&D? think about what effects open innovation, open sourcing or consumer driven innovation would have…
- Manufacturing? just imagine if every family or community would own a 3D printer… not at all science fiction
- Marketing? aren’t trends like crowdsourcing and social buying making this function a bit irrelevant?
- IT? think of the consequences of DIY technology, cloud and consumerization…
And so on.
But
obviously, the future is rarely extreme. What all these trends really imply is
that the world increasingly becomes part of your operations, and hence it is
the nature of all these divisions’ responsibilities and competencies. Grossly
put the near future looks like this:
The full slide-deck is now available on slideshare!
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