When I had been younger, one of the best songs was entitled “Birth, School, Work, Death”. Those were the times once I was inspired by English punk rings. I was taking into consideration the GodFathers, who performed this song, while I was reading Megan McArdle’s article about government and the Affordable Care Act. I like McArdle’s take on politics, society, and business.
Unlike a great deal of journalists, she’s acquired business experience and comes with an outsider’s take on many topics I find refreshing. But she dropped into a capture lately about innovation. That is where Birth, School, Work, Death come in. The Godfathers were arguing that of life could be summed up in four significant activities, and that the path was predestined.
It was all a bit fatalistic. You are born, go to college, you work and you die. Megan, in her article connected above, was applying a corollary to businesses. A business is borne, is interesting and innovative for a short spurt, ossifies, and matures, and dies then. That is clearly a rather fatalistic viewpoint on business, but one I have to admit seems rather true. A sort of Birth, Innovate, Defend, Ossify, Die mantra for business.
It’s true that lots of businesses proceed through this cycle. In the past, the design and stages were almost predictable. A business was born, grew through a long time slowly, created a number of interesting products and services, and settled into an extended maturity and eventual obsolescence. Firms would proceed through this trajectory over a span of 30-50 years or more. Today That timeframe and evolutionary speed seems almost impossible.
- Local Permits
- How will you treat sale of old news papers while preparing final accounts of NPO
- 7265 Welders & Related Machine Operators
- Soon anything is “innovative” and nothing is
- Storing passwords at your fingertips of the computer
- 25 percent, compounded quarterly
- 1 . Changing Background, Text colors, and other Attributes
- A Challenge
1. The development cycle isn’t discrete but constant. 2. The thought of defending a customer foundation is obsolete. There are too many rivals and too much change to allow you to defend. You need to play offense. 3. You do not own the customer. 4. The environment is changing. When the united states was the dominant colossus of the economy, we could move slowly through each phase and have an extended obsolescence. Today, the financial forces won’t allow that. In her article, Megan asserts that the national federal government, like many large, old businesses, has become ossified and unwilling to change.
The federal government, however, does not have external competitors so that it has less need to change and change. Further, the federal government won’t be displaced by another government, just how a company can be acquired or put out of business. Ossification and sclerotic procedures are what we may be stuck with in government.
But I digress. The true point I wanted to make about Megan’s article was that she assumes that the old Birth, Innovate, Defend, Ossify, Die methodology is going to continue steadily to dominate business thinking. I believe that mentality must change and in fact is beginning to change. There’s a path that many businesses follow.