I spent a couple of energizing hours on Sunday morning working out, reading, and then re-reading the lead article from the most recent Harvard Business Review (November, 2014) titled How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition by Professor Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann.
At the Private Enterprise Value blog I commit to you I am not going to make it a practice to add to your pile of things to read by linking to articles from the popular culture. In this case however, the sheer weight of the significance of this work causes me to make an exception. The piece intelligently links and builds on the (what were for me only fleeting!) closing thoughts I gave you in last week’s blog post titled You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. The link to the HBR article is here.
Smart, connected products (and I will contend…services) which up to this point have always been unconnected (or dumb) are without a doubt escalating an inflection point of strategy for Entrepreneur Owner-Managers. Up to now, economies of scale axiomatically were only available to large organizations largely working within the bureaucratic economy. Today building on distributed connectedness and complementarity with expert human judgment, a realm of real entrepreneurial power is developing, utterly leveling the playing field with larger organizations in the bureaucratic economy. It gives clout to Entrepreneur Owner-Managers in shaping their environment, providing value to customers the likes of which has never before been seen, and enabling them to optimize the resulting cash flow for long term sustainability, legacy, and Enterprise Value.