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The modern day business management experiment is only a little over a century old. Its origins can be traced back to 1911 when Frederick Taylor published his book The Principles of Scientific Management.
Since then it's been one big, sloppy social and economic experiment. There's been no real roadmap, no idea of what would work and what wouldn't, just a bunch of random experiments together with some wildly unintended consequences. A collection of initiatives that we've been making up as we go along, building upon what has been done before, making mistakes, and recovering. Clumsy steps forward impacting both the foundations of business and society.
The experiment continues as we enter what's being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Each of it's preceding three stages have created drastic changes in business that have also manifested throughout society.
Most of the business experiments over the last century have failed, but many haven't. The companies that have succeeded are all around us, having figured out a way to create something that we value and to make money in the process.
Value is also a sneaky part of the challenge. It's an elusive concept. There's a huge difference between things we need, and things we'll pay money for. Some things we don't need, but we'll invest our time, money, attention and energy into anyway. It's a fluid, mutable and fickle concept that changes over time and circumstance.
No one needs Facebook, but many will invest a significant amount of their time into it and give up their privacy along the way. Research shows that if people had to pay money to use Facebook, most wouldn't. So users trade off their time, information and privacy for what Facebook offers them. As a form of expression and as a communications tool, there's obviously some level of benefit that accrues to its users. Facebook then makes its money by selling access to its users and what they've learned about them.
Figuring out what we need, want and how to make money is the challenge that every business faces. However, understanding, serving, shaping and being relevant to the human condition is the contract that every company makes. Stop being relevant, and failure will come.
The tools that businesses have to work with are also constantly changing. New technologies are again making it possible to do many things differently and to do many different things, as they always have.
What has been available to us through each of the three preceding stages of our industrial revolution has been limited by what business could offer during each period with the tools at its disposal. That's now changing for the fourth time. Each new stage brings upheaval, uncertainty and unrest throughout business and society. Periods of transition create a resurgence — a pullback, followed by a push forward. We're at the early stages of the industrial revolutions fourth transition period, the "Fourth Resurgence."
Back in 1911, there was an initial focus on the work, the next stage evolved into a focus on the organization and then the individual. This progression enabled business to get very good at getting things done, scaling them and then fulfilling very specific needs during the last century's long journey. As business evolved, society simultaneously lurched forward, co-conspirators in shaping the world we live in.
In business, value was created, captured and delivered by our expert ability to produce quality at scale, meet individual tastes and through an ever-expanding number of products available to consumers. However in today's knock-off fueled world, options are plentiful and differentiation has become challenging.
But now the Fourth Industrial Revolution has delivered business and society a new set of tools to work with, and to reckon with. So once again a resurgence is underway. Value is being created in new ways for business and our social systems are also adapting, evolving and reacting, for better and worse. But that's always what happens.
Transition periods throughout our industrial revolution are always awkward as companies get disrupted and societies struggle to adapt to large scale, rapid behavioral change and new tools.
For business, this Fourth Resurgence is creating experiences and services out of products. Technology is allowing business to bridge the last mile and last minute of connectivity. Value is being driven by simplicity, convenience, connectivity, immediacy and many other experiential focused offerings.
For business, it's ushering in what I referred to in my book Social Inc. as the "Age of the Experience." Society is adjusting, adapting and reacting and trying to advance what we have to work with and to live with.
Disruption and upheaval during these periods isn't the exception, it's the rule. The world we live in is the one we ultimately choose to create, so our business and social experiment continues, painfully so.
