Decision-Making, Complexity, Kill Chains and OODA

New Technologies are important, but not as important as new thinking. ~ Christian Brose

Today, it is more critical than ever for our leaders to understand how to make good decisions, fast. They must understand in a formal way what that takes. Leaders must have an optimized information logistics system that can help them gain an understanding of what is happening around them as fast as possible.  Any kind of friction that delays relevant information from being captured, transmitted, analyzed and reported hinders the ability to make decisions and act (decision-action loop).

Mixing Business and Politics Requires a Strategy

Business leaders today are trying to navigate a hyper-politicized environment that can ambush them at any moment.  Everything a business does and says is being scrutinized to reveal political positions to either support or oppose.  Whether intended or not, or true or not, claims made by pundits, politicians and loud social media influencers can instantly lead to market segmentation, swarming or cancel culture that can unexpectedly derail your business and sales targets.

Prudent business leaders will think through these issues and have a plan.  They will discuss the most likely sources of trouble and identify the most likely scenarios and their potential business impacts.  The goal of these exercises is to create a playbook on how best to respond not if, but when it happens.  When it does happen the speed at which it materializes can be shockingly fast.

Some businesses are content with selling to a subset of the market that closely identifies with a well understood political persona or political position, while others wish to maximize their market size and potential by maintaining an apolitical position.  In either case, it is better to have a plan and then stay out in front of issues.

In the past political preferences were often kept confidential and any marketing or position statement from a company could be tightly managed and controlled.  Today, however, in a world of “cancel culture” and swarming where just about everything can be considered a litmus test, it’s wise to prepare.  Leaders, employees and former employees all have a pulpit today and businesses cannot stop what is said. No longer can businesses reasonably believe they can fully control their own messages.

Let's now take a look at a few of the objects and brands that were politicized in 2020.  

The ubiquitous nature of social media and social media influencers has resulted in an environment where businesses are always just a tweet away from chaos.  Businesses must truly understand this reality.  As an example, this week widely read NYT's columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an article where he stated, "I’d like to see pressure on advertisers to withdraw from Fox News."  Similar pressures were also applied to Cumulus Media this week forcing their leadership to order program hosts to stop spreading falsehoods.

Let's now look at some examples of businesses that have found themselves in the middle of politics this last week: 

• Twitter and Facebook have barred [politician] from their platforms.
• Shopify, which provides online store software, closed two [politician]-associated stores. 
• Forbes warned that any of its contributors hiring [politician's] press officials will be viewed as a “potential funnel of disinformation.”
• Zendesk and Okta, which provide popular back-end business services, both said they’d stopped working with Parler on Sunday. 
• Reddit banned a major group on its site for [politician] supporters.
• SnapChat banned [politician] from their platform this week. 
• TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app banned some videos of [politician] speaking. 
• YouTube suspended [politician's] channel
• Deutsche Bank (DB) has decided to refrain from future business with the [politician].
• Signature Bank said it had started closing [politicians] personal accounts.  The US bank also said it "will not do business in the future with any members of Congress who voted to disregard the Electoral College." Source: CNN
• Amazon said on Monday that it was removing products promoting [Q].
• Amazon also decided to boot Parler from its web servers and cloud services.
• MyPillow was offering a discount code to its customers: “FightFor[politician].” Online shoppers who type in the phrase can receive lower prices on the company’s “premium” pillow, “classic” pillow and other products.
• Stripe will stop processing payments for [politicians] campaign website.
• The PGA has canceled plans to play its 2022 championship at [politician's] golf course.
• Walmart's CEO Doug McMillon, as a leader in the business lobby, Business Roundtable, signed a letter critical of [politician] and his actions.
• Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman made public statements critical of [politician].
• Apple and Google have all booted the Parler app from their app stores, a social media platform friendly to [politician] supporters.
• Instagram, which is owned by Facebook blocked [politician] from its platform.
• YouTube, owned by Google, announced it will penalize accounts spreading misinformation from [politician].
• Snapchat blocked [politician's account] indefinitely.
• Airbnb cancels all reservations in the Washington DC area.
• Marriott announced it would be halting donations to the GOP lawmakers objecting to certifying the presidential election.
• Cumulus Media ordered their radio program hosts to stop spreading false information and accept the election, in order not to lose sponsors' business.
• Hallmark asked for their money back.  "The recent actions of [politician] and [politician] do not reflect our company’s values,” and “requested [politicians] to return all HALLPAC campaign contributions.”
• City of New York announced they had canceled agreements with the [politicians] organization.
• Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, the health care insurance group announced a pause on giving from its PAC to Republicans who had voted against certification.
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce condemned [politician's] conduct and said on Tuesday that lawmakers who backed his efforts to discredit the election would no longer receive the organization’s financial backing.
• Dow Chemical announced it was “immediately suspending all corporate and employee political action committee (PAC) contributions to any member of Congress who voted to object to the certification of the presidential election.” ~ yahoo!Finance
• Morgan Stanley announced they would stop giving money to members of Congress who objected to certifying the election.
• The list continues and includes Walmart, American Express, AT&T, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Commerce Bank, Comcast, General Electric, Intel and MasterCard.

All of these businesses and organizations are likely to be impacted by these public statements and announced policies.  The internet has ears and remembers.  Some may be negatively impacted, but others may see a positive impact from their statements and policies.  Some of these organizations reversed policies, some announced new policies, while others simply reiterated existing policies.

Even though many business leaders want to avoid politics, they also recognize that the rule of law is necessary to operate a business and support investments.  When rules, laws, regulations, practices and norms are disrupted there is a risk to businesses.  This risk may force them to act.  Ronnie Chatterji, a business professor at Duke University, was quoted by the Washington Post this week, as saying “The rule of law that ensures peaceful transitions of power - also makes business possible."   https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/08/trump-policies-corporate-america/

Sometimes no matter how hard a business tries to avoid politics, their hand is forced as voting technology company, Dominion found out. "Dominion said its reputation and resale value have been deeply damaged by a “viral disinformation campaign."  Dominion sues [politician] lawyer Sidney Powell, seeking more than $1.3 billion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dominion-sues-pro-trump-lawyer-sidney-powell-seeking-more-than-13-billion/2021/01/08/ebe5dbe0-5106-11eb-b96e-0e54447b23a1_story.html

Are you willing to take political positions with your business?  Will supporting or opposing a particular politicized issue help or hinder your business?  Is your target market aligned with a political position?  Does it align with your organization’s?  How does your leadership team and employees feel about it?  Are they both in agreement?  Is it possible to remain apolitical on an issue?

Social media and social networks are now permanent fixtures in our society, as such, it appears this challenge will be here for the foreseeable future.  Choosing how to position your business in a politicized environment has now become both a reality and a priority.

Read more on the Future of Information, Truth and Influence here:

• The Vulnerable Targets of Social Engineering and Mind Manipulation
• How Social Engineering Works on Our Brain
• Disinformation is Both Expensive and Deadly
• Social Engineering Escapes the War Zone
• Fooled by Psychographic Profiles and Social Engineering
• Social Engineering - Mind Manipulation at Scale
• Conspiracy Theories and Their Impact on Employment Opportunities
• Ideas as Competitive Advantages
• Facebook Decides What People Think
• Twenty-One People Who Control the World
• The Utility of Truth
• Human Thinking as Friction
• Selling Beans During Boycotts, Buy-cotts and Disinformation
• Mixing Business and Politics Requires a Strategy
• Swarming and the Requirement for a Chief Values Officer 
• We Can be Silent No More - Influencer Strategies and Responsibilities
• Our Minds on Facebook Algorithms
• Secrets, Brands and Global Swarming
• Facebook's Infodemic on the Pandemic
• Reality is Required
• Covid-19 and the Value of Ideas

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

What is the Destination of Technological Progress?

Definition of Progress – a forward movement toward a destination.

I have spent several decades working in and around the Silicon Valley where progress is measured by how many new ideas you can get funded, developed, scaled and sold.  The problem is Silicon Valley’s definition of progress is controlled by a relatively small group of investors focused on ROI.  I don’t think it’s such a good idea for investors to be the guardians of our progress or its destination.  Human progress is more than investor returns.  It should include a longer and better-quality life for a larger proportion of people, equality and justice.  Many of these qualities, however, don’t attract a lot of VC money.

When the destination for progress is good - humanity benefits.  We must all remember that the past wasn’t so great, and progress helped us improve it.   Analyst Marian L. Tupy described it as follows, “For most of human history, life was very difficult. People lacked basic medicines and died relatively young. They had no painkillers and people with ailments spent much of their lives in agonizing pain. Entire families lived in bug‐infested dwellings that offered neither comfort nor privacy. They worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset yet hunger and famines were commonplace. Transportation was primitive and most people never traveled beyond their native villages or nearest towns. Ignorance and illiteracy were rife. The “good old days” were, by and large, very bad for the great majority of humankind.” 

Reading Tupy’s description of our history helps us clearly understand the value of progress, but what happens when the destination of progress takes us in the wrong direction?  A direction that does not benefit humanity.  Many proponents of globalization would describe it as progress, yet it opened the door to a deadly and widespread pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands and shut-down the global economy.  Others call robots, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and digital commerce progress, but they may eliminate millions of jobs, causing despair and increasing income inequality.  

Many of the largest investors and technology companies today, the ones with the most money, are choosing our destination and defining progress without our vote.  A destination designed to maximize their revenue, rather than the destination offering the most good for humanity.  It seems to me that guiding progress and selecting our destination are two things that are far too important to leave up to investors or the invisible hands of the market.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught us many lessons.  Lean and long global supply chains are vulnerable to disruptions, pandemics require pre-developed plans and actions, viruses can shutdown entire economies, finding and developing a working vaccine and successful treatments require global collaboration and investment, testing and manufacturing and many other things.  Progress with a purpose to improve the human condition is far more important than progress to maximize investor ROI.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Measuring Enterprises' Capacity for Change

Change is difficult.  The default mode of most organizations and people is to resist change.  It's like a helmsman who steers a ship straight into an iceberg because he doesn't want to rock the boat.

Agile businesses, however, that can redirect energy to fast and positive change and transformation can exploit many more opportunities than enterprises mired in resistance.  The challenge for leaders today is to create an organization that is not only prepared and willing to change, but that also has enough energy and resources to succeed.

One of the rules of the First Law of Thermodynamics in physics is, "Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.”  I propose there is an application of this rule in business as well.  If energy is being consumed on resisting changes to your business, then it is not available for making positive changes to your business.

If markets are changing due to economic conditions, competition, technological innovations or rapidly changing customer behaviors and preferences, then companies must be able to quickly redirect their energy to implementing positive change in order to win.

Change consumes energy, and energy is finite.  That means in order to make changes to keep up with a rapidly changing market, energy must be conserved and stock piled so it is available.  Expending scarce energy resisting intelligent change is a huge waste.  Making investments and taking your business down a path that cannot quickly be undone if the market moves a new direction is also a big waste.

Enterprise Mobility, Legos and Mobile Trends in 2013

I have a world class collection of Legos.  With the exception of a few pieces lost to predatory vacuum cleaners, I have preserved them in a large Rubbermaid container throughout the years as our children have grown.  Legos are very simple.  They are blocks of varying size that all fit together in a standardized manner.  So as long as you don't mix non-standard pieces in with the standard, they all fit together with ease.   As simple as these blocks are, however, masterpieces can be made with them.   It is not the pieces that are interesting, it is the objects you can design with them.  I view mobile solutions in much the same way.

I believe 2013 will be the year of mobile strategy and design.  The components necessary for implementing enterprise mobility solutions are all in place.  Answering the questions of what to do with these components, optimizing ROIs and designing the best solutions that will offer the most competitive advantages should be the primary focuses.

I have noted with interest an emerging mobile industry trend.  Many of the large mobility vendors are changing their focus and strategy from building their own mobile application development tools, to utilizing third-party app development tools that are already widely used and accepted.  Mobility vendors are turning their attentions to building more robust platforms that can support a wide range of developer tools.  This is a significant industry trend.  It will impact the business models of mobility vendors.  It will be interesting to watch this play out.

When I was the CEO of a mobile application company, we were always looking to add as much value as possible into the developer tools we built so we could entice customers to standardize on our proprietary development environment.  That enabled us to lock-in our customers and have more dependable long-term license revenue.  Those times seem to be gone.

The components of a mobile solution are becoming commoditized.  Yes, they are absolutely valuable and required, but you can get good solutions from many sources today.  The strategic value of enterprise mobility today is less about the tools you are using, and more about the new business models and processes you are enabling.  Your success will be measured on your ability to support existing enterprise systems and integrate with emerging social, analytics and cloud solutions.

My analysis at the end of 2012 is that the mobile platform vendor market is evolving rapidly.  It is probing many different directions and exploring different business models trying to understand where the market is heading.  This market moves so fast mobility vendors are struggling to understand the areas where they should be investing.  In an effort to reduce investing in the wrong areas, they are retreating from the app development tools market and leaving that to more general third-party tool vendors.  They are changing their value propositions.

Mobility is of the utmost importance today.  It is mission critical.  As a result, ERP and large enterprise software application vendors will be developing or acquiring their own mobile platforms for their customer base.  This means, the unaffiliated mobile platform vendors will be shifting their focus to the SME markets, niche and vertical solutions, investigating a variety of cloud based, SaaS business models and looking to be acquired.

The mobile solution market is huge, growing fast and rolling forward like a train.  However, unlike a train it is hard to predict where it is going.  The mobility market may in fact be absorbed by the general software application market.  When all software is mobile, there is no longer a need for a separate mobile app development market, and when all ERPs have a platform to standardize mobile connectivity, this market changes as well.  This leads us back to where we began.

2013 is the year of mobile strategy and design.  It is the year of building masterpieces with your mobile lego set.  Find the app development tools that will support your strategy and maximize your flexibility to evolve with your business and with technology trends.  Find a mobile platform vendor that will support today's and tomorrow's needs.  Find your most creative business and technology minds and build your masterpiece.

May your 2013 be filled with joy and learning!

*************************************************************

Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.