Preposterous Thinking

On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world,” he said. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

“It is a dumb idea,” Jack Welch said. “The idea that shareholder value is a strategy is insane. It is the product of your combined efforts – from the management to the employees.”

I couldn't have said it better myself, Jack.

Business is no longer just about the product. Now it’s about solutions for the individual. Economic value is hidden in consumers’ unmet needs and is released by providing people with the means to fulfill those needs. But in order to release new value, you need to get out of organization space and into the subjective space where individuals live. I call it ‘I-Space.’ This means shedding the ‘us-them’ mentality. Now everyone is an insider.

Tim Leberecht at Frog Design wrote a great post on the shift in creating alternative methods of creating business and adding value. The future of business lies in building transparent, social relationships with consumers at a granular level.

Of special note is the concept of the Dynamic Signal, “a concept that every activity and action is recorded and made available, that every piece of data goes from being a database entry and is instead an event. An event which can be managed, shared and collaborated on by all of those in the organization.”