Last Friday, June 29, 2001, I had the privilege of participating in a conversation (video-conference) from the London Business School with who is surely the most respected current "guru": Gary Hamel. I intend to summarize what he said and relate it to the "search for talent" that seems to be the next to last fad in Spain and in the world. My conclusion is that if Gary Hamel is right, the most sophisticated computer applications and software will be of little use to generate the talent that companies need.
Gary began by saying that we were in an era of “disruptive change” in which although the Internet is currently going through a crisis no different from that which many companies had 170 years ago with the construction of the railways or 100 years ago with Automobiles: In the early 20th century there were over 100 car factories in the United States. In the long run, the Internet is going to destroy the most important “profit center” of many companies: consumer ignorance.
The most lasting impact of the Internet is going to be to deflate, lower prices, continuously; It will be the triumph of "consumer power"; it will destroy many competitive advantages by its undifferentiation. Given this, it is not possible to "manage knowledge" but "manage different knowledge", develop the revolution in companies. He gave the example of IBM; 15 or 20 years ago, this company represented 45% of the market capitalization of computer companies; today it represents 8%. An American company that has created a network of coffee shops under the name "Starbucks" has a market capitalization that represents 10% of Nestlé's! Unconventional, unexpected, different competitors arise everywhere. He invited us to visit a perfume and cosmetic store on Carnaby Street of which he said:"May be the gravedigger for" The Body Shop. " The next day I went to see that store and it really is innovative. It has soaps, perfumes, lotions that it advertises as "natural" and "freshly made" (by the way, some of the soaps it sells by weight had the appearance of the pills of our old "Lagarto" or "Chimbo" soaps that we left years ago All products have a handcrafted look, feel.
To make a revolution in each company, Gary advises that he look beyond what the sector does, that he copy himself from others even if the products are very different. He said how a few years ago a manager in the food section of Marks & Spencer had a problem. Given the cost structure of the company and its department, he was unable to sell British-style sandwiches (with margarine or butter since the process of spreading them on sliced bread was labor intensive). One day he was invited by the agency advertising to visit a screen printing workshop where they printed advertising items for their Company. He watched as a machine with a silk frame spread different colors over the articles to be printed. He asked permission to use the machine on a weekend, when it was clean and idle.The following Saturday he went to the workshop with various sliced bread and butter. He poured it onto the rack, put the bread on the griddle and put the machine to work. He had managed to use a printing press to solve the food department problem.
He cited several examples of possible innovations. One, that of public laundries (very widespread in the United Kingdom and the USA and little, as far as I know, in Spain):
- “I go to a laundry with my clothes and all the machines are busy. I have to wait or go home and try again later. Why can't "chips" be installed in the machines to reserve a shift through the mobile or the Internet?
Another, that of hotels:
- “I arrive at the Hilton with my reservation made and I have to fill out a form, they ask me. However, with my credit card I go to a machine and take out $ 500. Why can't I do the same when I check into the hotel? ”
It is not about facing the new and the old economy. It is about substituting conventional values and practices for more creative, more revolutionary ones. In the old one, the prevailing values were diligence, replication (copy), hierarchy, virtue, efficiency in the use of inputs (Taylorism); variety is bad, uniformity must be respected; the most important thing is the experience; we have to be faithful to the past; Big is beautiful "when" Gary says, "it is proven that there is no correlation between size and value creation."
He cited the three most conventional types of capital: financial, physical, and intellectual, adding that "knowledge" has become somewhat undifferentiated, in bulk (the English word is "commodity").
What is needed are multipliers, of which he indicated three:
1. Imaginative capital, dissatisfaction, taking advantage of discontinuities, incorporating the client into the company, being "opponents" (I know that this word does not exist in Spanish; perhaps it would be worth "being one of those who disagree"); empathy is needed to understand what is not yet articulated (my emphasis); and above all, look for solutions walking backwards from the understanding of the client's needs.
2. Capital of entrepreneurship, of initiatives. Create an open market for ideas and for experimentation. Gary has his consulting firm "Strategos" in the center of Silicon Valley. The largest concentration of venture capital companies in the world operates in this area. The normal thing - he adds - is that they receive 1000 business plans, that they pay attention to 100 and that they decide to finance 2 or 3. It is like procreation, he said. In fertilization, one is the sperm that achieves it and 59,999,999 those that fail in the attempt. It takes 60 million for one to procreate. With humor, he said that what happens is that current companies have few sperm ("very low sperm count" in the original)
3. Relational capital. It is necessary to weave an infinite network of relationships to know everything that is happening, what is being demanded and, above all, so that it does not happen as until now, that those who run companies are emotionally distant from the people we intend to serve.
"We have the right and the obligation to dream new dreams," Gary finished.
And my reflection before all of the above consists in asking myself if this is the knowledge management that we are promoting; Or rather, we are using periclit schemes to tackle this groundbreaking innovation, this revolution that Hamel advocates in his new book, and therefore we fail.
To the extent that we believe that we can design standard knowledge management processes and procedures, one size fits all, instead of creating specific value for each company and for each moment, we will be contributing to its destruction because we can no longer count on the customer ignorance which, until now, has been the largest source of business income.
For this reason, I defend the idea that consultants should not be the ones who provide the solutions, the same for all our clients, but the facilitators of internal processes so that it is the management teams who design their own learning and their own knowledge.
To this end, my Firm is designing a two-day "Innovation Factory" in which new forms of learning and knowledge are experienced. Innovation and creativity cover and understand all the steps of the company's value chain, and the redefinition of new “who” (who is my client), “what” (what products or services am I going to offer you), and “ how ”(how am I going to reach the client).
