The concept of 'business' has been around for centuries. Structured more formally through the industrial revolution and evolving further over time but the basic tenet of 'business' has not changed.
According to Wikipedia 'a business, also known as an enterprise or a firm, is an organization involved in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers.[1] Businesses are prevalent in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and provide goods and services to customers for profit. Businesses may also be not-for-profit or state-owned.'
As businesses go through the cycle from startup to mid size to corporate their structures get more formal, their processes more defined and their governance extends to accommodate thousands of employees. The 'corporation' is all about scaling people, processes, systems and customers to maximise profits. Management becomes everything.
As structures get industrially 'architected' people become numbers. Creativity and agility gets lost. Leaders are distracted by endlessly managing all this. Customers increasingly get forgotten.
The law of average kicks in the bigger it all gets. Average processes, average customer service, average products and average employees.
There has to be a better way and yet the very 'concept' of business has never really changed. Lots of full time employees run like armies out to defeat the enemy that competes. Bringing the bacon back to the imperial homeland (its owners).
The fundamental principle of business has centred around controlling growth, customers and profits by scaling within the walls. The corporation is the castle and it defends itself with vast armies of employees protected by legal walls and strategic moats utilising the latest technology as weapons.
But what if we did not need to scale or develop traditionally. What if we could grow without hiring more people, taking more office space, buying more computers, phones or copiers. What if we could grow without barriers and yet have an infinitely scalable entity of just one person. What if we could scale 'on demand' in the cloud. What if we could plug and play other entities around us on one common technology platform and grow through 'partnering' rather than 'employing'. Adopting a single, unified online platform that gives us all the things we used to keep within our walls: people, processes, technology.
What if we could plug into such a platform for any of the resources we need to manage, deliver, operate and extend. What if we called these resources 'services' - after all people (traditionally employees) are there to serve. But what if we could buy any core 'services' we require to scale and operate our business as easily as buying goods from a supermarket.
Surely then we would rethink the very concept of business. We would blow up the idea of organisation. The next GE would have 100 employees plugged into a virtual organisation with all the required 'services' in the cloud. The next ITV would have producers without people, sales managers without staff, CEO's without teams. Any of the services necessary to run the business would be sourced, managed and 'rented' from a single technology platform providing ALL the organisational software, process and people required to service customers at scale - and more profitably than ever before.
Top teams would only have to worry about strategy - execution would come out of a box and in the cloud. Business on demand. The organisation blurred.
You see business is being reinvented and like you can share a ride or a house or a holiday you can rent the resources you require to operate a business from a global services exchange. A place where ultimately you will access all the organisational software, common processes and necessary 'service' providers you could require. Effortlessly scaling your organisation on demand - up or down - in the cloud.
Tomorrow looks very different to today. Business is finally reinvented.
