Enterprise Animation

The Management Innovation Lab at 50

2008-05-29T11:45:00Z

Thursday, May 29, 2008 – The Management Innovation Lab (MLab) launched their inaugural conference this morning. I wrote the following "news report" from 2055 on the future of MLab last night. Of course the Gary Hamel quote is fictional; we’ll have to wait a few years to find out what Gary really thinks about the first 50 years of MLab:

Saturday, May 29, 2055 – This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Management Innovation Lab – MLab. Wow! It’s been quite a ride! Like many great discoveries throughout history, the key insight that has driven the lab over the past few decades is so blindingly obvious in retrospect that it’s hard to believe that it met with so much initial resistance. But the move from securities based on the accumulation of assets “stocks” to those organized around the liquid flow of assets "flows" was not an obvious lever for management innovation in the first decade of the 21st century.

As we all know, the 250 trillion dollar Global Flow Exchange (GFE) has now largely absorbed the old stock exchanges. Of course this VirtualSpaces trading infrastructure only captures about 25% of the total value created in the global economy today. So the real significance of this shift has been the birth of Flow Management (FM) which according to a recent MLab study now supports over 86% of all global commerce. FM was clearly the child of the Millennial Generation’s embrace of social networking and multi-player games at the turn of the century. The 20th century idea of working for "a firm" has been largely replaced with FM Transactions by knowledge workers globally. This shift could have actually been predicted based on a 1937 article by Nobel Prize winning economist Ron Coase.

This morning we caught up with 101-year-old Management Innovation Lab co-founder Gary Hamel at his London home. Hamel modestly chided us, "It’s fun to reminisce on the past but frankly I’m much more interested in talking about the next 50 years..."

© 2008 - All Rights Reserved

Intelligent Science Curriculum Design

2008-01-26T15:27:00Z

By Brian Mulconrey

Thursday, February 14, 2008 – Today’s battles over the teaching of Intelligent Design alongside the Theory of Evolution may totally miss the bigger picture. Virtually every religion has a long track record of “revealing” divine explanations for natural phenomenon - defending those explanations as science presents new evidence – and sometimes revising those revelations in keeping with new realities. It took a few hundred years, but the Vatican ultimately accepted the idea that the earth was not the center of the universe. The creation stories that weave through almost all religions are just one example of this practice. So why would any intelligent scientist be afraid of exposing children to this aspect of the evolution of science? When a large percentage of the population of the world still accepts various supernatural explanations for natural phenomena it seems a truly incomplete education to not expose children to this process. Let’s fast forward a few years to examine an alternative curriculum scenario…

Friday, February 14, 2020 – It’s now been ten years since Intelligent Science Instruction Design was launched into the first public school classrooms in the United States. As we all know, this movement was originally greeted with jubilation on the part of those who fought to allow the teaching of Intelligent Design in classrooms. With this new curriculum it became possible for citizens who believed in a divine creation story to have their brand of science taught in classrooms. But…this was still science. Curriculums required that the source and texts of the stories be referenced. And, to the growing dismay of Christian fundamentalists, it was necessary to expose children to the creation stories of other religions and cultures.

It wasn’t long before intelligent children began asking serious questions that previous generations not exposed in a rigorous way to the creation stories of other religions had simply never explored… Why are all these stories so similar? Is there something in the human psyche that is hard wired to weave supernatural stories when natural explanations are beyond our reach? Why do we continue to accept these stories as ‘fact’ when the authors knew so little about the functioning of the natural world? What else should we be questioning about the supernatural phenomena in the religions that we were taught as children?

In 2012 the popular movement that erupted around "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" - a book project started by Thomas Jefferson during his first term as President of the United States - added fuel to the growing controversy. Jefferson eliminated all supernatural phenomena from his version of the Bible claiming that these embellishments had been added by Jesus’ biographers who borrowed many of the ideas directly from ancient Greek myths. The web version of Jefferson’s Bible included an anthology of the deleted passages complete with links to similar stories from Greek Mythology. There was also a link to "The Gospel of Thomas" discovered on ancient scrolls in 1945 by an Egyptian herder. The Thomas Gospel, like Jefferson’s, didn't include any supernatural phenomena. It was suggested by Princeton Professor Elaine Pagels in her New York Times Bestseller “Beyond Belief” that the “doubting Thomas” story in the Gospel of John was a direct reaction to this almost-eradicated account of the life and morals of Jesus.

For Christian fundamentalists this was the last straw. By late 2014 a coalition of fundamentalist groups from virtually every major religion advanced their landmark lawsuit to shut down Intelligent Science Instruction Design to the United States Supreme Court. The majority opinion as written by the Chief Justice closed the book on further argument, “The United States Constitution does not prevent public schools from teaching any academic pursuit; particularly a subject of as much significance as the impact of religious beliefs on everything from science and morality to politics and acts of terrorism.”

The startling results of last month's "Prayer and Collective Intelligence" experiments on the Interbio have established research into "supernatural" phenomena as a path of inquiry that no longer risks derailing an academic career. Today young adults in the United States look more like their European counterparts when it comes to the percentage that still accept ancient religious explanations for natural phenomena. During the first decade of the 21st century it turns out that the advocates of teaching Intelligent Design grossly underestimated the intelligence of their children.

© 2008 - All Rights Reserved

How We Taught the Internet to Dream

2007-05-26T16:58:00Z

by Brian Mulconrey

Thursday, August 17 2017 - It was ten years ago today that an innovative little think-tank that has since become a household name launched an ambitious and well funded program aimed at "Teaching the Internet to Dream." What this actually meant for the companies and government agencies that sponsored this research was that we invented a method whereby the Internet could take advantage of the same processes that the human mind employs during sleep (and while awake) to process and organize the experiences of the day into memory hierarchies.

This project grew out of two major developments that went largely unnoticed in popular media at the time. First, on March 5, 2007, Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm, Inc.) announced that his new company Numenta, Inc. was launching NuPIC (the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing). This research release was the first time that the world experienced "hierarchical memory systems" outside of the human cortex. This powerful software architecture provided the foundation for creating cortex-like memory hierarchies for the Internet. The next major development came four days later on March 9, 2007 when technology innovator Danny Hillis announced the launch of Freebase - the first public tool for use by computers to search other computers over the Internet.

The last major piece of the puzzle was completed as part of the project. Working with a team of researchers at MIT, the project created the Semantic Scoring Algorithm (SSA) that allowed computer programs to create and update "relationships" between seemingly disparate pieces of digital information.

By the summer of 2009 the first Internet Dreams HTM's were deployed. Within 18 months, the insights gained from these embryonic memory hierarchies startled the world. And, as we all know, that was just the beginning…

© 2007 - All Rights Reserved

The Personal Health Record Revolution

2007-02-27T13:32:00Z

by Brian Mulconrey

Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - As today's nano-scale health monitors churn out rivers of personal health data, powerful software agents are working 24 hours a day to interpret these signals - adjusting nutritional levels and applying medications as necessary. It's easy to forget that just ten short years ago it would have taken millions of health care workers to perform the services provided by these invisible health care robots.

And of course, it's also easy to forget that, without personal health records (PHR), none of this would be possible. PHRs started in the late 20th century as a project to accumulate "provider" information (e.g., laboratory reports). But, as realtime monitoring tools exploded onto the market, it became clear that their real payoff would be in nano-scale personal laboratories that configure just in time treatment plans. It wasn't long before these monitoring tools lent themselves to the de-productization of the pharmaceutical industry with an explosion of custom drugs tailored to individual physical and DNA profiles.

In his 2004 book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins introduced the "intelligence-as-prediction" model. Once we combined the predictive power of hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) systems with PHRs it became possible to accumulate realtime insights into new drug formulations, and dosage levels while driving innovation by rapidly segmenting individuals into experimental treatment trials. With 2020 health care expenditures dipping below 5% of GDP in the United States and average life expectancies surging by 12 years in just the past decade we owe a great debt of gratitude to the humble PHR.

The Interbio at 20

2006-05-24T13:45:00Z

by Brian Mulconrey

Monday, December 22, 2036 – The 1999 film The Matrix painted a dark future where "advances" in AI (artificial intelligence) resulted in an army of robots deciding that the best use for human beings was to generate energy from their immobilized bodies. While the term artificial intelligence fell out of popular use in the early 2020's with the dawn of AtomGate technology, the actual evolution of interbiological intelligence would have struck 1999 movie audiences as almost as strange as The Matrix Scenario.

Today we hardly notice as we slip in and out of the Interbio to channel our collective imaginations and intelligence to invent new products and services, manage business/government enterprises, and generally entertain ourselves in ways that an individual human intellect could never have imagined. This week we'll celebrate the 20th anniversary of release 1.0 of the Interbio with a look back at how this ambitious open source project channeled advances in computing technology into the world's first interbiological operating system.

Of course the most important force that drove the evolution of the Interbio was the rise of biological computing in the early 20's and the relentless progression of Moore's Law through the end of that decade. At the turn of the 21st century AI researchers were obsessed with replicating "human" intelligence. But the maturing Millennial Generation had a better idea. Why not take multi-player games and networked communities to the next logical step? Instead of replicating the human intellect, the Interbio "aggregates" and "augments" the intellects of any group of employees, representatives/citizens, or players. In the process, it rendered our traditional notions of management and "individual human" representative government obsolete.

By the tenth anniversary of the Interbio in 2026 it was clear that the management of enterprises of all shapes and sizes would never be the same. The executive aristocracies that had grown up at the top of business and government organizations by the end of the 20th century were unraveling rapidly by the mid 2020s. Since "collective" intelligence augmented by the Interbio was so much more powerful than even the smartest individuals, it was no longer possible for individual employees to extract wages equal to tens or even hundreds of times the compensation of the average knowledge worker.

When the Interbio was born in 2016 - a quarter century after the launch of the World Wide Web - it was heralded as the world's first interbiological operating system. But the real power of early Interbio interfaces was the extent to which enterprise employees were able to "become" the mind of an enterprise. Large enterprises were always thought to be metaphorically alive. With the Interbio, this became more than a metaphor. A new "enterprise intelligence" had been born and with it the solutions to new categories of intractable problems were suddenly within reach. The Interbio sidestepped the goal of replicating human intelligence in a machine and focused instead on augmenting enterprise intelligence using computer technology to aggregate and amplify individual human intellects.

Over 30 years ago, futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil wrote a visionary book titled The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. In it he captured many of the forces that drove the growth of the Interbio. While Kurzweil focused heavily on the milestone of replicating human intelligence, he also seized on the radical implications suggested by the continuation of Moore's Law for another three decades. With the Interbio, we harnessed and augmented collective human intelligence to the point where it quickly transcended the intelligence of even the smartest individual humans. Kurzweil clearly grasped the possibility - perhaps the inevitability - of the Interbio.

But...it took more than technology to propel the Interbio to its central role in government and business management. The political and business leadership scandals and miscalculations in the early 21st century contributed to a growing weariness on the part of citizens and employees around the world with abuses of executive power. We the people of the planet earth were ready by 2016 to declare our interdependence in a manner that would have made Thomas Jefferson proud.

NOTE: Originally posted to www.enterprisepoetry.org/The_Interbio.html on May 24, 2006

© 2006 - All Rights Reserved.

The Great Transportation Transition

2006-01-27T23:59:00Z

by Brian Mulconrey

Thursday, August 18, 2022 – What were the long term forces that drove the transformation of our global transportation infrastructure during the first two decades of the 21st century? Competition for unpredictable global oil supplies was certainly a big part of the story, but a narrow focus on oil misses some of the bigger actors in this story. Even global climate change played a smaller role in the transition than many care to acknowledge.

At the turn of the century audio conferencing (a relatively small market for most of the late 20th century) exploded in popularity. This transition was fueled by the growth in email adoption in the late 1990's and data transmission rates that, while puny by today's standards, allowed for the rapid transmission of meeting materials over the Internet. It started to become commonplace for teams to be located around the world while still staying in close contact. This was only the beginning.

Widespread concerns over natural and unnatural disasters disrupting commerce motivated a wave of companies to expand the categories of employees that worked remote one or more days a week in order to help assure that remote workers could maintain operations during a disaster. Several countries developed tax and other incentives to encourage remote work. Between the oil shocks of 2006 and 2011, increases in worker "Remote Days" were credited with saving over a billion barrels of oil annually in the United States alone while preparing companies to react with more agility to a crisis. The growth in Remote Days also fueled investment in improved videoconferencing interfaces. Today's Virtual Spaces technology is a direct result of these pioneering baby steps.

Twenty years ago we climbed behind the wheel of two ton vehicles to drive to video stores and rent DVD recordings. This image strikes us as ridiculous today, but it didn't seem humorous at all at the time. While high speed digital media delivery rendered the DVD obsolete, it wasn't until the early twenty teens that we began paying serious attention to driving down the weight of our transportation infrastructure.

Most of today's RTVs (robotic transport vehicles) are just a little larger than their contents. As we watch them zip down the RTV Lanes on our highways, it can be easy to forget that they represent much more than a milestone in transportation technology. In just the past ten years, the global spread of these unmanned vehicles for transporting our stuff combined with reductions in traditional commuting have cut global traffic fatalities by over 100,000 lives annually. And, thanks to the nano-engineered solar collectors and fuel cells, these vehicles tap into both abundant solar power and the convenience of hydrogen energy storage. Of course the transition of most manufactured products to small scale local production has also helped a great deal in reducing the amount of "stuff" that we need to move around the planet.

The combination of RTVs, Virtual Retail Spaces, and integrated digital entertainment programming redefined the ancient art of "shopping" in the second decade of the 21st century while bringing sophisticated retail experiences to every corner of the world. These technologies also launched the reinvention of the 20th century supply chain with the 2017 introduction of Triple M (Mobile Manufacturing Modules) mini-factories that break apart, transport themselves via RTVs to new locations, and auto reassemble in response to changes in global demand patterns.

"Winning the Oil End Game," a pioneering manifesto published by Amory Lovins in 2005, outlined most of the strategies ultimately adopted for driving both a new energy paradigm and the business logic that accelerated the development of RTV infrastructure. But perhaps the most fascinating alchemy of the past 10 years has been the co-evolution of Virtual Spaces and RTV technology. We have literally rewritten the definition of "being there."

NOTE: Originally posted to www.enterprisepoetry.org/great%20transportation%20transition.html on January 27, 2006

© 2006 - All Rights Reserved.

The 21st Century Hero

2006-01-07T00:06:00Z

by Brian Mulconrey

Wednesday, January 6, 2016 – It was 75 years ago today that President Franklin Roosevelt, the "Father" of the US Social Security System, delivered his "Four Freedoms" speech. Freedom of speech and religion were familiar freedoms and, as the fascists marched across Europe and Asia, "freedom from fear" represented a natural longing. But Roosevelt's list went further than any American leader had ever imagined when he proclaimed "freedom from want" - a healthy peacetime life for everyone in the world.

Ten years ago today the US Social Security Trust Fund was on a course to run out of money as early as next year. And, in the most technologically advanced epoch in human history, the world watched in 2005 as tens of millions of children, women, and men died from starvation and easily treated diseases globally. On the surface, these two issues didn't seem to be linked. But, in December of 2005, Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates were recognized by Time Magazine as "Persons of the Year" and the world was given a rare gift - a new definition for heroism.

These new heroes developed a strategy for channeling their power - wealth and celebrity - to spread freedom from want to everyone in the world. Inspired by this example a vast global network of citizen-heroes formed during the first decade of the 21st century. Their goal went beyond spreading "freedom from want" everywhere in the world to placing a "quality standard of living" within easy reach of everyone on earth. These individuals came from every walk of life, united only by their growing sense that their lives would be immeasurably enriched by integrating this simple goal into everything that they did. The first thing that became clear was that, to provide a quality standard of living to everyone in the world, it would be necessary to reduce the huge amount of waste involved in producing a quality standard of living at the turn of the century.

Once the challenge was framed as driving down the cost and waste involved in producing a quality standard of living, the link between "freedom from want" and the Social Security Trust Fund crisis became clear. In 2011 Social Security benefits were actually increased in the short run in order to secure political support for expressing all benefit formulas in terms of a "quality standard of living" index. Over the past ten years we cut the resources required to generate a quality standard of living in half twice. Over the next ten years, most economists think that we'll cut the cost of a quality standard of living in half every two years. At this rate, by 2020, we will have realized Roosevelt's goal of spreading freedom from want everywhere in the world while actually running a "real" surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund and building a wide range of huge new global businesses.

In his 2004 classic, "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid", CK Prahalad outlined a strategy that came to be called "the Liberation of Moore's Law." In 1965, Gordon Moore focused the computer industry on doubling the processing power of a computer chip every 1-2 years. That capacity kept right on doubling well into the 21st century. Today we take it for granted that we can cut the cost of producing a quality standard of living in half every 2-3 years. But it was Prahalad's vision that translated this design principle into a market-driven action plan.

The 21st century hero may have been defined by the world's richest couple and the most celebrated musician in the world. But the network that grew from their example represents today the most powerful governance structure on earth with tens of millions of citizen heroes. There is good reason that hero stories are our favorite story form; they have survival value. When we stepped out against all odds to save the world, we saved ourselves.

NOTE: Originally posted to www.enterprisepoetry.org/21%20Century%20Hero.html on January 6, 2006

© 2006 - All Rights Reserved.

The History of Personal Enterprise Networks

2005-08-11T13:47:00Z

by Brian Mulconrey

Monday, January 18, 2021 – Today’s personal enterprise network driven economy seems so natural that it’s hard to remember the era before this structuring of collective customer-investor-citizen power. Sure, democracy is an old idea. But it was just a little over 10 years ago that we paid third parties to secure our own credit history information, allowed ill-informed politicians to make huge un-funded financial commitments impacting us, and sold our aggregated purchasing power for a fraction of its real value.

Today we take it for granted that our personal enterprise network (PEN) managers will act on our behalf to manage our entire network of enterprise relationships including managing our personal information assets and negotiating with employers, advertisers and others seeking access to our skills, limited attention bandwidth, and purchasing power. The rise of PEN Managers was a revolutionary step in empowering individuals to make informed decisions across the entire spectrum of their lives while facilitating collective investments in the future.

Any history of this huge growth industry - last year PEN management fees exceeded $65 billion globally – must start with the foundational role played by personal health records (PHR). In the first decade of the 21st century, our personal health records were a mess. Every health services provider kept their own files. This information was virtually impossible to quickly aggregate or combine. When the first comprehensive PHR services hit the market in late 2006, consumers willingly paid the base monthly fee of $5.99. Over the years these records expanded to the point where today virtually every health professional assumes that your entire medical history and personal genome will be readily accessible in order to precisely target appropriate treatments to your personal genetic make-up.

The next major force that drove the early evolution of PEN management was the logical expansion of PHR services to support the management of “all” of our personal information, not just personal health information. This resulted in the rise of personal information managers who aggregated our personal information assets and negotiated access to these assets on our behalf. It wasn’t long before it became obvious that this was about a whole lot more than information. These entities were managing our entire network of enterprise relationships while shattering long-standing retail, advertising, and manufacturing business models in the process.

In her prophetic 2011 book, "Smashing the Producer/Consumer Divide," anthropologist < Susan Raje > described the role that personal enterprise networks were playing in allowing consumers to perform functions that had previously been performed inside companies and by government agencies. PEN managers were relentless in driving cost out of virtually every product and service category, positioning individuals to orchestrate their personal networks of enterprise innovation and personal supply chains.

The PEN management industry also played a central role in driving down enterprise costs in what we once referred to as the "developed" and the "developing" worlds. Today a quality standard of living consumes only 15% of the human and natural resources required in 2005. At the same time, the definition of a quality standard of living has actually improved to include "necessities" that were considered "luxuries" at the turn of the century.

In 2000 it was obvious that eBay had created a pioneering business model but it wasn't immediately clear that this was just the first step in a process of putting individuals in a position to weave personal enterprise networks that cut across virtually every product and service category. In 2000, people had so little control over their personal information that it was actually possible to "steal" another person's identity. It was time for a change. The recognition that WE are the rightful owners of our personal information, purchasing power, and political power grew into one of the most important new industries of the early 21st century.

<> = Indicates a fictional person. Any similarity to a real person is purely coincidental.

NOTE: Originally posted to www.enterprisepoetry.org/PENManagers.html on August 11, 2005

© 2005 - All Rights Reserved.

Poetry and Enterprise Innovation

2005-07-23T20:54:00Z

by Brian Mulconrey

Wednesday, May 1, 2019 – What were the forces that drove the explosion in new enterprises during the first two decades of the 21st century? Accelerating technology curves were certainly a big part of the story. But a surprising number of new enterprises can trace their roots to brief essays and 3 minute video segments that came to be called - enterprise poetry.

An enterprise poem starts with an idea for an enterprise that doesn't yet exist. The first 150 words describe it from a date in the future, e.g., Sunday, December 22, 2024. This might be a new product, process, government structure, social movement, or any human enterprise. The middle section – 300 words – tells the story of how this enterprise came to life. What were the forces that caused it to happen? The last section – about 150 words – brings us back to the present.

In 350 BC Aristotle wrote, "The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose… The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen." The global professionals and entrepreneurs described in the January 2016 Indian Institute of Management (IIM) study titled "The New Enterprise Revolution: 2006 to 2015" didn't consider themselves poets. But they all worked in the realm of imagining enterprises that may happen and then transforming these idea prototypes into enterprises that had happened. The IIM study performed an economic autopsy on a diverse collection of 20th century business models that died in the New Enterprise Revolution, stranding global investors atop an estimated $25 trillion mountain of obsolete capital and infrastructure.

A second and interrelated force driving the evolution of enterprise poetry was the need for speed. The life expectancy of any enterprise strategy has fallen on an almost exponential curve over the past decade. Enterprise poetry provided a vehicle for accelerating the process of inventing new strategies. With an accepted format, it became safe to speculate on what may happen. Operating in a hypothetical future transformed these prototypes from the realm of flaky speculation and unbelievable prediction to a legitimate voyage of exploration. Even the missing details in an enterprise poem provide jumping off points for further strategic conversation.

A third driving force propelling enterprise poetry was a trend that came to be known as the democratization of strategy. In the 20th century, strategy was the domain of chief executives and elite strategy professionals. In the first decade of the 21st century it became clear that the continuation of this process was a formula for disaster. Some of the best new enterprise ideas were coming from the organizational fringes both geographic and functional. Enterprise poetry empowered individuals and small groups to rapidly invent and deploy new strategies. A big picture enterprise poem would often spawn additional enterprise poems describing new processes or marketing methods needed to bring the overall enterprise to life.

The Internet and personal fabrication technology were a powerful combination for channeling the imaginations of individuals and small groups into prototyping new enterprises. This typically involved combinations of concept prototypes and fully functional product prototypes. In a prophetic 2005 book MIT's Neal Gershenfeld described how personal fabrication technology, "helps develop the planet's most precious natural resource of all, its people and their ideas."

The futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer" to describe the merging of the roles of producer and consumer in 1980. Forty years later the prosumer is now an accepted reality as individuals and small groups configure their own personal networks of enterprises. Yet, even today, the pace of cultural evolution means that many enterprises require a decade or more to fully develop. Enterprise poetry helped to popularize longer term thinking by providing a literary format for visiting a future in which an enterprise has happened and then working our way back again to reverse engineer how that future happened.

NOTE: Originally posted to www.enterprisepoetry.org/EA1.html on July 23, 2005

© 2005 - All Rights Reserved.