Staying Relevant
Staying Relevant
The role of Information Technology in Creating Economic Sustainability
Kip Garland, founder - innovationSEED
Sustaining an organization, be it a business, a government, or other groupings of people, requires the ability to create new growth. When organizations stop growing - they lose their relevancy. Economic studies show that sustaining growth in productive sectors is increasingly difficult. From 1950 to 2005 the average time that top company could sustain its relevancy among the top 500 companies fell from 65 to 8 years¹. Among the top fifty firms in the world only 5% could sustain a growth rate of a mere 6% while they were leaders. Among the 95% who could not sustain growth, only 4% were able to sustain a growth rate of even 1% ².
Conclusion – if you cannot find new ways of growing…. you become irrelevant.
Sector Saturation – Twentieth Century ³
If new forms of growth are the key to sustaining organizational relevancy, a closer look reveals a more complex problem. Similar to biological organisms, economic growth is a non-linear. This means that growth is a complex function (more specifically, changes in inputs are not proportional to outputs). The result is that traditional management practices are inutile, and many times harmful for creating new growth.
Instead of fighting against these forces - a firm grounding in the circumstances that affect these non-linear situations goes a long way towards the ability to create new growth. In fact dealing with the complexity of growth in many cases means going against deeply instilled management practices, like listening to your customers, developing better products, and robust financial management.
One powerful approach to these complex circumstances is to begin to examine the fundamental “questions” our organizations were set out to answer. In trying to come up with new answers to long-running questions we sometimes lose track of what the original question
The role of Information Technology in Creating Economic Sustainability
Kip Garland, founder - innovationSEED
Sustaining an organization, be it a business, a government, or other groupings of people, requires the ability to create new growth. When organizations stop growing - they lose their relevancy. Economic studies show that sustaining growth in productive sectors is increasingly difficult. From 1950 to 2005 the average time that top company could sustain its relevancy among the top 500 companies fell from 65 to 8 years¹. Among the top fifty firms in the world only 5% could sustain a growth rate of a mere 6% while they were leaders. Among the 95% who could not sustain growth, only 4% were able to sustain a growth rate of even 1% ².
Conclusion – if you cannot find new ways of growing…. you become irrelevant.
Sector Saturation – Twentieth Century ³
If new forms of growth are the key to sustaining organizational relevancy, a closer look reveals a more complex problem. Similar to biological organisms, economic growth is a non-linear. This means that growth is a complex function (more specifically, changes in inputs are not proportional to outputs). The result is that traditional management practices are inutile, and many times harmful for creating new growth.
Instead of fighting against these forces - a firm grounding in the circumstances that affect these non-linear situations goes a long way towards the ability to create new growth. In fact dealing with the complexity of growth in many cases means going against deeply instilled management practices, like listening to your customers, developing better products, and robust financial management.
One powerful approach to these complex circumstances is to begin to examine the fundamental “questions” our organizations were set out to answer. In trying to come up with new answers to long-running questions we sometimes lose track of what the original question