As I sat in the audience of a Patty Seybold seminar, I was enthralled with the insights of Stan Davis, the pre-eminent business futurist. This very tall, professor type was very serious about his predictions and then started sharing the humorous ways that he “discovers” the future. My favorite story involved Stan being invited to the home of a Japanese colleague and going to the bathroom. He went about his business without noticing that the toilet was an electronic marvel. When he got ready to flush he realized that there were some 20 buttons all labeled in Japanese. Not wanting to embarrass himself by having to ask how to flush the toilet, he decided to push one of the buttons randomly. To his unpleasant surprise a strong jet of hot water immediately blasted him in the face and down the front of his elegant suit. His conclusion “Not all innovations are really a step forward.”

His first major work, Future Perfect was called the “book of the decade” by Tom Peters. I heartily agree. Davis was the first to point out the huge transform that would occur as business would overcome the physical world challenges of time, space, and mass. His mantra of “any time, any place and mass customization” are now taken for granted by viable businesses.

As Stan was focusing on research on organizational structure he noticed that the questions that were being asked were nowhere near as fundamental and exciting as the questions being asked by his colleagues in physics and biology. In trying to understand why, he realized that innovations in organizational structure were at the end of a long chain of understanding and innovation in other areas. He states:

“A basic progression governs the evolution of management in all market economies: Fundamental properties of the universe are transformed into scientific understanding, then developed in new technologies, which are applied to create products and services for business, which then ultimately define our models of organization.”

UNIVERSE → SCIENCE → TECHNOLOGY → BUSINESS → ORGANIZATION

“The dilemma for managers is that dominant organization models are the last link in the progression to develop, and are not likely to occur until the shape of the economy is fairly mature. While the new economy is in the early decades of its unfolding, businesses continue to use organization models that were more appropriate to previous times than to current needs.”

In Blur, Davis pushes these insight further to illustrate that the distinction between products and services, between buyer and seller, and the ways that companies are organized will continue to blur. The fundamental formula of “Speed X Connectivity X Intangibles” leads to the phenomena of blur. Much in the same way the Downes and Mui in The Killer App describe the interaction of Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, and Coase’s Law leading to the law of the diminishing firm, Davis identifies that the individual needs to begin thinking of themself as the fundamental atomic entity, not the corporation.

For a good understanding of how structural thinking from Science to Organizational thinking can dramatically improve the productivity of you as an individual as well as your organization, read and apply Stan Davis’s insights

Books by Stan Davis