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14/ The latest faddish business book doesn't exist in isolation. It is part of what Walter Kiechel called a "literary industrial complex" knowledge stack going back to Drucker/Chandler in the 50s.
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15/ This stack is what MBA programs teach, and what big companies model in their very bones. Whether you learn it in texts or through osmosis at your first job, it's a "way of doing business" that's a deep cultural skill/competence.
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16/ Just visit a developing world business environment if you aren't convinced this "business normalcy field" exists. The absence will be palpable. You may think of it as crappy developing country culture or corruption, or unprofessionalism, but it's a missing normalcy field.
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17/ This business-normalcy-field is in fact the greatest economic asset that separates developed and developing/third-world economies. It's an operating system that carries 80% of the intelligence of running a thriving, wealthy economy.
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18/ When this field is absent because it never emerged, or once existed but has collapsed, business feels like a bunch of random, anarchic, inefficient, messy hack activity that is low-yield and produces little wealth, and very inefficiently.
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19/ My point is this: as and when this field finally starts to collapse, the business world will be at a fork in the road: collapse into developing country state, or reinvent management knowledge on a new assumptions stack.
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20/ This has been, uhh, an extended informercial for the thinking/writing I'm doing now: figuring out the new assumptions stack we should be using :D
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From a slightly different angle, I wonder how this impacts the regime of Design Thinking, which rests on a similarly structured knowledge stack. How untenable will the double-diamond and fail-forward become?
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Do you mean DT as in the Ideo religion or as a generic placeholder phrase for design-driven org thinking? (I'm a skeptic of both, but they do seem to have a following)
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primarily the former. As I looked at your thread, I started thinking about it in product design terms, thinking about how processes are structured now in a sort of reality-insulated environment.
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I'd say that kind of business ideology is a further normalcy field within the general business normalcy field. Other examples include lean six sigma, lean startup, holacracy... any kind of structured way of thinking about an aspect of business