A dilemma of thinking

It’s the first week of semester, well, actually, it’s the Sunday before the first week of semester and I’m suffering my normal first lecture jitters. You see, I always want to grab students’ attention. I want them to see the importance of the things I will be talking about. I want them to appreciate just how much technology, particularly the Internet, has changed the way we do things in business.

Normally, I put a video up while they all settle down. I usually start with 5000 Web Apps in 333 Seconds from SimpleSpark.  It kind of sets the mood as it’s fast-paced and quick-moving.  It lets me start with the question of how do we keep up with all the changes, which, of course, is a central theme of Business Informatics. Then I usually do 2 stories to introduce systems thinking, another core theme of the course.

Once upon a time, there was a man, he was a powerful man. He was the head of a large multi-national corporation, which made STACKS of money.  But things changed. Technology intervened. He couldn’t cope. He said

I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good #$&^&# story would have gotten past me.

Technology was breaking his business model.  He had an analogy.  He said:

If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola?

[At this point, I usually take a swig from my bottle of water, bought specially for the occasion,  and say something inane like: seriously, would you pay for what comes out of your tap?]

There you go, that’s what happened to the record business.

So who was this man of such forethought? Doug Morris: Head of Universal Music [Source].  Doug gave us the recording industry’s new business model:

Sue anyone who doesn’t give us money.  Break the customer’s technology!

Of course, more companies have jumped on that bandwagon, giving us technology that doesn’t perform as we would like, it’s defective by design.

Then I used to have a second contrasting story.  But that story has been broken and become the first story. But maybe not.  I have to reframe it.  The second story was about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, about how he had a vision, and persevered.  How he’s one of the successes of the dotcom generation.

But after the last few Kindle Kerfuffles (the Kindle has been featured on Defective by Design), I’m not sure that it fits any more.  Well, sure, he apologised, so perhaps the recognition of the power that the Internet gives people could be the factor in the way I present it.

I was going to add a third story, United breaks guitars, about how consumers can really bite into your reputation, but that’s almost too much like Amazon’s kindle swindle.  I would really like to have a positive story, but … I now really don’t have one.

These stories were to introduce systems thinking, but it seems that systems thinking is becoming a dying art, particularly in the business world.  How can I emphasise its importance when there are very few well-known examples of it?  How do I demonstrate the importance of seeing the bigger picture, of linking that to strategic thinking and thus to the underlying systems thinking concepts when I no longer have really good examples?

Just for the record, I usually present systems thinking as “a way of thinking about the World based on four pillars: emergency, hierarchy, control and communication” where the emergent property is the behaviour of the system which emerges after the interaction of elements within a system, hierarchy implies different levels of subsystems within a system and communication and control maintain the interrelationships of elements within a system.

So, do I stick with Amazon even though there is abundant evidence that they stopped systems thinking for a while?  Is there a better example of an organisation that is pretty well known that shows some evidence of systems thinking?

Such is my dilemma.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 6:58 am and is filed under teaching, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.