We live in a world of Twitter-time value creation

If you haven't been paying attention, this little thing called Twitter has been generating quite a bit of buzz over the past 6 months. Regardless of if you're a Twitter fanboy, hater or just trying to understand it, it's been incredibly interesting to watch not only the growth of the service, but also the huge range of opinions about whether or not it creates any real value. One day it's a life-changing technology, the next day it's dead!

Twitter has obviously changed the game in terms of how we can now consume information. It's no longer measured in days or hours, but instead it was become instantaneous. But does this create new value? For the average user, it may create more distraction than the value the instant information could bring. But it is starting to bring value to new technologies that are leveraging Twitter APIs to take the feed of information and turn it into something new.

So I have to ask a few simple questions:

• Do we have any sense of what value is anymore?
• Does long-term value exist anymore?
• Is all value going forward going to be measured in Twitter time?
• Is technology moving so fast that we won't recognize that we need additional value, or new value, until the technology is upon us?

On our trip to China, our new friend Joost at Volvo mentioned that if we wanted to come do business there, that we'd better have a business model that expected products & services to be copied in 90 days. Maybe that's the new duration of value creation. It's been about 90 days since Oprah first joined Twitter, the user count soared, and now it's coming back down to earth.

Or maybe there will now be phases of value created, like rounds of venture funding. Maybe Twitter has now been through it's adolescence value-creation phase, and over the next 90 days (or maybe 6 months, or maybe 12 months), it will have to decide if it's able to move into it's 20'something value-creation phase, or it's adult-maturity value-creation phase.

We live in interesting times. Fast moving times. Sometimes it's very difficult to not only keep up with the pace, but determine if the thing in front of you is valuable or not. I don't know the answers to my questions, but I do expect that they will flip the business world on its head over the next couple of years. Are you creating long-term value, or Twitter-time value?

Conflict of Crisis - 21st Century Economics

[More details about these concepts can be found here]

This is about a 70min video from Umair Hague,  called Conflict of Crisis.   I'd highly recommend it to all my classmates.  It goes against the majority of what we learn in MBA programs, because they typically teach based on examples (cases, companies, etc.) that succeeded over the past 5-20yrs.  

Haque's messages are starting to connect with me more and more for a few reasons:

1. In OpsMgmt, we're reading case after case about how manufacturing jobs and companies are leaving the US because of lower costs.  But while the US grew to economic dominance on the backs of these manufacturing giants, we're not necessarily seeing similar prosperity happening in the 3rd-world countries that are taking over this work.  Why is this not happening?
2. The GenY population is not embracing large company ideals and culture, they are bringing their principles to companies and asking why they aren't being embraced.  
3. The "value" created over the last 10yrs is almost completely unsustainable (as we've seen with the last two bubbles; Internet & Credit).
4. The hyper-connectness of the Internet is allowing very different business models to be created and grow.  

So what does all of this mean?  It means the pace of change could potentially start moving much faster than any principles we're learning in B-School today.  It means businesses could be in sprint mode all the time, with radical market shifts happening every 5 years.  It means you need to keep you mind open to new ideas, and consider looking for ways to focus on the 4 principles Haque mentions.  While the examples he gives are still somewhat limited, they are beginning to show the building blocks of what could be the new 21st century economic principles.  

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Here are the four pillars of smart growth - for economies, communities, and corporations:

1. Outcomes, not income. 

2. Connections, not transactions. 

3. People, not product. 

4. Creativity, not productivity.