Disruptive Influences, Anodyne Language

 

You can always tell when management writers are attempting to address a topic in a new or largely speculative arena, or for which there isn’t very much hard evidence. Their language swerves towards the inchoate, incorporating terms that sound sophisticated but are better described as “fuzzy.” Such terms include:

• Leverage
• Landscape
• Dislocation
• Delivery
• Dynamic
• Value
• Expand
• Heavyweight
• Synergy
• Confluence
• Innovation
• Confidence Interval

Okay, okay, I threw in that last one just to jab our friends, the risk managers, but the others are almost always dead giveaways that the person writing the piece is conducting a largely exploratory effort. Management writers conducting exploratory efforts is okay, don’t misunderstand. It’s just, well, frustrating. Consider this example I swerved across from the world wide web[i]:

Whether it’s how we spend, take care of ourselves, learn or interact with each other, digital disruption has changed the script. While this causes dislocation, it also creates opportunity.[ii]

I must have read that paragraph over a dozen times, and I’m still not sure I know exactly what it means. Strictly speaking, digits “disrupt” nothing. Who’s writing this “script”? What (or whom) has been “dislocated”? Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, and simply need to leverage my dynamic understanding of the innovative confluence here.

“Okay, wise guy” I can hear Game Theory In Management Nation saying, “If it’s really not all that complicated, and simply awaits a writer who knows how to convey more precise meaning, why don’t you do it?” Okay, I will.

Recall my oft-cited overarching management structure, the one that asserts that there are three different types of management:

• Asset Management seeks to maximize shareholder wealth, and its main information source is the general ledger.
• Project Management seeks to attain the customers’ expectations of scope, on-time and on-budget. Its principle information streams are cost and schedule performance reports, based on Earned Value and Critical Path Methodologies.
• Strategic Management is all about market share, and how the organization is doing with respect to its competitors.

Any discussion about Disruptive Influences, or technologies, is more effective if it centers on Strategic Management. Why? Well, the Asset Managers have been sucking all of the accepted management practices oxygen out of the board rooms for some time, so, at this point, any easy way of reducing costs without (or sometimes, even though it means) disrupting project quality or delivery has been explored ad nauseum. Similarly, the number of papers, presentations, and paper presentations along the lines of how everybody really needs to be doing Earned Value and Critical Path would, if printed out in twelve-point font and delivered, sink a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

But Strategic Management? That’s a different animal. As I discuss at length in my second book, advances in technology are game-changers in any industry. Recall another one of my axioms: quality, affordability, availability – pick any two. This rule governs many a strategic approach business model. Should an advance in technology provide a way of, say, making a given product or service more affordable at existing market conditions of quality and availability, the impact is always significant – one might even say disruptive.

The organizations that are adept at monetizing advances in technology will always be more successful than those seeking to wring the last efficient penny out of older ways of doing business. This, of course, is highly “disruptive” to those organizations clinging to the more conventional ways of doing things, but to the rest of us it’s anything but. Indeed, it’s less troublesome or unsettling (two of the thesaurus’ synonyms) than it is soothing (antonym) when a non-competing vendor monetizes a technology in such a way as to deliver a superior product for a better price.

Which returns us to our word-salad imbued management science analysis. Whenever you see or hear something about “disruptive influences,” ask yourself this: who, exactly, would find this influence disruptive? For me, it’s all those digital disruptions changing the script.

[i] QUT Dynamic Capabilities of Innovation and Change website (which has two of our “reveal” words in the very title of the web page, no less):

[ii] Retrieved from https://research.qut.edu.au/dynamic-capabilities-of-innovation-and-change/2017/08/29/disruptive-influences-what-to-do-with-them-2017/ on September 29, 2018, 20:18 MDT.