Jan Bosch
Many of the companies I work with aspire to build an ecosystem around their product portfolio. The idea of having others complement your offering and increasing its stickiness while taking a cut of the revenue generated by these complementors is, of course, incredibly appealing. As with most things in life, if something sounds too good … Read more
Western civilization is built on the notion of the sovereign individual: each person is unique with his or her rights, responsibilities, dreams and fears standing separate from others. Buddhist dogma takes the exact opposite perspective: the notion of self is an illusion and the goal of meditation and other religious practices is to free yourself … Read more
There’s little doubt in anyone’s mind, I hope, that automation lies at the heart of all the progress in human well-being and economic development. It started with outsourcing physical labor to machines, initially through watermills and windmills and later through the use of internal combustion engines and electric motors. Later on, also “white collar” work … Read more
Automation is central for companies that are digitalizing, and new technologies, including natural language processing and image recognition as well as robotic process automation, allow us to automate processes that were impossible or prohibitively expensive to automate earlier. Although I’m a strong proponent of automating everything repetitive, there’s a “dirty little secret” around automation that … Read more
As I walk around in numerous companies, one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the number of people living out their lives in pretty poor jobs. Repetitive jobs, where they have lots of responsibility but little authority and where company processes, guidelines and rules dictate the way the work is to … Read more
As humans, we tend to avoid situations where we experience pain or discomfort. Consequently, many organizations tend to decrease the frequency at which ‘hard’ things are done. And rather than fixing the root causes of the pain and discomfort, often there’s a desire to increase the amount of formalized process around the action that needs … Read more
During the last weeks, I have gotten quite a few indications that companies are preparing for worse economic times. The combination of rising inflation due to, among others, logistics challenges, the war in Ukraine as well as the central banks finally deciding to increase interest rates seems to be the trigger the world economy needed … Read more
Every few weeks, it seems, we are treated to another major breakthrough innovation in artificial intelligence. Whether it is Deep Mind’s system beating the world champion Go player, GPT-3 dazzling us with Turing test breaking abilities or DALLE-2 generating images that are simply stunning, it seems like we are on the cusp of general artificial … Read more
Although it is uncertain who said this, a famous quote is “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” This notion is at the heart of digitalization: much of what we think we know is no longer true when the industry goes … Read more
One of the models that I use frequently in my consulting assignments is the 10 types of innovation model by Doblin/Monitor Group. As the name suggests, the model identifies 10 different forms of innovation arranged around the business ecosystem, the offering and the customer experience. This model is important as most people think about improving … Read more
