Review Exercise Anticipating Compression

Review Exercise Anticipating CompressionJune 3, 2010

  1. DIAGRAM YOUR EXISTING BUSINESS MODEL
  2. Does the organization now serve a vital, articulated social mission?
    1. Does it use lots of energy, materials, or toxic materials?
    2. Does it have estimates of “resource footprints” consumed?
    3. Must it function well to assure health, safety, and quality of life?
    4. Does top management see the organization as existing in a natural environment, or as detached from it?
    5. Does it have a plan to cope with a major disaster? Is it practiced?
    6. Does the company’s business model encourage wasteful consumption by customers, employees, suppliers, or others?
  1. Customers: what performance do they expect from you?
    1. What do they want?
    2. What do they need?
    3. Do they require any “must do” performance from you to stay alive?
    4. What do you give them that they don’t need?
    5. Do you give them anything that could cause harm or injury?
    6. Do they assume any obligations or responsibilities because they are customers?
  1. Workers. Employees. Contributors – those who “do things” in the organization:
    1. What do they physically do?
    2. How can they become responsible and “accountable” for more?
    3. What are the consequences if they make an error?
    4. How can they learn what to do and why much faster and in more depth?
    5. How could they work effectively with you to radically change the business?
    6. How can a learning system based on scientific logic be developed for them – and with them?
    7. How must the leadership and the working culture change in order to do this?
  1. Suppliers and contributing partners:
    1. Do they know their resource footprints? Made any attempt to estimate them? Willing to disclose them if they have?
    2. Technological competence? Leading edge or lagging?
    3. Operational competence? Lean and quality?
    4. Able and willing to collaborate in a vigorous learning enterprise?
    5. Product/process design:
      1. Do you have a learning system as a base for advancing designs?
      2. Is it tied into information and opportunities from suppliers?
      3. Could it advance to being a platform for 10X advances?
  1. Revised or revolutionary business model:
    1. What is the social mission that we must execute very, very well?
    2. Does fulfillment of this mission require a business model that manages complete cradle-to-cradle life cycles of products and processes?
    3. How will this mission convert into a business model that secures financial stability to support long-term innovation and development?
    4. How can all stakeholders be drawn into such a business model?
    5. How can the business model be kept flexible to adapt to rapid changes or crises?
  1. Migration through “next possible” stages:
    1. What opportunities can be seized to start the learning process, capture serious attention, and practice making major change (no big change that involves basic changes in thinking can be executed in a few weeks).
    2. What be done to start innovative technical initiative with “Re” and “De” concepts (well-publicized, but not widely practiced):

“Re” Initiatives “De” Initiatives

Re-use, re-purpose                                                De-emphasize

Re-build, revise, refurbish                                    De-energize (total product life cycles)

Re-manufacture, upgrade                                    De-materialize (total product life cycles)

Recycle                                                            De-toxify

NOW DIAGRAM YOUR PROPOSED IDEAL BUSINESS MODEL (Can’t do it very well without spending a good deal of time thinking about it.)

Recent Posts:

The Influence of Neoliberalism Runs Deep

The Influence of Neoliberalism Runs Deep Better known in the United States as Libertarianism, neoliberal dogma began as simplistic assumptions in old quantitative economic models, before computers; later economists were not as constrained. Moneyed people glommed onto...

“Deep” Complexity

A graphic depiction of Gaia from Pixabay, showing that we are connected to each other, to our ecology, and to everything else. That everything in the entire universe, not just earth bound systems, all somehow link together.   Can We Understand Complexity or Only...

Covid-19 Complexity

This is one variation of Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail -- doesn't recognize its own tail.. Here Ouroboros is also shown in the form of the universal symbol for infinity, signifying deep, hidden feedback connections that we might never be able to fathom with...

A Microbiomic Crisis

The Economy Critically Disrupts the Balance of Nature  Black Lives Matter demonstrations all over the world crowded Covid-19 out of the news, swelling into a pandemic of demonstrations in small towns as well as big cities on six continents. Triggered by the death of...

Planet of the Humans

Planet of the Humans, movie by Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs Moore and Gibbs’ movie appears calculated to incite controversy. If so, they certainly roiled the environmental community. So far, it’s received little mainstream attention, and a few environmental activists...

Finding Our Real Reserves

Finding Our Real Reserves April 7, 2020  Covid-19 and its economic tailspin presage many more crises to come. We must change how we live and how we think. Our economic objectives have set us up for Covid-19, with more debacles on the way. What we have assumed to...

System Fragility

Above: Model of the Corona Virus. At Right: Diagram of our proper priorities: Earth first; us second; profit third. Or, should profit be no more than a systemic convention? Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush First in a Series “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush” is a stock...

Legal Creep

  Legal Creep Or why we think there is no alternative to economic expansion A better sub-title for this essay with two book reviews might be “can we escape our self-deception that economic expansion is necessary?” Whether economic expansion is labeled capitalist...

Follow Us: