- DIAGRAM YOUR EXISTING BUSINESS MODEL
- Does the organization now serve a vital, articulated social mission?
- Does it use lots of energy, materials, or toxic materials?
- Does it have estimates of “resource footprints” consumed?
- Must it function well to assure health, safety, and quality of life?
- Does top management see the organization as existing in a natural environment, or as detached from it?
- Does it have a plan to cope with a major disaster? Is it practiced?
- Does the company’s business model encourage wasteful consumption by customers, employees, suppliers, or others?
- Customers: what performance do they expect from you?
- What do they want?
- What do they need?
- Do they require any “must do” performance from you to stay alive?
- What do you give them that they don’t need?
- Do you give them anything that could cause harm or injury?
- Do they assume any obligations or responsibilities because they are customers?
- Workers. Employees. Contributors – those who “do things” in the organization:
- What do they physically do?
- How can they become responsible and “accountable” for more?
- What are the consequences if they make an error?
- How can they learn what to do and why much faster and in more depth?
- How could they work effectively with you to radically change the business?
- How can a learning system based on scientific logic be developed for them – and with them?
- How must the leadership and the working culture change in order to do this?
- Suppliers and contributing partners:
- Do they know their resource footprints? Made any attempt to estimate them? Willing to disclose them if they have?
- Technological competence? Leading edge or lagging?
- Operational competence? Lean and quality?
- Able and willing to collaborate in a vigorous learning enterprise?
- Product/process design:
- Do you have a learning system as a base for advancing designs?
- Is it tied into information and opportunities from suppliers?
- Could it advance to being a platform for 10X advances?
- Revised or revolutionary business model:
- What is the social mission that we must execute very, very well?
- Does fulfillment of this mission require a business model that manages complete cradle-to-cradle life cycles of products and processes?
- How will this mission convert into a business model that secures financial stability to support long-term innovation and development?
- How can all stakeholders be drawn into such a business model?
- How can the business model be kept flexible to adapt to rapid changes or crises?
- Migration through “next possible” stages:
- 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).
- 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.)