{"id":4395,"date":"2010-05-18T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T12:12:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-05-17T18:12:04","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T12:12:04","slug":"big_and_small_companies_alike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/big_and_small_companies_alike\/","title":{"rendered":"Big and small companies alike&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>&#8230;have to deal with their new landscape.<\/strong> It&#8217;s often unclear whether a firm should strive to be on top of a mountain (for example, to be the world&#8217;s most reliable hard disk manufacturer), when the whole mountain range beneath that particular peak may sink in a few years (if everyone moves their storage onto large protein arrays). <span class=\"nr-highlight\">An organization can cheer itself silly on its way to becoming the world&#8217;s expert on a dead-end technology.<\/span> (The nuclear power industry offers one example.)<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/img\/VNRF$$12.jpg\"><br \/>\n<span class=\"nr-caption\">Turbulent times mean that local success is not global success. A company may be at peak efficiency, but on the wrong mountain. The trick is to select a high-potential area to excel in.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Some of the most perfect technology was created just before its demise. Vacuum tube technology reached a <span class=\"nr-emphasis\">zenith of complexity just before it vanished<\/span>. As MIT economist James Utterback writes: &#8220;Firms are remarkably creative in defending their entrenched technologies, which often reach unimaginable heights of elegance in design and technical performance only when their demise is clearly predictable.&#8221; It&#8217;s relatively easy to arrive at a peak of perfection. The problem is that <span class=\"nr-emphasis-less\">perfection can be local, or suboptimal<\/span>, like being the best basketball player in your state, but unaware of national tournaments. While a firm is congratulating itself on creating the world&#8217;s fastest punch card reader&#8211;the fastest in the universe!&#8211;the rest of the economic world has moved on to the PC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;have to deal with their new landscape. It&#8217;s often unclear whether a firm should strive to be on top of a mountain (for example, to be the world&#8217;s most reliable hard disk manufacturer), when the whole mountain range beneath that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/big_and_small_companies_alike\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"1","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[202],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/newrules\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}