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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates

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To: unclewest who wrote (15911)	1/22/2000 10:33:00 AM
From: pkapsiotis	Read Replies (2) of 54805

Here is an idea on where we are going to be in 10 or 20 years from now. I have no thoughts on how this affects the Gorilla Game "game" so I welcome your comments. I think that if we look back in how the industrial revolution - and assuming you can intelligently forecast the future based on the past - we can get at least a general idea of where things might go. Let's pick an example: It is a well known fact that when the automobile industry started there was initially a large number of small competitors competing in this area. The market was in an early stage - the concepts that drove the industrial revolution had not yet evolved; no best practices where around - and all the efforts relied on the individuals who founded all those companies and tried to find a way of getting the product out the door in a fast and cheap way. As we took the idea of the division of labor to the next level - and I am talking about a 80-100 years period here - some people actually found a way to get the product out the door in a fast and cheap way and it is those few companies from which we buy our cars today. However, during this transition basically in all the 20th century - and in all the industries not just the automobile industry - the individual lost more and more of its power over commanding things and what took over was "the process". I am not saying that the individual is not important - it will always be - but if you wanted to compete with those large organizations of the industrial era you better had good processes in place to deliver. It is not surprising after all that in the 80s the last decade when the industrial revolution was dominating things what took place was reorganization, a lot of merger and acquisitions activity, and business process redesign. As we started moving to the information revolution during the last 30 years I think we are seeing a similar pattern. The power has shifted again on the individual level - the "knowledge worker" - who is controlling the information and the know how (IT specialist, programmer etc.). We haven't figured out yet how we can establish a process or knowledge management machine or whatever is going to be called that would capture all this information, shifting away the power from the individual. I do not think the network itself is the answer. The network is just enabling us to get there. For example, the open source software communities are utilizing the network efficiently but you still need e.g. Red Hat = people to assemble the product. In a similar way here in this thread we are experiencing a learning method that does not differ much from what is being done in an MBA school where a class discussion is one of the most important elements of the educational experience. We are using the network to take learning to the next level (no disrespect to Universities but the beauty of this is that it is a continuous process). The challenge for us or the "companies", "value chains" or whatever is going to be in the future is to find a way of capturing this information and automate its processing into answers in a similar way that an industrial process produces products. Would an XML type enabling technology be the answer? Maybe. If I understand it correctly in the same way that the division of labor breaks an operation in small tasks an XML type technology would break information into small pieces. The "companies" of the information era will be the ones that will find a way of assembling those pieces together creating tremendous value. At this point the power would have shifted once more from the individual back to the organization. Ok having said that and in an effort to keep myself on subject since I am posting in this thread what are the implications for GG in the knowledge management area? I cannot envision a time when all the "companies" of the future will have the exact same knowledge management "backbone". If this is the case then we have accepted mediocrity. No competition no better ways of doing things. I would like to hear some comments on this as I think it is relevant to how our investing strategy will evolve. Thanks for taking the time to read. Panos

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