But constant consumption is deadly. Imagine just relentlessly consuming food, every 10 minutes, eating whatever is on offer, chicken and fries, beef stew and ugali, pizza, hamburger, hot dog, chocolate cake, washed down with a Red Bull and a Coke, along with a few shots of vodka.
Then going through this cycle, constantly devouring whatever fast food is made available. Within weeks one would likely be disillusioned, prone to bouts of depression, enroute to obesity, all the time confused, wondering what happened?
Yet that is what we do with information, constantly consuming whatever comes in on all the channels of the screens of the multiple devices we use.
Risking an addiction to devouring the next tasty morsel of an engaging clip, confusing the flood of information with truth, and touch of wisdom.
Just as you don’t rummage around someone else’s garbage, looking to extract value, or to gain nourishment, might be better to think for oneself.
Competing information networks
Old thinking of 30 years ago was that there was only three ways to compete: 1) cost leadership, which was a fancy way of saying being the least cost, the cheapest 2) serving a niche market, and 3) differentiation on, for instance, quality.
The idea was that one had to be one of those, not risking getting stuck in the middle with a confused product identity. Thanks to technology and fierce global trade it is not uncommon to find a quality product, like a Japanese, or Korean, and now Chinese vehicle at a very reasonable price.
On the muddy bewildering rugby pitch of business competition, it is not a battle between individual players, but more an ability to be plugged into quality [not quantity] information networks. Having a snippet of data, or an astute insight, that the competition does not have.
Startups and the bureaucrat’s drawer
Information networks have existed from the stone age to the time of artificial intelligence. Both a disruptive start-up and a staid laid back bureaucracy are types of information systems.
Startups, often part of the venture capital network, are defined by their entrepreneurial drive, agility, and innovation. They have the ability of seeing differently, noticing what other players missed.
In this early stage, the startup is fluid and shaped by the founders' vision and day to day behaviour. “Move fast and break things” was Facebook’s initial motto.
Being close knit, openness, and risk-taking are standard operating procedure. With time, scaling the business can become an issue. Driven by a sense of urgency, the need to disrupt markets, risk-taking and small failures are the required steps.
But eventually, even the startup needs to follow the dictates of bureaucracy, meeting all the various regulatory and compliance requirements.
“Bureaucracy literally means ‘rule by writing desk’. The term was invented in eighteenth-century France, when the typical official sat next to a writing desk with drawers – a bureau. At the heart of the bureaucratic order, then, is the drawer. Bureaucracy seeks to solve the information retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer,” writes Yuval Noah Harari.
“The principle remains the same regardless of whether the document is placed into a drawer, a shelf, a basket, a jar, a computer folder or any other receptacle: divide and rule. Divide the world into containers, and keep the containers separate so the documents don’t get mixed up. This principle, however, comes with a price. “Instead of focusing on understanding the world as it is, bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world,” notes Harari, the historian of change.
Business success lies in the ability to master a balancing act. Meeting the requirements bureaucracy needs to file in a digital drawer.
Combined with the ability to treat each new dawn, like day one of a startup, with a sense of entrepreneurial drive, combined with an injection of ‘out of the box’ creative thinking.
