Dave Gray of The Dachis Group and author of a recent book,The Connected Company works with the world’s leading companies to develop and execute winning strategies. His previous book, Gamestorming, sold more than 50,000 copies and has been translated into 16 languages.
This video is an hour long but discusses much of the content in the book. He makes a case for why services are important and how they need to be created and managed in the world today. He also makes the correlation on why manufacturing is no longer the caveat that many of us think it is. An hour worth spending.
His discussion on The Law of Requisite Variety is part of my discussion in next weeks blog. The law basically states that any control system must be capable of variety that’s greater than or equal to the variety of the system to be controlled. From the book;
In other words, if there is variety in the environment, you need enough variety in your system to absorb it effectively. Imagine you are throwing balls at a juggler and the juggler is trying to keep them all in the air. No matter how skilled the juggler, there will always be a point at which there are too many possible states for the juggler’s mind and hands to maintain control. At some point, you will either need to reduce the number of balls, or you will need more jugglers.
He goes on to say:
Customers have a tendency to resist standardization. The more you try to standardize their service requests, the more you will anger them. Not a good recipe for customer satisfaction or long-term business growth.
Listen to Dave’s spin on it and next week you will hear mine.