Richard, interesting piece ... the trigger was JLR ... I have a theory which I think very much applies to the car industry generally, but I have seen it in lots of other industries ... a business like JLR develops expertise, builds on top of itself ... the next step follows logically from the previous one ... then from seemingly nowhere a discontinuity emerges which open the doors for new entrants who otherwise would never have managed to establish a position in the industry ... a new technology usually ... I saw it happen in the welding industry when semiconductors allowed the creation of inverters - and flat footed the electrical engineers in companies like Hobart and Lincoln ... Steve Jobs did it in multiple industries ... Southwest and then Ryanair did it in the airline industry ... Dyson did it vacuum cleaners ... BYD was first a battery company and this is the path that led them into the automotive industry, where as Honda is at its core an internal combustion engine business ... it is very difficult for legacy players to abandon the expertise they stand on top of, and effectively start again ... they have too much invested ... they lose confidence in themselves and begin to try radical things (often hiring in star designers ... was Johnny Ive involved in the recent Ferrari embarrassment with the Luce ... they go down paths that in retrospect were not wise because they are lost and do not know how to adapt to the new circumstances they find themselves in ... the species that survives best is not the most intelligent or strongest, it is the one that adapts best to the circumstances it finds itself in.
Morning, Paul. Indeed. As often with posts like this, you think of something that you want to continue after you push the publish button. The question that's now surfacing, which I think is true in many areas, is the difference between character and identity. Increasingly, in many places, identity is something that's manufactured, whilst character is immutable and demonstrated in action. I think there's also an interesting thread that comes off that: in that a particular agentic AI is reducing the need to abstract what we offer. This is an interesting article by Paul Choudhary, whose work I like, this morning. https://platforms.substack.com/p/how-agents-unlock-new-markets?r=4xbtf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. Organisations, for a long time, have given people somewhere to shelter. I think that is changing.
Richard, interesting piece ... the trigger was JLR ... I have a theory which I think very much applies to the car industry generally, but I have seen it in lots of other industries ... a business like JLR develops expertise, builds on top of itself ... the next step follows logically from the previous one ... then from seemingly nowhere a discontinuity emerges which open the doors for new entrants who otherwise would never have managed to establish a position in the industry ... a new technology usually ... I saw it happen in the welding industry when semiconductors allowed the creation of inverters - and flat footed the electrical engineers in companies like Hobart and Lincoln ... Steve Jobs did it in multiple industries ... Southwest and then Ryanair did it in the airline industry ... Dyson did it vacuum cleaners ... BYD was first a battery company and this is the path that led them into the automotive industry, where as Honda is at its core an internal combustion engine business ... it is very difficult for legacy players to abandon the expertise they stand on top of, and effectively start again ... they have too much invested ... they lose confidence in themselves and begin to try radical things (often hiring in star designers ... was Johnny Ive involved in the recent Ferrari embarrassment with the Luce ... they go down paths that in retrospect were not wise because they are lost and do not know how to adapt to the new circumstances they find themselves in ... the species that survives best is not the most intelligent or strongest, it is the one that adapts best to the circumstances it finds itself in.
Morning, Paul. Indeed. As often with posts like this, you think of something that you want to continue after you push the publish button. The question that's now surfacing, which I think is true in many areas, is the difference between character and identity. Increasingly, in many places, identity is something that's manufactured, whilst character is immutable and demonstrated in action. I think there's also an interesting thread that comes off that: in that a particular agentic AI is reducing the need to abstract what we offer. This is an interesting article by Paul Choudhary, whose work I like, this morning. https://platforms.substack.com/p/how-agents-unlock-new-markets?r=4xbtf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. Organisations, for a long time, have given people somewhere to shelter. I think that is changing.