Purpose Landing on the VizPlanet© - Our Generation’s Sputnik Moment?

Courtesy: Google images customized within our prototype implementation

With our VizPlanet© article, that is being posted within the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) site, generating some interesting follow-up questions within the MIX community, one of our readers, suggested that we cross-post it, within our blog to keep that momentum going. As it turns out, some of those questions, in fact, strengthen the case of our article, and so, we decided to incorporate them within our blog today. The most notable question being – is there a burning platform to call this revolutionary VizPlanet© idea, as our Generation’s Sputnik Moment?

The Answer is …..

The short answer is YES! Having said that, as we started thinking about the best way to present the compelling case for this burning platform – a key insight came to our mind – i.e. an insight from an article by Jared Diamond, assessing the impact of the increased rate of consumption happening among world’s population- as summarized in the picture below.


What does this insight tell us? The middle class boom of the developing world (more specifically the BRIC countries), that is being used by the western multi nationals, as the burning platform for their emerging market growth strategy, eventually might come back, and start even impacting their capital raising ability in the long run– especially, when those middle class populations, start competing for the limited set of natural resources, that are currently being consumed by their western counter parts, with a GH emission inequality ratio of 32:1. What do we mean by that? As it turns out, the emerging market growth strategies of most western multinationals, in a way, are a paradox because - on one hand, these corporations are counting on capitalizing the middle class boom happening within the developing world, to sustain and justify their double digit growth for the next 10 years or so - and, on the other hand, the same boom, eventually will end up increasing the competition for the limited natural resources (or cost of capital in financial terms)- and might even start reducing (or hurting) the quality of life, that is being enjoyed by all of us, perhaps not today, but definitely 10-25 years from now. In other words, no matter how we slice it, our planet’s current resource consumption pattern or lifestyle, is not at all sustainable and so, it is a no-win value proposition, for both the developed and developing world, in the long run.

As we present this argument, I hear someone pointing us to the progress we have made so far on developing those innovative sustainability solutions/strategies to reduce the carbon footprint (& hence reducing the resource uses) along with those efficient global capital/capability management strategies that have been instituted by most multinational corporations. While we don’t disagree with the intent and merits of any those strategies - most of those sustainability solutions/strategies, however, are still being centered around –just changing our personal choices, to reduce the carbon footprint, as opposed to changing our lifestyles in en-masse , before changing those personal choices. In other words, if we may use Prof. Clayton Christensen’s style of writing – most of our current sustainability solutions are stuck at the wrong side of the fork!

The root cause being …..

While we agree, that it is the right thing to do, to develop these innovative sustainability solutions (e.g. energy star programs etc.) to help reduce the carbon footprint at the personal/household/business levels, in our humble opinion, these solutions, do not fix the root cause of the issue i.e. -

• "With urbanization happening at a faster rate than ever across the globe, especially, in the last decade or so - more and more percentage of consumers (& corporations) are continuing to consume and compete for the limited set of natural resources to sustain their current life style (& profit margins) within the natural realm, in spite of a compelling alternative purpose/virtual lifestyle, available for them within the virtual realm, in a fraction of cost, providing almost the same “look and feel” type of experience, emitting just a fractional percentage of the greenhouse gases.”

One might wonder why we have not been able to fix this root cause, in its totality so far! The reason, in our humble opinion, is the lack of a compelling motivation (or incentive mechanism) on the part of both consumers and corporations, to embrace the alternative purpose/virtual lifestyle - and rightfully so, we propose a “lifestyle-changing”, root cause fixing, systemic approach, that MOTIVATES both consumers and corporations alike, to come together under a Virtual Community Environment(VCE, henceforth pronounced as Viz), that is bounded together by a powerful “Purpose Score driven, Virtual Reality/Avatar/3D/Interactive Gaming technologies/Tele-Metry based VizPlanet© Platform”, as outlined in the picture above, (that was put together as part of our recent prototype implementation), that inherently compels all parties (specifically corporations) to stretch their value chain into the VizPlanet© realm, thus making it possible for them to provide value-add purpose bundles of products and services with relatively less number of resources. Not only that - this type of a stretched value chain, apart from increasing corporations’ economies of scale & scope benefits, also, helps us to preserve God given, limited natural resources for the benefit of the future generation. In other words – it is all about us, changing our life style and making a conscious mindset shift, where possible, to consume certain services within the virtual realm (thus reducing the carbon footprint in larger percentages), as opposed to continuing our current lifestyle within the natural realm.

Resource Pool Portfolio (RPP) Framework – to help prioritize the VizPlanet© Services

To facilitate such a large scale sustainability driven purpose movement, we have developed a Resource Pool Portfolio (RPP) framework by grouping the high value resource consumption assets of our planet into 25 resource consumption buckets, and let the framework itself, to identify the top 5 high potential candidate buckets of services (as numbered in the picture below) that can be slowly moved from natural realm into the virtual realm, as promoted by our earlier purpose innovation platform concept.

Simply put, those purpose consumers (with a history of consuming/applying H&W P&S’s, consuming/reducing green energies, thus leading a purpose lifestyle, in body-soul-spirit dimensions with a higher purpose scores), who choose to consume all of their commerce and content services, using our VizPlanet© Platform, not only get a better value for themselves, but also, facilitate the noble cause of reducing the natural resource consumption rate by a substantial percentage. In other words, VizPlanet© platform, over a period of time, reduces the carbon footprint, by a substantial percentage (& hence operating cost as well) as captured in the three KPI’s of the RPP framework, thus increasing the profit margins of corporations as well.
Solution Options within the VizPlanet© Platform
With that said, the sustainable long term question that needs to be solved within the purpose reform context is – How do we change our lifestyle by resetting planet’s end-to-end resource consumption pattern and by moving some or all of the resource intensive commerce/content services from natural realm into the virtual realm – using one of the five options identified below

1. Brick and mortar platform along with a purpose score enabled vanilla online channel (current model with just addition of purpose scores based content and commerce services bundles).


2. Brick and mortar platform with a purpose score enabled vanilla online channel along with a third option of Purpose Score based VizPlanet© Platform in asynchronous mode i.e. near real time synchronization of SKU’s and content.


3. Brick and mortar platform with a purpose score enabled vanilla online channel along with a third option of Purpose Score based VizPlanet© Platform in synchronous mode i.e. real time synchronization of SKU’s & content - and so potentially replacing the newly constructed brick and mortar platforms


4. Brick and mortar platform with a purpose score enabled vanilla online channel along with a third option of Purpose Score based VizPlanet© Platform in synchronous mode i.e. real time synchronization of SKU’s & content with lot more value-add services like personalization and so eliminating the need for the new brick and mortar platforms, especially in the developing world


5. 100% “one-stop-shop” VizPlanet© Platform in synchronous real time mode eliminating all commercial real estate platforms(remediate the brick and mortar real estate for other services where virtual services are not possible to provide)

Having said that, by no means, we are suggesting that any of these options, will replace the current solution(s) in totality – rather, we suggest that these solution options, among many of the other experimentation solution options, has a great potential to compliment the current solution options. In other words, our solution is an experimentation option – with a potential to become the stepping stone, for the long ranging solution(s) within the 5-10 year purpose reform road map.

Conclusion
In closing, our hope is that sustainability experts, will pay a closer attention to our experimentation based solution options, given the fact, our VizPlanet© approach (including its ancillary platforms like VizMall©, VizTV©, VizDiner©, VizBev© etc), not necessarily, just solves those sustainability challenges, but also, it provides a better value (price) proposition for all parties, with an "almost similar look and feel type shopping/consumption experience" of their brick and mortar platform counterpart, thus motivating corporations and consumers to consume more and more purpose bundles, with an intention to increase their purpose scores -resulting in a win:win value proposition for all parties, in the long run!

PTV©- Our generation’s Sputnik Moment View - to tap the untapped opportunities?

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” In his State of the Union address, President Obama threw down the gauntlet: “We’re issuing a challenge; we’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems (clean energy etc.), we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time.”

As it turns out, our Portfolio-Thread View (PTV) is being birthed as an answer to solve these “Sputnik moment” challenges of our generation strategists – who are faced with a similar challenge of not able to effectively, tap the untapped growth (and innovation) opportunities, and so, we thought of re-positioning PTV as a Sputnik Moment View – as our way of living up to President’s challenge. In other words, PTV© is being redefined as a Sputnik Moment view, from both application and symbolic standpoints, as outlined below, and on the picture, on the top of the page -

• “Analysis/Synthesis” balanced (solving the 6 macro dilemmas of - Purpose vs. Profit, Customer Centric vs. Vision Centric Innovation, Pull vs. Push value chain, Operation Excellence vs. Innovation Excellence, long term vs. Q-To-Q results and Market based vs. Resource based view),

• “PtC©” positioned ( overcoming the collaboration gridlock using the "Power through Collaboration" process promoted by Willis Consulting LLC).

• “Nature’s principle” driven (using nature’s three principles of balancing opposites, energy conservation/transformation and Solomon’s cyclical seasonality),

• “Value Accelerators” propelled (using the value accelerators called experience/capability pools),

• “Purpose” landed (in the form of three Portfolio/Thread portfolio frameworks called experience pools, capability pools and purpose innovation pools (EPP©, CPP© & PIP©).
  

Sounds like a symbolic redefinition resembling Sputnik's “Balance-Position-Drive-Propel-Land” sequence, isn’t it? Interestingly enough, our PTV© , indeed is a Sputnik moment view that is meant to be latched on to the business orbit of corporations (as depicted on our PTV radial cycle framework picture with an embedded Apollo XVIII image on top of the page)– not only to overcome, the so called sputnik moment challenges (from the standpoint of effectively “balancing-positioning-driving-propelling-landing” their strategies), but also, to continuously measure, monitor and manage them for maximizing their efficiencies.

With one of President’s sputnik moment challenges happen to be energy sustainability – the symbolic coincidences to our PTV could not have been any better, that PTV is indeed being designed with the same energy sustainability principle as its cornerstone, from both symbolic and application standpoints. What do we mean by that? With our blog being known for its spiritual/metaphysics metaphors, let us explain PTV with yet another spiritual metaphor called Tai Chi, the well known form of Qigong/Yoga (that is further enhanced with few other popular meditation techniques of Chinese/Indian/middle eastern origins) – to get our point across!

First things first- let us start with some energy management basics i.e. matter and energy are just different forms of the same thing (as revealed by Einstein’s insight/foresight balanced energy equation- e=mc2), and so, for all practical purposes, we can call Einstein’s energy equation as value equation. With that said, Tai Chi in its essence is nothing but the manifestation of this value/energy equation in five steps - Balance, Position, Inhale, Exhale and Iterate that is in perfect alignment with our sputnik moment PTV sequence “Balance-Position-Drive-Propel-Land” , as identified in the top of the page.

In other words, Tai Chi is all about balancing the posture of our body so that energy can flow better followed by a slow and deep, abdominal inhaling and exhaling (breathing) exercise, creating a self awareness which further channels the energetic thoughts of the mind to iterate on a continual basis with an end goal of maximizing that energy.

With that said, let us peel the Tai Chi steps, like peeling the layers of onion – wherein, Tai Chi starts with a fluid balancing process first – and then gets strengthened from the right body posture – which is further accelerated by the inhaling of oxygen to make the energy flow efficient, creating the self awareness that is needed to overcome the illnesses causing stresses -by turning that self healing mechanism that is buried within our human body!

Similarly, under PTV©, strategy is all about first balancing these six nebulous dilemmas using these three nature’s principles resulting in a positive value flow– that is further strengthened with the posture (or structure) provided by the power through collaboration (PtC) process- which is further accelerated by injecting value accelerators (in the form of experience and capability pools overcoming the value de-accelerators) that turns-on the self healing mechanism called value maximization that is buried deep within our businesses. Let us use the following “similarity map” to put these similarities in perspective!

• Balance the energy flow/blockage dilemma –> Balance the six macro level value dilemmas using “analysis/synthesis” based 3 nature’s principles as identified earlier.

• Position the posture for energy to flow without inhibition– >Position the collaboration structure for value to transform, using PtC driven collaboration principle.

• Inhale the oxygen for accelerating the energy flow -> Inject the “insight/foresight” positioned value accelerators (in the form of effective experience pools and efficient capability pool portfolios) for accelerating the value flow/creation.

• Exhale (Relax) –> Let the stakeholders (shareholders, consumers, customers, partners, suppliers etc) reap the value on a periodical basis.

• Iterate –> Reinvest and keep the cyclical process going.

As it turns out, PTV not only qualifies to be a sputnik moment view from application standpoint (i.e. its power to tap the untapped opportunities), but also from symbolic standpoint as identified in the picture and the Tai Chi metaphor based similarity map. Yet another coincidence is that PTV© , as a matter of fact aligns perfectly with Einstein’s energy equation as well!

Value Accelerators=Capital Pool x Experience Pool2

Now that we have built a compelling case that PTV indeed is a Sputnik Moment view (from both application and symbolic standpoints) – it is a moment of “call for action”! Our ask today is – should there be an interest from any of our readers (especially to those of you who are in leadership roles running specific organizations within your firms), here is a golden opportunity to seize your Sputnik type moments – and all that you have to do is, just second President’s closing statement “we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time” – to tap your untapped growth opportunities that are buried deep within your businesses. The call is yours -as we are just a phone call away, readily available to help and serve!