Antoine Buteau from The PNR sent me this video. It a criticism of bland business strategy. More precisely, it highlights the importance of figuring out your 'why' and your 'where', two questions are often skipped in strategy documents. To answer these questions, we often say 'well x% of the industry is doing it, so it must be a good idea'. It introduces the idea of value chain mapping. The idea is to use maps to figure out 'where' things are going and 'why' and 'when' you should go there or not.

"Apparently we are living through a time of disruptive innovation, with the creation of new value and the destruction of old norms. Cloud computing, Big Data, the rise of open source and the internet of things are all examples of this -- or so we are told. But whilst we all have inertia to change, disruption implies that the change is unexpected, even unpredictable. However, if you have 20 years to plan for something, can you really call it surprising, random or unexpected?

Alas, it turns out that companies are being disrupted by broadly predictable changes. But how can this be? The problem is poor situational awareness to the point of blindness. In this keynote, I will present the general principles of industry change and describe what can and cannot be predicted. I will then examine how companies can better understand the environment around them and by anticipating the nature of change then manipulate the market in their favor through open techniques."