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Registration for our Stanford Continuing Studies course Corporate Strategy at Scale: Emerging Thinking on How Companies and Economies Evolve opens on February 22. Learn more
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The economic and social disruption caused by the ongoing pandemic will likely match that of the Second World War. Arching through history, this comparison caries a special significance here, as it was WWII that triggered the rise of strategy in business — an era dominated by Harvard Business School. And while many have challenged this status quo over the years (i.e., Is Strategy a Bad Word?), recent trends and developments suggest that what we learn and how we learn might have reached its limits. |
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"Today, Harvard doesn’t even have a course called General Management. Nor do most other business schools. Many students have come to view entrepreneurial management courses as the capstone experience of the MBA curriculum, where you learn about defining businesses, moving them through growth, changing course, and doing it again. But entrepreneurship courses don’t teach people how to run a large company; they teach them how to create and finance a startup." (Cynthia Montgomery, Harvard Business School)
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Larger Scale, Lower Complexity
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Seeing companies as complex systems of ofmos (offering-market cosmos) creates new ways of understanding the big picture. In his 1972 article More Is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science, Nobel laureate P.W. Anderson wrote, "it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y. But this hierarchy does not imply that science X is 'just applied Y. At each stage entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry."
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A New Kind of Granularity
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The elementary entities of the new worldview are business spaces defined by a product and a set of customers with the same need-addressing behavior relative to that product. Ofmos (short for offering-market cosmos) are abstract, information-based units that provide a new lens for understanding companies and economies, including their boundaries and behaviors over long periods of time. In the 2020 article What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory, which revolves around a novel " information theory of individuality," a Santa Fe Institute physicist states, " I think that defining fundamental quantities helps us to suddenly start to see dynamics that we didn’t see before, and understand processes that we hadn’t thought of before."
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More Meaningfulness, More Accessibility
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The Ofmos model makes business learning (a) more meaningful by providing a knowledge umbrella, and (b) more accessible by providing a learning scaffolding. Yet its usefulness goes deeper , when we consider what P.W. Anderson called "broken symmetry" in his 1972 article, explaining that "in general, the relationship between the system and its parts is intellectually a one-way street. Synthesis is expected to be all but impossible; analysis, on the other hand, may be not only possible but fruitful in all kinds of ways." In short, the Ofmos worldview helps us see things that might not be visible otherwise.
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"I am interested in explanation, and don’t much care what it’s called, theory or otherwise. When I think about it, however, I see explanation along a continuum, from lists (categories), to typologies (comprehensive lists), to impressions of relationships among factors (not necessarily ‘variables’: that sounds too reified for many of the factors I work with), to causations between and patterns among these relationships, to fully explanatory models (which interweave all the factors in question)." (Henry Mintzberg, McGill University)
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Experience the Ofmos way of thinking in its simplest, playful form.
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