Strategy 2006
1) The rise of the edge (= value creation external to the firm) continues. Incumbents across industries start thinking about edge competencies (and not just cause I told them to :)
2) Strategy decay at the core begins to kill. The music industry dies; no one cares.
2.5) Because the music industry's busy being reborn (Last.fm, Pandora, etc); everyone notices but VCs, who will still be busy talking about how "media companies" are terrible investments.
3) Publishers (news, books, etc) finally get it, and start investing seriously (versus just dabbling) in the new value chain and actively shepherding it's emergence.
4) Search makes even more $$$, search players across verticals start seeing nice exits, PPC doesn't die - it gets more and more efficient, and extended into newer and newer domains.
4.5) Yahoo shows the world how not to build edge competencies; minimizing value creation from "social media", and failing to do anything with most of their acquisitions. They're forced to keep acquiring social plays, feeding the vicious circle. Google demonstrates how to build (and leverage) edge competencies, using liquid and plastic ads and content to disrupt more and more traditional ad markets.
5) TV and Hollywood's strategy decay accelerates, instead of actually doing something innovative, they a) explode ad time and b) make
even dumber content.
5.5) By the end of the 2006, the only two people still watching TV and going to the multiplex are Cary Sherman and Jack Valenti.
6) The social = anticonsumption. People talk more and buy less; consumer industries start getting qwned.
6.25) Brand strategists realize that the century-old strategy of engineering social meanings into products is decaying fast, because social meanings themselves are undergoing hypercommoditization. They begin searching for a model of post-branding, but struggle to find one.
6.5) VCs completely don't get that this is an enormous gap in the consumer space for all things 2.0 to be beyond disruptive, and miss the entire strategic point nicely.
6.75) This accelerates the disruption of the current model of funding innovation, creating huge incentives for the smarmy 20somethings that keep saying, "dude, venture money
sucks" to actually do something about it.
7) The manifold problems with future econ - peer production, the social, communities, anticonsumption, etc - become glaringly apparent. In these models, people often make bad decisions, they're irritating place to be sometimes, they're prone to navel-gazing, information contagion, and error cascades.
8) Despite that, the market will begin to tell us they're
still more efficient than firms in many cases - and so their growth continue to accelerate; they begin to create serious value in physical, not just digital industries - targets: fashion, print, CE.
9) New management innovations emerge for these modes of production. Editors, execs, and managers at the edge become something resembling DJs, leaders of cells, curatorial shoppers, underground artists, connected consumers; to do this, the assumptions behind management behind to shift seismically.
9.5) Incumbent inertia is magnified: most corporates see these management innovations as more massive threats than opportunities.
10) The creativity explosion: all of this begins to unlock a huge, much needed surge of (real) creativity. We're already seeing the beginnings: machinima, fan flicks, snowballs vs blockbusters, social search/finance/everything etc...
11) The world becomes a much more interesting place...