How Scale, Skill and Speed are Re-inventing Companies

This week we saw Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase leverage his experience from the 2008 crash and his knowledge of the system with the scale of his bank and other leading banks to attempt to stabilize First Republic bank These were huge organizations whose CEOs moved rapidly proving that elephants can dance fast and quick if they need to under skilled leadershipThe challenge for successful organizations moving forward is not that they do not have scale skill or speed but rather what happens as a new world emerges where the benefits of scale diminish when new skills become critical but the ability to hire the newly skilled with the old incentives are reduced and the speed of the world outstrips the speed of the organizationScaleIn the past three years in the US all the net new jobs have been created by companies with fewer than 250 employees Modern technology including GPT4 influencer and social media and the explosion of marketplaces from AWS to Shopify to Upwork to manufacturing and fabrication on demand by scaled foundries allow individuals and small companies to scale quickly with very limited resourcesThese new platforms technologies and marketplaces are significantly reducing the benefits of some types of scale and many types of expertiseToday the scale of manufacturing communication spending resources and people are being augmented by a new scale of network data influence and talentideasThe Mr Beasts Damp8217Amelio sisters and Kardashian sisters leverage the new ecosystem to scale their talent without having to become big as companiesA new form of media company built around worldclass talent whose bylines are featured as prominently as their publications39 logos combined with simple and low costno cost distribution such as email has made Axios Puck and now Semafor influential and impactful with dozens versus hundreds or thousands of employeesScale is a short piece on how scale is changing and what leaders and companies can do to scale their companies but themselvesNot only can individuals now work at the scale of companies by upskilling unleashing their talent scaling through their teams and building reputations as stellar as big firms but large companies now need to reconfigure around talent rather than believing talent will cluster around companiesThe shift of power from big to small management to talent and from the towers of power to the talent with wrenches in the trenches has only just begunAll management to talent hordes to individuals has only just begunSkillEvery advance in technology places a premium on skilled ability ChatGPT Runway ML and DALLamp183E 2 are modern paints and new canvases but in the hands of skilled painter who has learned the new brush strokes necessary to unleash the potential of these tools they can be far more magical than that of a lesser talentIronically some of the skills in highest demand such as coding may become less scarce as the machine writes code while the quotsofterquot skills of creativity curiosity imagination story telling and innovation which now will easily have all the facts figures and charts at their disposal can connect dots in new ways by standing on the shoulders of machines to create new worlds and ways to wealthIn todayamp8217s fastmoving environment the halflife of skills decays much more quickly and unless one is continuously learning enhancing capabilities and upgrading talent a firm can suddenly find itself with herds of people skilled in yesterdayamp8217s tongue when the world is speaking a new languageToday with 62 of Gen Z having a sidehustle freelancers about to overtake fulltime workers and unbundled and distributed work offering a plethora of possibilities large companies must reinvent themselves in every way to attract and retain talent Human resources people development and talent leaders will become even more strategic to the fabric of the future company Sadly in the most recent round of layoffs many companies blew up their talent teams since they no longer were in quotrecruitingquot modeTalent Will Matter Even More builds the case as to why talent will grow more and not less important in an AI and modern world of technology as we incorporate technology and redesign organizations around the best of people and machinesSpeedIt took nearly two weeks for Washington Mutual to fail It took less than two days for SVB to failIt took Instagram 25 years to reach 100 million users It took TikTok 9 months to do the same It took ChatGPT 2 monthsMooreamp8217s law saw processing power double every 18 months In the world of machine learning and large language models the rate of doubling or even tripling is less than six monthsFueled by software social media and a twitchy and connected world everything is accelerating at a speed which is making most organizations feel tortoiselike In a world of espresso too many companies are going through the rituals and machinations of high teaWe should all evaluate how much of our time we spend working on output and how much time in meetings checkins signoffs allhands temperature checks and other group gropes where we gather like herds around PowerPoint slidesQuality control risk management and inclusive viewpoints require a process that for good reasons slow down production or delivery while enhancing the eventual output and are essentialBut too many companies may still be following processes for another age with too many people and too many checkins A study by Bain indicated that any project moves forward in an organization less than five percent of the time and is waiting for the next signoff or is on hold the rest of the timeWhen the benefits of scale are reduced the lack of speed now becomes a bug rather than a feature of a large companyFeedback ReThinking Presentations and Fewer reveal how large companies can move faster by actually providing feedback versus checkins curtailing long dog and pony presentations that wind their way through time and limiting the number of people involved in a projectImplicationsEvery leader every company and every individual must determine how best to hone skill create new scale and determine where and what to speed up Some approaches to consider1 New Strategies Many moats like scale will soon become prison walls unless companies learn to break free from their containers and mindsets of the past Think different Do different2 Outside perspectives critical Management and boards need to look outside and below versus at people like themselves or upward By the time stuff gets to Davos itamp8217s too late and often the opposite of what is actually going on The future does not only come from the heavens and a cabal of insiders but from the slime and outsiders3 Scale is not bad but needs to be leveraged differently Being scaled does not mean one cannot move at speed and build new skill sets Just look at Microsoft over the past five years Or how The New York Times has reinvented itself for a new world4 Openness is the key A mindset open to partnering which allows for speed and agility in incorporating new skill sets is important An outlook open to other points of view when the future can come from anywhere and most importantly open to continuous learning in a world of changeSelfpublished at MediaVillage through the wwwAvrioB2Bcom platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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How Scale, Skill and Speed are Re-inventing Companies

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Rishad Tobaccowala

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How Scale, Skill and Speed are Re-inventing Companies

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