Permeable Business Models - The Context S04E11

Can businesses adapt to exponential changes rapidly enough with their own internal resources? With ecommerce, for example, they had literally a decade or two to internalize the capabilities. Even so, companies like Walmart wasted billions of dollars getting things wrong, and they were lucky, at least for the moment, to have had the time to try again and again, to catch up with Amazon. The market still says that they were not successful: Amazon’s stock outperformed Walmart 300% over the past five years.

But if artificial intelligence, blockchain, quantum computing and so many other technologies are not only accelerating, but their rate of acceleration is increasing, they are jolting, will businesses still have the luxury to internalize the capability to take advantage of them?

The decisions made without external help are even more difficult.

They can delay the moment that they will concretely embrace, analyze, and understand how these technologies should be incorporated in their business processes, but sooner or later that moment will come.

In the ecosystem of businesses, consulting companies occupy an important and delicate position: they have to balance the interests of their customers with their own, and their product is an amalgam of repeatable components that get commodified, as well as value-added services that have to be invented every time.

I recently joined Beyond Enterprizes as its Managing Advisor. Beyond Enterprizes specializes in helping projects succeed in the field of Blockchain at 360 degrees.

Over the past four years the combined market capitalization of Beyond’s reached $14 billion: this is exciting, accelerating, and something that makes me proud. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next, how we can evolve the best tools and practices to take care of our clients.

The role of strategic advisory firms such as Beyond becomes even more crucial in times of jolting technological change. In a way that is somewhat similar to what happened in marketing with social media, the rigid distinction between what is inside and what is outside of the company becomes mute, the active participation, with aligned interests, or a diverse set of parties involving specialized consulting partners, will design and implement the new, more flexible and permeable business models that will win the future.