Strategy in the media

Citation

Henry, C. (2013), "Strategy in the media", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 41 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2013.26141baa.001

Strategy in the media

Article Type: CEO advisory From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 41, Issue 2

Craig HenryStrategy & Leadership’s intrepid media explorer, collected these examples of novel strategic management concepts and practices and impending environmental discontinuity from various news media. A marketing and strategy consultant based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he welcomes your contributions and suggestions (Craighenry@aol.com).

Strategies for an era of capital abundance

To navigate the shifting currents of global growth in a time of capital superabundance will require financial market participants to recalibrate their expectations, acquire new skills for spotting and managing risk, and exercise enormous investment discipline … successful corporate and financial investors will be challenged to adapt to five new imperatives.

Rethink hurdle rates. A prolonged period of capital surplus will be characterized by persistently low interest rates, high volatility and thin real rates of return. Some big institutional investors, like pension funds, will face large gaps between the returns they will need to meet payouts to beneficiaries and what markets will generate …

Prepare for bubble risks. Capital superabundance will increase the frequency, intensity, size and longevity of asset bubbles. The propensity for bubbles to form will be magnified as yield-hungry investors race to pour capital into assets that show the potential to generate superior returns. Because the global financial system has grown so large relative to the underlying economy, asset values can quickly reach unsustainable levels and remain inflated for months or years, tempting businesses to commit resources in pursuit of unachievable returns …

Actively manage the balance sheet. Capital superabundance will require even the most traditionally stable businesses to operate in much the same way as many hedge funds do, by actively managing their mix of long and short positions to insulate themselves against a more volatile macroeconomic environment across their portfolio of business activities. For nonfinancial businesses, in particular, an extended period of abundant capital will change the balance sheet from an object of thrift, to be managed to minimum size, into an important strategic platform with defensive and offensive potential …

Open investment channels to emerging markets. The capital needs of the faster-growing emerging markets would appear to make them a natural destination for the large stock of financial assets that remain concentrated mostly in the advanced economies. In an ideal world, capital would flow toward the best growth opportunities based on risk-adjusted returns; and indeed, capital has been migrating toward developing nations over the past several years …

Look to the far horizon. Capital superabundance will tip the balance of power from owners of capital to owners and creators of good ideas – wherever they can be found. But as yield-seeking capital increasingly crowds into all available asset classes, diversification will become even harder to achieve. Indeed, over the past decade the returns among assets that have traditionally been negatively correlated – equity values moving up as bond yields decline, for example – have begun to move in the same direction.

“A world awash in money,” Bain Report, November 14, 2012, www.bain.com/publications/articles/a-world-awash-in-money.aspx

The measuring the value of a good boss

What’s the value of a good boss? When the boss is a CEO, that question has been closely scrutinized. But the role of less exalted front-line supervisors – the folks who directly oversee teams of workers – has been overlooked. Do supervisors vary in quality? How valuable is a good one? And what makes a good one good? These are questions that preoccupy people in their daily work lives, but haven’t been the subject of much formal research.

That’s why it’s excellent that Kathryn Shaw and Edward Lazear of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business recently teamed up with the University of Utah’s Christopher Stanton to explore the subject in a working paper called “The Value of Bosses.”

Their research comes from a study of a large company (it’s kept anonymous as part of the terms under which it was conducted), but the results should be of interest to top-level managers at companies of all sizes. And, indeed, it’s smaller firms that probably have the most to learn from this sort of study, since they lack the scale to conduct an analysis in-house.

Their answer is that, yes, good bosses are a good deal better than bad ones. Replacing a supervisor from the bottom 10 percent of the pool with one from the top 10 percent increases output about as much as adding a 10th worker to a nine-worker team.

That it’s better to have a good manager than a poor one isn’t very surprising. But the authors’ two other findings are a bit more striking. The main impact effective supervisors have on their employees doesn’t come from motivating or supervising them per se, it comes from teaching them better work methods. About two-thirds of the productivity boost from working under a good supervisor persists even after the worker switches bosses. That leads the authors to conclude that “teaching” – imparting better methods or skills – is the biggest part of effective supervision. The good boss effect does decay over time, however, so that after six months only about 18 percent of the boost remains.

The second finding is even more surprising: The most efficient structure is to assign the best workers to the best bosses rather than have the best bosses bring the weakest workers up to speed. “Maximizing the value of bosses requires that the better bosses be assigned to the better workers,” they conclude, because workers increase their output so much when working with star supervisors.

Matthew Yglesias “Who’s the Boss?” Slate, October 12, 2012, www.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/2012/10/the_value_of_a_good_boss_stanford_researchers_show_the_economic_value_of.html

Consumers don’t buy, they hire

Despite what some marketers would have you believe, we don’t go through life conforming to particular demographic segments. While audiences are almost always broken down in such a way, nobody goes out and buys a newspaper because he is an 18- to 25-year-old white male with a college degree. Those attributes of a consumer may be correlated with a decision to purchase and read one particular newspaper over another, but they don’t actually cause one to read or buy anything.

The problem is that too many newsrooms’ strategies are based around exactly this assumption –that their businesses can best be explained in terms of key demographics, price points, or distribution platforms.

Instead, a better way of thinking about the business you’re in is through the lens of a theory that we call jobs-to-be-done. The basic idea is that people don’t go around looking for products to buy. Instead, they take life as it comes and when they encounter a problem, they look for a solution and at that point, they’ll hire a product or service.

The key insight from thinking about your business this way is that it is the job, and not the customer or the product that should be the fundamental unit of analysis. This applies to news as much as it does to any other service …

David is in line for his morning coffee. He’s probably got 10 minutes while he waits to order and be served. David pulls out his smartphone. He opens up Twitter and scans through his feed for an interesting article. A New Yorker article catches his eye, he clicks on it, and starts reading. Just as he finishes it, the barista calls his name; his coffee is ready.

What we’ve described here is actually a huge job in the media market: “I have 10 minutes of downtime. Help me fill it with something interesting or entertaining.” David chose to hire Twitter, but he could have hired a newspaper that was lying around the coffee shop. Or he could have hired a game off the App Store. Or perhaps he could have started replying to his e-mail.

Understanding the world through the lens of jobs-to-be-done gives us an incredible insight into people’s behavior.

Next time you’re sitting in a doctor’s office, watch all the people with exactly this job: “I’ve got 10 minutes to kill; help me fill it.” … Nowadays, many patients find this job is better fulfilled by their smartphones or iPads allowing them to curate and read the articles and websites that are of interest to them, rather than relying on the office manager’s taste in magazines.

Clayton M. Christensen, David Skok, and James Allworth, “Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism,” Nieman Reports, Fall 2012, www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102798/Breaking-News.aspx

Crowd-sourcing analytics

During a 2008 internship at The Economist, economist-turned-journalist Anthony Goldbloom made an important discovery: many organizations that want to use predictive analytics don’t have the skills to do it well, if at all. In response, he came up with an interesting business idea: create a company that allows anyone anywhere to compete to solve other business’s analytics problems.

Today, hundreds of organizations, both public and private, have submitted their datasets and business problems to Goldbloom’s company, Kaggle Inc. Sixty five thousand data scientists from around the globe have signed up with Kaggle to compete to develop the best algorithm for a given problem, from predicting click-through rates on ads to predicting who will be admitted to a hospital within the next year (a current competition with a $3 million purse). Ongoing results are displayed in real time on a virtual leaderboard …

Goldbloom: “There was also an intellectual, or commercial, reason why I thought it was a good idea. The quality of the data scientist is crucial in determining the quality of a data science solution. Data science is extremely high leverage, so a data set and an algorithm in the hands of a great data scientist can generate a $100 million return on investment, while the same data in the hands of somebody inexperienced can be extremely costly …

“At the bottom end, competitions will give you a ten percent lift over what you’re already doing. At the top end, it’ll be in the order of three to four hundred percent. We’ve noticed that generally the more complex the data, the more challenging the data, the greater the lift.”

Renee Boucher Ferguson, “Business quandary? Use a competition to crowdsource best answers,” Sloan Management Review, December 2012.

Corporate failure and strategic risk

We analyzed US public companies around the world with at least US$1 billion in enterprise value on January 1, 2002 (1,053 companies met these criteria). We calculated each company’s change in enterprise value over the next 10 years, and then indexed each company’s annualized return to that of its industry benchmark to control for industry-specific effects. This allowed us to zero in on the biggest losers – the companies that experienced the most dramatic losses of enterprise value. Only 103 companies had annualized returns relative to their respective industry benchmarks that were worse than negative 10 percent. This group corresponded to the bottom 10 percent of performers in our overall sample …

Next, to get at the root cause of this lost value, we conducted an event analysis by going back to news reports, press articles, and brokerage reports for each of the 103 companies before and after their loss of value. We then assigned each company’s economic decline to one of four categories.

The first category included major strategic blunders (such as new product or new market failures) or instances when a company was caught flat-footed by a major industry shift (such as digitization of content). We included failed mergers and acquisitions in this category, as well as dramatic shifts in major enterprise value drivers (for example, a major input cost), because these occurrences should have been foreseen. This category includes, for example, Time Warner and its widely criticized merger with AOL in 2000.

In the second category, we grouped together major operational problems, such as supply chain disruptions, customer service breakdowns, and operational accidents, that had caused substantial shareholder value destruction. A high-profile example is the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig explosion and leak in the Gulf Coast, an event that wiped out more than $50 billion in BP’s shareholder value in the days and weeks following the accident.

The third category included fraud, accounting problems, ethics violations, and other failures to comply with laws, standards, or ethics. During the 10-year time frame we analyzed, a few prominent examples were Tyco’s accounting and discrimination lawsuits in 2002 and Tenet Healthcare’s 2006 legal battles over improper medical and business practices.

In the fourth category, we identified declines resulting from external shocks that were natural, political, or regulatory. We narrowed these situations down to circumstances in which the external event could not be controlled or easily anticipated by the company. For example, USEC – a supplier of enriched uranium for nuclear power plants – saw a sudden and sharp decline in enterprise value after the 2011 Japanese tsunami and ensuing nuclear disaster.

The results are unambiguous. Among the 103 companies studied, strategic blunders were the primary culprit a remarkable 81 percent of the time. When we segmented the data by industry and geography, we found some variations; for example, strategic failures are particularly acute in the financial-services industry, and Europe has more operational problems than the US or Asia. Nevertheless, strategic failure remained the major cause in these cases as well.

Christopher Dann, Matthew Le Merle, and Christopher Pencave, “The lesson of lost value,” Strategy+ Business, Winter 2012.

Congruence and competitive success

Very simply, the organization’s performance rests upon the alignment of each of the components – the work, people, structure and culture with all of the others. The tighter the fit or, put another way, the greater the congruence the higher the performance.

Russell Ackoff, a noted systems theorist, has described the phenomenon this way: Suppose you could build a dream car that included the styling of a Jaguar, the engine of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, and the interior of a Rolls-Royce. Put them together and what have you got? Nothing. They weren’t designed to go together. They don’t fit.

The same is true of organizations. You can have stellar talent, cutting-edge technology, streamlined structures and processes, and a high-performance culture, but if they aren’t designed to mesh with each other, you’ve got nothing.

Indeed, the congruence model suggests that the interaction between each set of organizational components is more important than the components themselves. In other words, the degree to which the strategy, work, people, formal organization and culture are tightly aligned will determine the organization’s ability to compete and succeed.

For example, consider two components: the work and the people. When the skills, knowledge and aptitude of the individuals involved match the job requirements of the work at hand, you can reasonably expect a relatively high degree of performance.

Now let’s assume that a restructuring has reassigned people doing related work to different parts of the organization, separating them into tightly bound units that lack sufficient processes for sharing information and coordinating activity. In that case, the formal organization will inevitably hinder performance, even if the right people are separately doing the right work. Taking the argument one step further, assume that the work at hand requires considerable autonomy, real-time decisions and occasional risks. However, if people have been conditioned over time to seek shelter in anonymity, evade responsibility whenever possible, and trust in the wisdom of playing it safe, then merely shuffling the boxes on the org chart won’t get the job done. The work, the people and the formal structures might be right, but the prevailing culture will keep getting in the way, a situation that will require some major, long-term changes. Without all the right pieces in place, performance will suffer.

“The congruence model: a roadmap for understanding organizational performance,” (Mercer Delta, 2012), www.mercer.com/delta

Locavore manufacturing

Globalization is full of paradoxes. Consumers who have ready access to goods from anywhere in the world seem increasingly willing to buy local … New production technologies and radical declines in their cost mean that in years to come we will have local, on-demand production of goods ranging from prosthetic limbs to auto parts to phones …

At the same time that the organization of production has been dis-integrated, the cost of production technologies has declined dramatically. Machine tools for working with wood, metal, plastic, textiles, and other materials have seen declines of 90% or more in price, and 3D printing is set to become a ubiquitous technology. At the same time, CNC technologies have become standard in production equipment.

What CNC means in practice is that if you can draw it on a computer, you can make it. For instance, ShopBot Tools makes a highly sophisticated but relatively low-cost CNC router that allows someone with virtually no woodworking skills to create a design on a computer, throw a board on the machine, hit “print,” and watch as the design on the screen is executed by the router. Scores of designs for furniture and crafts are posted online so that users can download them, modify them, and “print” them using their favorite local materials.

The radically lower cost structure for production equipment makes possible innovative business models. For instance, TechShop provides members access to a wide array of CNC machines and other sophisticated tools, including high-end design software, for a modest monthly fee, along the lines of a fitness club. With fairly minimal training, it is possibly to learn to use laser cutters, milling machines, water drills, industrial sewing equipment and more. The TechShop model is eminently replicable, and one could easily imagine TechShop franchises in every town in North America, occupying the spaces abandoned by thousands of Borders and Circuit City stores.

Now consider Ikea, which produces flat-pack furniture that is shipped and sold around the world. What Ikea sells is not furniture per se but a recipe for furniture along with the parts necessary to build it at home. The ShopBot router is to Ikea what Napster was to the music business, enabling businesses like AtFAB to sell furniture designs that users can download, send to the router, and assemble themselves or hire someone else to make. Their motto? “Ship information not stuff.”

Within a few years, it is likely that thousands of products currently manufactured in East Asia and shipped around the world will be produced locally when they are needed.

Gerald Davis, “Buying furniture on iTunes: creative destruction in a world of ‘Locavore’ production,” NBS Thought Leaders, November 7, 2012, http://nbs.net/buying-furniture-on-itunes-creative-destruction-in-a-world-of-locavore-production/

A what-not-to-do list

In turbulent times, it’s hard enough to deal with external problems. But too often people and companies exacerbate their troubles by their own actions. Self-defeating behaviors can make any situation worse. Put these five on the what-not-to-do list.

Demanding a bigger share of a shrinking pie. Leaders defeat themselves when they seek gain when others suffer, for example, raising prices in a time of high unemployment when consumers have less to spend, to ensure profits when sales are down. McDonald’s raised prices three percent in early 2012 and by the third quarter, faced the first drop in same-store sales in nine years. The executive responsible for that strategy was replaced …

Getting angry. Anger hurts companies too, especially if misplaced. Years after a tragic explosion on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 in which 11 people lost their lives, BP was back in the news with a record fine and criminal charges. Former CEO Tony Hayward defeated himself and damaged the company in the public mind by issuing bitter statements about how unfair this was … .

Giving in to mission creep. Trying to become something you are not while there’s plenty of value in who you are can be self-defeating. For professionals, this can mean branching out into new fields while falling behind in the latest knowledge in the field that made their reputation. People can get caught in the middle – not yet good enough to compete in the new area, while losing strength in the old area.

Adding without subtracting. A related form of self-defeat is to allow bloat … It takes discipline to cut or consolidate some things for every one added. Too often that discipline is missing …

Thinking you'll get away with it. Whatever "it" is … lapses cannot remain secret for long in the digital age. Believing otherwise is delusional. The mistake will show up somewhere …

Rosabeth Moss Kanter “Five self-defeating behaviors that ruin companies and careers,” Harvard Business Review blogs, November 20, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2012/11/five-self-defeating-behaviors.html

Digital transformation: it’s not just for start-up

How can senior executives successfully lead digital transformation? While many experts urge companies to get started on the digital transformation journey, few tell how to do it. The examples they do give tend to revolve around young companies that exist because of technology, like Apple and Amazon. Executives in traditional companies often find these examples hollow. Big traditional companies, with decades of history and legacy, are simply different from these newer digital entrants.

For traditional companies, technology is often just one of the tools managers use to support the overall business. And many traditional companies have been burned by unsuccessful technology projects that failed to achieve their promise. In fact, companies have seen that technology can have three effects:

1. 1.

   a substitution effect, because the technology just substitutes for, or replaces, existing processes;

2. 2.

   an extension effect, because the technology’s main impact is to extend the company’s brand or product line into a new platform, such as the Web, or mobile;

3. 3.

   a transformative effect, because the company begins doing business differently.

… But there are companies achieving digital transformation … PagesJaunes, the French Yellow Pages, has completely changed its business model based on the idea that it is not a purveyor of advertising books, but of localized advertising. Its technology strategy includes building 100,000 websites for small businesses in France, creating a strong mobile presence and using analytics to help its clients develop better brand and advertising strategies.

Michael Fitzgerald, “How to digitally transform your company,” Improvisations, October 29, 2012, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/improvisations/2012/10/29/how-to-digitally-transform-your-company/

Is economics relevant?

In the 20th century, economics consolidated as a profession; economists could afford to write exclusively for one another. At the same time, the field experienced a paradigm shift, gradually identifying itself as a theoretical approach of economization and giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter. Today, production is marginalized in economics, and the paradigmatic question is a rather static one of resource allocation. The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost

This separation of economics from the working economy has severely damaged both the business community and the academic discipline. Since economics offers little in the way of practical insight, managers and entrepreneurs depend on their own business acumen, personal judgment, and rules of thumb in making decisions. In times of crisis, when business leaders lose their self-confidence, they often look to political power to fill the void. Government is increasingly seen as the ultimate solution to tough economic problems, from innovation to employment.

Economics thus becomes a convenient instrument the state uses to manage the economy, rather than a tool the public turns to for enlightenment about how the economy operates. But because it is no longer firmly grounded in systematic empirical investigation of the working of the economy, it is hardly up to the task …

It is time to reengage the severely impoverished field of economics with the economy. Market economies springing up in China, India, Africa, and elsewhere herald a new era of entrepreneurship, and with it unprecedented opportunities for economists to study how the market economy gains its resilience in societies with cultural, institutional, and organizational diversities. But knowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists.

Ronald Coase, “Saving economics from the economists,” Harvard Business Review, December 2012.

Finding numbers that matter in a service business

Mark Hoplamazian was predictably a little skittish when his bosses at the Pritzker Organization asked him to become interim president and CEO of the family-owned company’s signature investment, the Hyatt chain of hotels …

Hoplamazian took on the leadership role in 2006 in the middle of an upsurge in the hospitality industry. “The year after I came in, 2007, it was like a fantasy world. Everything was going right,” he said. “Margins were expanding. Everyone was having a good time. But then [the financial crisis in] 2008 came, and things got funky really quickly. And 2009 was a disaster.”

According to Hoplamazian … 2009 was its all-time worst year. “We had to readjust our budgets six times [in the first six weeks]. It was that bad.” By then, however, Hoplamazian had already established a management style: Ask lots of questions, listen to the answers and make sure to treat employees with sincerity.

Quantifying customer satisfaction. Firms that make a product can judge performance based on sales and whether the devices work properly, he points out. But in the hospitality business, it is not immediately apparent how much the bottom line is impacted by the way individual employees clean guest rooms, provide directions to guests or carry bags up to a suite. It’s also not easy to tie those efforts back to the performance of top-level management.

Coming from finance, Hoplamazian wanted to find ways to quantify even a service business like Hyatt … but many of his co-workers were unsure whether there was a sound method of achieving that goal. “I asked about results of employee satisfaction surveys, and they showed me upward curves,” Hoplamazian recalled. “I asked how that correlated with customer satisfaction, and they said it didn’t. I asked if individual properties saw it correlating, and they only said, ‘No.’”

Hoplamazian decided to approach fellow CEOs in the service industry to see how other firms had tackled the problem, figuring that technology had greatly increased the availability and ease of analyzing customer data. The leadership team at Enterprise Rent-a-Car proved to be the most helpful. “They said the most important contact was the first person who engaged a customer,” he said, citing a well-known piece of advice: “There is only one chance to make a first impression.” Based on that guidance, Hyatt developed a survey with a one-through-five rating system that was given to customers to fill out during their stay.

“In my discussion with Enterprise, they said that people who give a ‘five’ are three times more likely to return than those who give a ‘four,’” Hoplamazian noted. “And the people who give a ‘four’ are twice as likely [to come back] than [those who give lower numbers]. Below a ‘four,’ and you might as well forget it. The only thing that matters is customer satisfaction.”

“Hyatt’s Mark Hoplamazian: quantifying the value of customer service,” Knowledge@Wharton, October 10, 2012, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3095

Supply chain transformation

Harvard Business School professor Kristina Steffenson McElheran studies the effect of information technology on business process innovation. It’s a topic, she is sometimes told, that is, well, less than exciting.

“I’ve had people say to me that studying IT use is like studying plumbing – every firm has it, so why is it interesting?” she says. “I think it’s pretty sexy plumbing.”

McElheran believes IT has the potential to completely transform the supply side of business by flattening hierarchies, shrinking supply chains, and speeding communications. The result: “People can spend more time thinking up new products and servicing customers, and less time checking boxes.”

To get there, most firms must be willing to engage in radical change and completely rethink how they collaborate and compete. Few companies, especially larger ones, have done so. Those that have done the heavy IT and organizational lifting, such as Wal-Mart, reap serious dividends.

“There’s a tremendous gap between the most IT-savvy firms and the IT laggards,” says McElheran, the Lumry Family Assistant Professor and a member of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at HBS. “The longer we take to figure this out, the more likely we’re going to have a few of the best firms pulling way ahead based on this competitive advantage … ”

So what should firms do to upgrade their IT-based business processes? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.

“It’s not just about writing a check to an IT vendor,” McElheran explains. “There’s a complicated assembly of processes and people and organizational structures and supply chain partners that really have to come together.”

The first step, she says, is “treating it as an innovative process. Understand that there’s uncertainty and put processes in place to manage it.” When firms invest in a new product, for example, they usually have a strategy in place in case it bombs. “The same should go for process innovation,” says McElheran.

Maggie Starvish, “Why business IT innovation is so difficult, Knowledge@Wharton, October 15, 2012, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3109

Thinking small is the new scaling up

“‘Does it scale up?’ is the perennial question that investors ask of engineers who are creating new technology and infrastructure,” says Professor Garrett van Ryzin, who for the last few years has been team-teaching a course on the business of sustainable energy with Klaus Lackner of Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. “Hearing that question again and again got Klaus thinking about whether it is really necessary to scale up.” The two colleagues’ conversations on that question soon turned into a full-fledged framework for determining the feasibility of moving from large (in size) scale industrial infrastructure to large (in number) but small-in-size scale industrial infrastructure.

Economies of scale have dominated industrial practice and investment decisions for so long because they have made sense – and profits – in the face of human and technological limitations. As the size of physical plants, means of transportation, and equipment increase, capital costs per unit and operating costs decline, while increased productivity makes the cost of labor more efficient. For example, 100 ten-ton dump trucks would require many more drivers than a fleet of 10 hundred-ton dump trucks. Further motivations for scaling up include geometrical efficiency (such as increasing the ratio of volume to area) and spreading out the fixed costs of certain components like control and safety systems.

But automation and communication technology have evolved to the point that a large number of small units may be better, cheaper, or more efficient than a small number of large units. Consider supercomputers: until the 1990s, the supercomputer industry focused on increasing computing speed and capacity by building bigger, more specialized machines with greater processing power. “But by the mid-1990s it had become cheaper to network the capacity of CPUs and memory from large numbers of personal computers and computer workstations rather than relying on a single microprocessor,” van Ryzin notes. This shift from large to massively modular computing led to an abrupt collapse of the traditional supercomputer industry in the 1990s. Are we now on the cusp of a similar radical shift in other industries?

“Think Small,” Ideas@work, October 30, 2012, www4.gsb.columbia.edu/ideasatwork/feature/7231162/Think+Small