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Tag Archives: Value Chains

Tech, Social networks and & the rise of Inconvenient Desire

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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21st Century Consumer, Adaptive Governance, Apple, Caring about what people care about, Communications, Consumer Activist, desire, ecosystems, Foxconn, Human Rights, Identity, Incandescent Identity, Institutional Investors, Labour Conflicts, NPS, reputation Studies, resilience, social networks, Supply Chains, technology, Value Chains

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You’d be hard pushed to find a more powerful source of human incandescence than that of Desire.

Most humans once seized upon by a fierce Desire, (quenchable, drenchable or otherwise) would struggle to not glow like embers or light up like a Christmas Tree.

But equally, incandescence is a volatile and unstable thing in its base form. It is as likely to illuminate a life as it is to burn down a house, so must always be treated with the greatest caution and respect.

A powerful and singular Desire, initially so exquisitely turned out: seductive, rich, complex and compelling, can quickly lose its form, focus and potency, becoming fleeting, deceptive, destabilising, and in some ways almost manipulative – one moment all consuming, profound substantial and irresistible: a twisted echo or hollow memory the next, whispering in our ear.

It is one of the cruel polarities of life that Desire, especially when ignored, demeaned, spoiled or thwarted, can become a very destructive force –  one of the most turbulent, psyche-ripping, heart-trouncing, confidence-destroying, life-diminishing experiences in our human condition.

We do not take it well! And it makes us act in irrational, random and unexpected ways.

So Desire. Powerful, yes; BUT its got form. Tricky. Volatile. Fluid. Uncontrollable. Fragile.

A singular Desire is of course not the only model. Desire has many forms, natures and universes. Not all Desire is so singular, egocentric, unfettered and prone to flip-flopping and flailing all over the place, at the drop of a rather existential hat. Some Desires are quiet; considered; evolving over expansive periods of time and frames of context. Others are a dynamic shifting mass: loose ecosystems of smaller desires, likes, preferences, needs and wants; splintered, fractured, fractual. A brilliant constellation with fluid and adaptive qualities.

But for now let’s concentrate on one very particular nature of Desire and the context in which it exists: that of human consumption and the systems and organisations that meet its rapacious and accelerating demands.

Desire in its 20th Century Consumer form was well served by multiple businesses and the brands they created. Most importantly the Desire was one dimensional: of a linear and modal kind. A singular Desire, in the form of an unmet consumer demand for a particular product or service, was either revealed or identified through intuition, experience, market research or in the absence of anything else, confected out of thin air in a marketing consumer insight department and then seeded in the mind of the unsuspecting consumer.

Once identified, every atom of the business was put in service to meet the needs of that one Desire. The whole operational infrastructure and systemic nature and capability of the brand and business was set into motion to against it. The sentiment and sensibility of every other person in the chain other than that of the Consumer – the font of all revenue opportunity – was set aside, ignored, or suppressed; viewed as at best, secondary, or at worst, irrelevant.

The Desires (and disappointments) of any individual or group dwelling in the Supply Chain that provided the material, resource, operational systems and manufacturing tools were also secondary – and someone else’s problem.

The Value Chains that developed around the Supply Chain to extract clear measures of additional value in every link in the chain, were focused wholly on controlling and securing in absolute terms the direct cost of resources (human and material), the executive overhead, operational running costs, the logistics of distribution and the indirect fixed contracting of supplier partners, especially when operating across multiple sites and geographies across myriad countries and cultures.

The ability to secure the base cost of delivering increasing value in every link of the chain was the way by which a company both improved its productivity and profitability. And it did it by controlling everything. Even the desires and the voices of those that worked within it.

The insular unconnected and disparate nature of the old world was highly convenient for those who wished to quash any form of desire that might destabilise that link in the chain’s ability to deliver itself at a projected and secured cost amenable to the larger commercial target and deliverable margin.

The very fact that these various sites and sources of production were localised, isolated and unconnected to every other stakeholder in the chain by anything other than their place in that chain meant that the desires of the workforce and the local communities in which they lived could be considered incidental. They remained for the most part invisible, unheard and often unmet. It is fairly telling that the managerial department allocated solely to ensuring and upholding the wellbeing of people required to populate and sustain any Value Chain were identified as a Support Activity in Value Chain models.

But those Desires cannot be ignored anymore. In the 21st century, the consumer’s Desire is not the only one that must be respected, elevated and pored over.

Technology and the social networks have unchained the value chain, giving voice and a podium to every Desire of every person (or stakeholder if you prefer) along the chain, Supply, Value or Otherwise. And they cannot be simply ignored anymore.

Now, Desire has got a smart phone, 6 email accounts, a facebook page, a twitter, instagram and youtube account. And Desire is getting busy.

Desires, individual and collective, in every corner of the globe are now connected. They’ve got access. They’ve got volume. And they are using the social networks to act with fierce purpose against brands and businesses they feel demonstrate an arrogant lack of respect for the human rights and dignities of their customers, employees, suppliers or partners. Once fired up, these consumer activists will harry and pursue the perpetrators regardless of emollient PR releases and promises – as the likes of Apple and Foxconn found out in no uncertain terms. These massed, noisy and high profile actions are now proven to have a direct impact on the measures of integrity held in high esteem by brands and businesses – NPS, The Reputation Study – and more importantly by the investors who fund their ambitions.

So the volatility, flux and turbulence of kaleidoscopic Desire is now at work in the world along very link of the Chain. And they are testing the resilience of those chains, and buffeting the previously tightly controlled and secured value and margin each link in the chain delivers. Adaptive governance must now include the ability to absorb the turbulence these points of social flux and volatility present.

In this way, the 21st Century world of accessible, affordable tech and the social networks they fuel are giving rise to a new chain – the Desire Chain – a value chain populated by individuals with dreams, expectations and rights as important and potent and ultimately as capable of creating value and growth as the old singular desire of the Consumer in the 20th Century.

So here’s to brands embracing a new chain model – the Desire Chain – one that is made incandescent and more resilient by respecting and elevating the desires of every stakeholder in its chain, to mutual benefit and a more secure future for all.

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The essay upon which this blog is based, ‘The Value Chained Unchained‘, explores the nature and impact of technology and the social networks on the old Value Chain models and sets out the need for a new model based upon ever-evolving highly adaptive points of Mutual Desire and Shared Resilience.

The Value Chain Unchained by J Borra is to be published by Shared Value Chain Consultancy as part of a compendium of essays on Sustainable Value Chains. Editor: Michael D’heur

www.sharedvaluechain.com

The Dimensions of Desire & The Human Ghost in the Value Chain Machine

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Consumption, corporate efficiency, Employee activation, Employee rewards & recognition, Green Ips, Hobbes, i-phones, Identity, mammoths, McMansion, Philosophy, prosperity, psychoanalytical motivators, resilience, samsung TV, sonos sound systems, storytelling, Tai-Bo, the American Dream, thriving, Value Chains

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I mentioned recently that I felt that the resiliency of a company’s storytelling: its ability to tell a singular differentiated, robust and authentic story through its value chain, across its social reach and around its stakeholder constituency, is one of the greatest factors in defining that company’s resilience.

The ability to tell a story that fuses the nature of Mutual Desire and Shared Resilience in the company – one that ignites and feeds the Desire of every stakeholder embraced within its parameters – not just some precious few – is critical to capturing and securing value in every link in the chain.

So, having said that, I thought I might just unpack the Satchel of Desire so to speak. Then I shall follow up with a like-minded piece on Resilience.  

Now when I talk about desire at its basest level. I am talking about the ‘core motivator of all human action’  version: the psychoanalytical one, where desires are fundamental to human existence because they are directly attributable to bodily organs and their needs.

Belly empty. Gonads full. Get club. Hit Mammoth. Mammoth dead. Woman eat mammoth. Man eat mammoth. Woman like man. Man like woman. Belly Full. Gonads empty. Repeat as necessary.

This seems terrifying bleak and basic to our terribly self-aggrandising and civilised selves.  Thankfully, things have moved on a little (ish – a night out in your average Harvester or TGIFridays might say otherwise!)

There is also the philosophical nature of the word desire. Hobbes (1588–1679) proposed the concept of psychological hedonism, which asserts that the “fundamental motivation of all human action is actually the desire for pleasure’.

(Some might go further and say that desire at its most basic physiological level is an addiction to the dopamine surges that we interpret as ‘pleasure’ or a pleasurable feeling.)

But dopamine addiction aside – somewhere between the psychoanalytical, physiological and the philosophical lies the basic nature of desire. My particular interest is in regards to the consequence of it on us individually, collectively and communally: especially in context to what motivates out working personas and culture and our concepts of recognition and reward.

As we get further up the civilizing ladder – and the increasing skills/increasing value axis of measurement – the relationship between desire and motivation and emotion and action increase in their levels of sophistication and complexity.

I stated in the previous piece that I had chosen the word DESIRE because it carried within it two profound and powerful dimensions, notably those of IDENTITY and UTILITY.

I believe that developing compound indices around IDENTITY and UTILTY could allow us to set DESIRE up as a rich yet defined enclave within which to further calibrate far more nuanced degrees of relationship between the functional nature of something being desirable and the aspirational nature of its desirability.

I also ventured that to qualify these dimensions with any authenticity we would need to appreciate that there are positive and negative versions of both.

The positive and negative dimensions would help stop us being too over simplistic in our assumptions.

They would allow us to make (and measure) the point that it is possible to choose a Desirable lifestyle that is very heavy on IDENTITY but suffer none or perhaps very few of the negative aspects that we have come to associate with ‘shiny living’ as an assertion of IDENTITY

The usual suspects in our current version of ‘a shiny life’ are traditionally based upon a toxic rendition of the old ‘American Dream’ – a dream of having infinite everything.

The positive/negative axis would allow us to view IDENTITY not only in the terms of the old aspirational underwriters of what constitutes a ‘thriving life’: McMansions, disposable fashion, gas guzzler vehicles, industrial food consumption, endless consumables, palm oil rich beauty regimes, and the accompanying incontinence and profligacy of water and energy use that accompany them. 

(This is where we see Desire as motivator run riot – too many mammoths, overstretched belly, shrunken gonads & Viagra – a delivery system for negative impacts on individuals and society.)

It allows us to see and recognise that a life of IDENTITY includes positive choices – one constituting a state-of-the-art neutral footprint apartment in a carbon savvy city, punked-up electric super-bike, up-cycled fashions, Tai-Bo regime, smart ‘block’ phone, green IP run on renewables, smart meters, and a diet of locally grown and raised foods and stay-cations. DESIRE, if you are that way inclined, can be rendered wholly positive and regenerative.

Equally you could view UTILITY, through an explicitly negative filter. Utility as a word which, whether it is associated with basic infrastructure supply stuff like water and power or alternately in product and lifestyle terms, delivers an ‘aspirational’ state of Amish-like dour and sparse ‘being and doing’, rooted in plain unadorned functionality.

This stripped down approach to aspiration is very fashionable, especially amongst those who celebrate a caustic weathered and slightly cynical view of the world. Everything other than a withered utility is simply hyperbole, sophistry and myth-making.

UTILITY can be a magnet for those quietly terrified that someone is hiding something from them, and a terror of not being taken seriously – people who prefer a candour sparse and stripped down in manner, emotion and function.

This economy of mysteries is the Naturists Camp of Aspiration. Naked. Unfettered by slogans promises and abstract benefits. Does what it says on the tin. Boxy and ugly but safe. It’s big. It’s red. And it eats rocks.

BUT even in this stripped down space the positive nature of your stripped down, no-bullshit utilitarian view of the world can lead you into the ‘negative’ corners of Desire.

Even if you’re being terribly smug about NOT a having a android friendly Sonos system, Samsung TV, i-phone, Primark bag or Walmart carton in sight, you could still sink the whole carbon offset global metric calculation in one small drive from A-B in your 50 year old breaker-salvaged pick up Bronco truck; especially if A runs on an oil fired generator, and B is an abattoir!

ULTILITY can still house a world of ills to both society and the environment. Some would argue that ‘lowest price’ itself is the purest form of negative UTILITY

A lot of stuff that supplies a need – for greatest functionality/delivery matched with cheapest price – is the greatest blight on society.

Take the humble fast food franchise burger with its industrial and environmentally punitive beef farming and logistics distribution supply chain – or those slinky brightly coloured Primark stretch pants shot with petrodollar synthetics for ten bucks a pop – shipped from Pakistan across increasingly emphysemic oceans by the mega tonne.

So, suffice to say, DESIRE framed by the dimensions of IDENTITY and UTILITY qualified by positive or negative impact seems a reasonably simple yet sympathetic baseline framing to start us off.  

It creates a simple tool within which to look at the tasks, roles or stakeholder groups with a direct ability to impact on the performance of a Value Chain through a more finely calibrated social lenses  – the employees of a company for example – to explore any socially or culturally shaded differences, dissonances or hidden similarities between those who might work in payroll and those in IT and on the production line.

Desire Testing the Links in the Value Chain

It allows us to look at the essential and inextricable Stakeholder Groups – the links of people whose compound performance defines and directs the whole – Supplier Company and Employees, Local Regulatory Bodies, Distribution Partners, market audiences – to see if we can reveal exceptional points of integration and disintegration.

Which all sounds kind of fancy but the journey across the marshlands of consumption as its make-up re-calibrates from a purely functional need to one that is more coloured by more nuanced social and cultural measures of wealth and status comes down to some reasonably simple stuff.

People need stuff to live. That stuff is either still viewed at a basic functional level – and they live a utilitarian life in utilitarian housing with utilitarian diets and jobs. Or they have started to ascend the ladder from Surviving into Thriving – and suddenly the degree of cache around the stuff increases.

Take food: it moves in a circular manner – starting with a move from the sparsely populated bowl or plate to stable consistent access to it, then to the volume of it, then to the quality of it, the badge of it, then the diversity of it, then the provenance of it until everything falls away at the ‘Being’ stage – at which point food deconstructs back to three bean shoots, a mung bean and some agedashi tofu washed down with delicious h2o.

So being able to measure the nature and effect of Desire at a mutual level, across a group of stakeholders along a Value Chain might be quite illustrative. It may reveal flaws in the culture of the Value Chain one would otherwise not have noticed. It may reveal that especially in multi national structures that the subtle shifts in socio cultural concepts of prosperity DO impact on the stability and of the company and its ability to ‘rally the ranks’ around a unified strategy for the business

But more importantly it may well reveal some commonalities inherent in that desire that point to a hidden mutual strength or sense of purpose.

And there the real resilience lies: because it is rooted in something more profound and far beyond the analysts strategists and planners segment frameworks.

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