A Radical New Vision Of Value Creation And The Value Roles Of Consumers And Entrepreneurs From Professors Bylund and Packard.

Hunter Hastings:

Mark and Per, welcome to this somewhat experimental edition of the Economics For Business podcast. Experimental in the sense that we’re going to have a three party discussion for the first time.

Mark Packard:

Hey Hunter. Hey Per.

Per Bylund:

Hey, thanks for having me, Hunter. Good to see you again, Mark.

Hunter Hastings:

With the occasion of having you both here at the same time is the recent publication of a coauthored paper, it’s called Subjective Value and Entrepreneurship. And it really advances and changes the thinking and logic regarding the implications of subjectivism for businesses, for entrepreneurs, it changes how we define value creation. It changes how business schools are going to have to teach value creation, it changes how firms are going to think about their business models, it changes how product engineers are going to think about product design. It really is a big breakthrough, I think.

Hunter Hastings:

So let’s start with I don’t know whether to say subjectivism or subjectivity, you’ll tell me Per, but it’s based on a area that we’ve covered before about value centricity. It’s subjectively experienced by the consumer, and therefore any entrepreneurial business action, whatever it might be, must be viewed through a lens of consumer subjectivity. So wouldn’t you start us off Per with the overview of what you and Mark mean, when you talk about subjectivity in entrepreneurship.

Per Bylund:

Sure, it’s not actually very strange for listeners to the Economics For Business podcast, because we’re saying pretty much what we’ve been saying here on the podcast for a while, namely, that subjective value is the direct experience, sort of good feel that you get, the emotions, everything that you directly experience as a consumer in your consumptive action.

Per Bylund:

Whereas what we’re doing in the paper is really reacting to how… There have been steps taken in the direction of subjective value, but they’re not exactly recognizing value as subjective, what they’re doing is rather seeing that… They’re assuming that value exists out there, in some form or another. And that we have different views of it, that we see it differently. And some of us can see some of them perhaps, but none other values.

Per Bylund:

Whereas what we’re doing in this paper is taking the full step and saying that no, value is your personal experience. It doesn’t exist in any other way. So it is, whatever it is for you personally.

Hunter Hastings:

So one way of just explaining the terminology, as we say, value exists in some way that would be objectifying it and you’re saying, we can’t do that. It’s entirely subjective.

Per Bylund:

Exactly. Yeah. It is your emotion, it is your feeling, it is your experience. And that’s end of story. That’s it.

Hunter Hastings:

Good. And so if we look through that lens to identify some of the applicability to businesses and firms, then let me start at the, what I call the point of the spear Mark, you say value is created by consumers, and not by businesses or entrepreneurs. And that’s the big non breaking statement at the outset. Business schools claim to teach value creation, but it bears no resemblance to that.

Mark Packard:

Yeah, it’s certainly not what’s normally taught in business schools. But to be clear, Per and I, and I think others of the Austrian School, we typically shy away from the language of value creation, we define value essentially, as benefit, an increase in individual well being.

Mark Packard:

So in this sense, value isn’t really created, it’s experienced by consumers, there’s no value if a consumer doesn’t experience it. If you have a product on your shelves, that is collecting dust, that product is not valuable, because no one has experienced value from it. And also, as Per was just saying, value is highly subjective. And it’s not just idiosyncratic, which means that it’s unique to every individual. It’s not even objective in any sense, it’s experiential. And that means that it’s different for everybody. And it’s dependent on your conscious view of and understanding of that value.

Mark Packard:

So everyone’s experience is different. We experience things differently. We have different physical and psychological and emotional makeup that puts every experience in an individually unique context. So value is never the same across individuals. It’s always unique.

Mark Packard:

So yeah value emerges or is experienced by consumers on the demand side and not on the supply side, it doesn’t emerge on the supply side, nothing is truly valuable ex ante. A resource doesn’t have value. A resource may be valuable to us or we might value a resource because we predict that it will contribute beneficially to one of these consumer experiences. But at that point, it’s only a prediction.

Hunter Hastings:

So pushing that a little bit further with value as an experience on the consumer side, you’ve talked about this before, but you repress it in the paper a little bit. It’s not even a one time experience, we can’t even narrow it down to that. It’s a process and more specifically a learning process. So take us through that, again, as you do in the paper, Mark, the implications of value as a process?

Mark Packard:

Yeah, I think this is a fascinating point, our lives and our whole human experience is this never ending value learning journey. Everything we do is toward a higher valued state, whether it’s production so that we can consume, or if it’s consumption, so that we can realize those benefits that we’re trying to get. But we don’t innately know precisely what we need, or even should want to make us as well off as possible.

Mark Packard:

From the moment that we’re born, we start searching for solutions to our pains, and our dissatisfactions. And we keep learning what to want and what not to want through our firsthand and secondhand experiences. And we keep changing and the world keeps changing. And there are new solutions to new problems. And until we reach what I call the Nirvana equilibrium, which we never will, where we’re perfectly and perpetually in a state of perfect euphoria, then we’re going to keep searching and keep learning and trying to resolve those remaining dissatisfactions.

Hunter Hastings:

And one of the ways you express in the paper Per that learning process, the consumer goes through is that they suffer from or they experience value uncertainty. So we often talk about uncertainty, and we tend to think about it on the entrepreneur side. And we’ll get to that in a second. But the consumers got uncertainty, too, they can’t know, at the point of purchase, or even at consumption, whether they’re going to experience value. So take us through the implications of that for the consumer.

Per Bylund:

And I think we all have the experience of buying a product and then being disappointed with how valuable it actually is, or how useful it is. And maybe we bought something and it sort of bought the idea of us being different people or it propelling us into a different career trajectory, or whatever or maybe it’s just a simple meal at a restaurant where we think that, “That sounds really great. And I’m going to try that.” And it’s not really all that satisfying.

Per Bylund:

So even when we have the product in front of us, and we can sort of extrapolate and guess what that good might do for us, we have an understanding or an idea of, and can imagine what it will get us and the experience we will get from it. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that, that is the experience we actually get from using the product. And that’s the uncertainty. So the more you have tried, the more experience you have, then probably you’re better at guessing how good that product is for you.

Per Bylund:

So what Mark mentioned in the learning process, that when you start out as a toddler, you don’t know a whole lot about anything. So you’re trying everything pretty much. But as a grown up, you know to stay clear of certain things that you don’t like very much, and so forth. But the problem is always a new product, a new good, a new thing to use that we don’t know exactly how this is going to satisfy us, even when we buy it.

Per Bylund:

And this of course translates to a huge problem for the entrepreneur because the entrepreneur needs to tell a story and sort of inform us of the possibilities and the value experience that we might get from the product, which is of course different for different people. But that’s why you have marketing and commercials telling a story and using pictures and colors and music and so forth to sort of convey to us as potential consumers that there is potential for value here.

Per Bylund:

Then the question of course is first do we believe it and then if we believe it, is it actually the case for us. So this, of course, goes back to the entrepreneur’s ability to sell us something more or sell us that service again. So when we go to a restaurant and we’re served a meal, and it was sort of poorly carried out, it wasn’t all that tasty that it looked like or whatever, we tend to not go back there.

Per Bylund:

So the entrepreneur’s problem is not only providing us with a good in the story, but also making sure that, in a sense, help us with a value uncertainty. And they can’t of course, because it’s our personal experience, but not lying is a good first step.

Hunter Hastings:

Yeah. And then just sticking with the consumer for a second. One of the props or tools that they use to do this evaluation work, you say is relativity, relativity of potential one satisfaction, I.E. they can at least go through the cognitive process of comparing the value proposition that’s in front of them with alternatives, and perhaps previous experience, you call it relativity marketing. That was your word. Can you explain that for us?

Mark Packard:

Yeah, that’s right. So everything that we value, we value relative to our opportunity costs, and actually more specifically to the alternative solutions that we typically use to satisfy that same need or needs as we understand them. So in other words to use Per’s example of the restaurant if I’m thinking about going out to eat for dinner, the value of a sushi place is not just relative to my valuation of other sushi joints.

Mark Packard:

It’s also relative to burger joints, and pizza joints, and steak houses and Indian food and seafood and everything else. It’s relative to all the other options that I have to satisfy that need. And you still have to go further than just these other restaurants, it’s also relative to the option of staying home and doing it myself, cooking my own meal. All of these options are available to me for the satisfaction of that hunger need.

Mark Packard:

And so I have to pick which is the best use of my time and money, for example, cooking at home saves me money, which I can use for other satisfactions, so to go out to eat, I have to give up those other satisfactions. But cooking at home also means I’ve got to clean up and do the dishes, which I also hate. So it adds an additional satisfaction component to that satisfaction experience, satisfying the hunger.

Mark Packard:

And so when you think about it, our minds do a remarkable amount of calculation when we choose and make these decisions. And most of it we do by instinct, which is pretty remarkable.

Hunter Hastings:

Yeah, I’ve got a picture of that going on inside my head every time I make one of those decisions, as you say, it’s pretty remarkable. Just as a sidebar, you did differentiate a little bit in the paper between consumers wants, and consumers needs. And I do personally get a little bit confused with that Per. So can you explain the distinction as you’re presenting it in the paper and how it might affect entrepreneurs thinking?

Per Bylund:

Sure. And Mark was sort of getting at that a little bit in his answer just a minute ago now. In the paper, we distinguished between a want, whatever is something you want, in a sense, it’s something you intend to use for satisfying whatever lack that you have, where I say need would be the core, sort of almost an objective component to it.

Per Bylund:

So Mark just mentioned the need to satisfy my hunger, which is not necessarily a want for any type of food. And it’s not necessarily a want for a restaurant either. So it’s broader. And this is sort of a little bit of a quibble, we have I think, about the relevance of distinguishing between wants and needs. Where I as an economist think that in a sense needs, it don’t matter, because we’re still acting on our wants, which is sort of an interpretation of how we can eventually get to those needs.

Per Bylund:

Whereas Mark would be more interested in the psychology aspect of it. And I guess we can discuss how relevant it is for entrepreneurs as consumers are still acting to satisfy their wants. But it could help to understand that there is a sort of a physical need behind a lot of products and a core that might be sort of objective that might be the same for a lot of people. I don’t know if Mark want to chip in here and give his sort of psycho analysis version?

Mark Packard:

Well, I will say that I’m right and Per’s wrong.

Per Bylund:

You got that wrong.

Mark Packard:

The way I see it and this goes back to kind of that learning model is that the need is, is critical, just because it is the satisfaction of the need per se that creates the objective experience from which the satisfaction and the experience arises. And so that… It is important to distinguish the wants from the needs, but the wants drive action, but the needs drive the kind of the response, the experience that we learn from and so influence future action. So that’s why I think it’s important.

Hunter Hastings:

So it has to do with consumer uncertainty in a sense. So you’re acting to satisfy a want, but whether that want actually satisfies a need? Well, that’s something you will find out for yourself in the experience. And the sort of discrepancy between the two is a big part of the uncertainty, right?

Per Bylund:

So I think that’s helpful. And I think of it in language, It’s much better if I’m a entrepreneur thinking about solving consumers wants or addressing consumers wants that’s the business I’m in and needs is some kind of higher state that the entrepreneur shouldn’t be thinking about. We use language about needs in a loose fashion that we should say once I think that’s how I interpret it anyway.

Hunter Hastings:

I want to take all of this, stay on the consumer side for a second. And I think what you’re telling is the consumer has work to do. They have this role of evaluating, and they’ve got some tools about relativity and the conditional nature of their decisions. But that’s a value processing task that they have. Is that a good way to think about the consumer’s role here?

Mark Packard:

Is this for me?

Hunter Hastings:

Either one, go ahead, Mark.

Mark Packard:

Yes. Our wants is perilous just explaining or actually predictive evaluations or evaluations, as I call them. That the predictions of value. And so we can imaginatively assess how much value we get from some new value proposition. And we formed once in comparing those imaginations but our value predictions are really fallible and uncertain, again, as Per was saying.

Mark Packard:

So when we consume, we also do what I call an assessment valuation. We reassess, or we assess that value experience itself, relative to our expectations of it. In fact, marketing theory argues that our experiences of satisfaction or dissatisfaction are actually comparisons to our expectations, they’re relative to those expectations. If we expected so much value, we’d be dissatisfied if we got less than that, even if it was actually pretty valuable to us.

Mark Packard:

So our expectations matter quite a bit in our value experiences and the assessment valuation is how we learn from those experiences and what we learn from those experiences? And from that learning, we decide what to want next.

Hunter Hastings:

So one of the ways I interpret that, tell me if you agree is that the consumer’s got a lot of effort here, got a lot of work to do. You say in the paper they have a job to do. It’s a discovery task and an innovation task. And you specifically say the role of value discovery and value innovation is the consumers, the entrepreneur can’t do it, because they can’t observe this evaluation.

Hunter Hastings:

So we’re giving work to the consumer, where I’m going with that is one of the implications for entrepreneurs in delivering convenience is think about that work. How hard does the consumer have to work to evaluate your offering and make it easier for them? Is that an okay way to translate what you’ve said here in the paper?

Per Bylund:

Yeah, I think so. That’s a good way of putting it. I mean, since we are arguing that value is completely on the consumer side and that value is the experience. And therefore that there is some certainty in the value for the consumer too. So this consumer seeks to get the value out of things, but doesn’t necessarily can be wrong. It does mean that for the entrepreneur, what they need to do is in a sense offer something that is potentially of greater value for consumers than other entrepreneurs are offering.

Per Bylund:

What that means is also that entrepreneurs can only get to the point where they facilitate value for the consumer, but whether the consumer actually chooses it, whether the consumer actually gets value out of it, that is really beyond what they can do. So whenever they sell the product, which can facilitate value for the consumer, the entrepreneur is sort of done.

Per Bylund:

I mean, the entrepreneur can, of course, offer service and whatever support might be part of the product as well. But as soon as the consumer has and uses an experiences the product, the entrepreneur can’t really do anything about it. So what that means is, is that yeah, the discovery of what the actual value is on the consumer side, it also means that the consumer might discover and innovate and figure out new ways of using the product, or service and also sort of find completely different uses for what the entrepreneur has delivered. And I think we’ve seen that throughout history and in the economy all the time that it happens when entrepreneurs offer a new type of product or device that whoops, people did not use this as intended, or as the entrepreneur expected.

Per Bylund:

Instead, they used it in a very different way, which turns out that, that’s in a sense, it’s a different product. So the entrepreneur can learn from this value innovation that the consumer is really providing to the marketplace, in a sense.

Hunter Hastings:

So let me try and sum up the revolution on the consumer side. I think it’s really critical, this idea of the consumers got work to do they got a valuation work to do, they’ve got uncertainty they’ve got to overcome. And in my head, I contrast that with the famous Clayton Christensen claim, which is about objectified value, I think that the consumer has jobs to be done and the entrepreneur’s offering can do it.

Hunter Hastings:

And we’re saying the opposite here that the consumers doing the job. And the entrepreneur can really facilitate that. That’s I think, that’s my way of saying what the revolution is, you’re giving much more weight to the consumers role in value generation, than has been the case in the past.

Per Bylund:

Yeah, we’re sort of shifting the boundary between the entrepreneur and the consumer. Whereas traditionally, it’s been the case that the entrepreneur delivers the product, which has the value, and then the consumer just has to use it. And then of course, it’s some weird psychological thing going on whether the person is satisfied or not. And there’s plenty of, I guess, space for the entrepreneur to trick the consumer. And the disappointment is sort of the entrepreneurs fault, whereas the implication of our new boundary between where the distinction between where value happens and where it’s facilitated means that there can be plenty of disappointment in a good or service on the consumer side completely.

Per Bylund:

So the consumer has made a mistake in expecting to get certain value out of a product, but didn’t, there was nothing wrong with the product, the product was exactly as described, but the consumer made an error. So the entrepreneur is not at fault. But of course, it might mean that the consumer is no longer trusting the entrepreneur, and will not buy anything more from the entrepreneur and what have you.

Per Bylund:

And I think what it also does is, it recognizes the larger role of the consumer. What it also means is that the entrepreneur becomes more of a servant of the consumer than was the case before. That, instead of being the guys in traditional sort of entrepreneurship, where you figure out a product, you produce a product, and then you just take it to market and then consumers get to buy it.

Per Bylund:

Instead, it’s your problem as an entrepreneur to figure out what could cause a valuable experience for the consumer, of course in competition with what other entrepreneurs are offering. And then make sure to continue and follow up and help the consumer through through the use of the product and make sure that the consumer gets a valuable experience out of it, which is much harder than it sounds.

Per Bylund:

But what it does is points out that the entrepreneur is sort of in the hands of the consumer, whether the entrepreneur’s successful. It depends on how much he or she helps the consumer to get a valuable experience.

Hunter Hastings:

Yeah, so let’s focus on the entrepreneur side now, we flip to that. One of the phrases I picked up from the paper that really brought it home for me is that what the entrepreneur is doing is producing the means for consumers to use for their desired satisfaction.

Hunter Hastings:

So that’s a very creative way to think about the role of business, I think. You’re producing the means but you have no control over how the consumer uses those means. So all you’ve got is watching, observing and monitoring what the consumer is doing, is that a good way to say it Mark?

Mark Packard:

Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradigm shift in the way we think about business. Again, we’ve shied away from this language of value creation, because value emerges in the experience of consumers. And this means that value isn’t created by businesses, right? The experience might be created by a business, but the value emerges out of the experience. And honestly, even that’s not entirely accurate, because really, it’s consumers who consume, right? It’s consumers who are actually creating the experience.

Mark Packard:

So what businesses do is really just facilitate the opportunity for that experience for consumers. So what we say is and I think this is much more accurate, is that businesses facilitate value experiences that are expected to benefit consumers. And that’s a very different way of thinking about what business’s role is, we’re providing the means, the resources, the tools.

Mark Packard:

And some businesses are experienced businesses, they actually create the experiential environment for the consumer to experience that thing. But it’s the experience that really, ultimately matters.

Per Bylund:

So if I may add to that, I mean, we see some of the errors that come from seeing what the entrepreneur does as value creation. We see those in policy, which are, in a sense, disastrous policy propositions, where a producer of a thing is going to be held accountable for what the consumer does with the thing. That doesn’t make any sense at all when you recognize that no consumers can innovate, they can figure out whatever they feel like and have whatever experience they feel like for that good, whatever it is.

Per Bylund:

So the producer has no influence really over what the consumer does with a product, which is pretty obvious for anyone running a business that when you have made the sale well, if they resort to throwing the tomatoes they bought on people, instead of eating them well you can’t really do anything about that at all.

Per Bylund:

I mean, if you sell hammers, they’re intended to be used in construction work or what have you. Well, someone takes the hammer and bashes someone’s head in, that’s not the intention. But it’s sort of an innovation on the consumer side, not very productive one, but still. So holding producers responsible for what someone might do with a thing. It completely misunderstands what is going on here.

Per Bylund:

And it completely… In a sense it handicaps and undermines the position of any entrepreneur that whatever someone produces, can be used for something terrible, potentially, and something beautiful as well. But whatever the consumer chooses to do with it, it’s out of your control. So you can only try to make it valuable for a consumer, but you can’t really change the consumer’s behavior with the thing, how they use it, and so forth.

Per Bylund:

So I think producers make this error too, not only policymakers, but trying to steer users to use products in a certain way. An example of this would be Apple, for instance, where very often in Apple products, you can use it in one way, but you can’t really change it a whole lot. So unless you use the computer or the tablet, or what have you, the way that Steve Jobs intended and thought was a good way of using it, it’s kind of be a mess trying to use it.

Per Bylund:

And that sort of steering, it has the benefit of simplifying the product, and maybe simplifying the message. But it can also reduce the value that the consumer gets out of it and you can even make the value pretty much zero.

Mark Packard:

I was talking to my parents just the other day about WD-40 and all the things that WD-40 can do. And you know the story of WD-40 is that it was designed for aeronautical equipment, it was to prevent rust on aeronautical machines. But it is a huge product and a huge success because some of those employees took it home and started using it in different ways that it wasn’t originally intended for.

Mark Packard:

And yeah, let your consumers explore and try things with your product and see what they come up with because they can come up potentially with much more valuable uses for what you think it should do than what you think it should do. So, that’s a good point Per.

Hunter Hastings:

It’s the essence of what Professor [Kihani 00:30:44] called a couple of weeks ago, generativity, if you are unfiltered in what you let the consumer do, you’ll be unconstrained in the innovation that comes out the other side. So there’s a exponential potential there.

Hunter Hastings:

So let’s go back to what the entrepreneur can do, they can initiate a value proposition, “Hey, here’s something that I think will serve as the means to you, Mr. and Mrs. Consumer to fulfill your want.” And the wants today and wants tomorrow because of production taking time. And then they can monitor the consumers value experience and get some feedback from that, is that how we define what the entrepreneur can do?

Per Bylund:

Sure, why not? I mean, in a sense, they have to forecast or predict or imagine what could be of value to consumers and provide them with the means. And then seek whatever means of feedback there are in order to learn and just like we talked about, with WD-40, is a great example, that sometimes consumers use it in a much, much more valuable way than you had anticipated. Well, then it makes sense for you to follow up and try to figure out how they’re using it. And you can learn about your product’s actual value, by having a close relationship with the consumer.

Per Bylund:

So it’s not about selling something and then just turning your back and moving on. So any product in a sense, you can learn about the consumer experience. And you can have a relationship with consumers. And thereby realize how you can make the experience more valuable for consumers, maybe you can make a small tweak here and there. And that would facilitate more value for your existing customers or maybe you can make it valuable to a whole new range of customers.

Per Bylund:

I think it’s a little strange to assume that the entrepreneur can figure all this out to begin with. So when we talked about before that you should set place the value first and then the values determines the price that you might be able to charge for the product. And then your role as the entrepreneur is to choose the cost structure that can offer your profit given that your estimation of the price is correct.

Per Bylund:

Well, this goes beyond placing the sale that you can learn and you can continue to develop the product using the consumer’s experience and learning from the consumer how your product is actually valuable. And thereby you can improve your chances.

Per Bylund:

So I think a lot of modern companies recently anyway have had sort of adopted this model without, I guess, knowing exactly why. I mean they probably don’t have a value theory that they’re following. But having like panels of customers, providing feedback and looking at online reviews and things like that, in order to learn more. What did we do, right? What did we do wrong? Where’s the value add in a sense to this experience of our product?

Per Bylund:

And how can we help the consumer realize more value in using and experiencing what we have to offer? And there’s of course a lot you can learn. So you have to be open for that. And especially if you have a new product, it’s not easy to figure out exactly how people might use the product.

Hunter Hastings:

As we try to compose what we’re calling the Austrian business model, I think of it as three V’s and we’ve just covered I think the third one. So I call them value understanding, that’s what you two have been talking about all day, understanding what value is, value facilitation we’ve discussed that in depth. And the third term which might not be the right word, but is the right ideas, value agility, I.E. the agility to monitor the experience, take the feedback, make sure adjustments, take it back, see what happens next, continuous change and improvement. So I’m going to call that value agility.

Mark Packard:

Well, that’s also the on the entrepreneur side. The agility is on the entrepreneur side. But what you’re looking at is really an enhancement of the value experience for the consumer. So you have to be agile to respond to those things, but also to sort of suck in that information that might or might not be available.

Hunter Hastings:

Yep. The three V’s is a business model for the entrepreneurs, hopefully, as we perfect it. So another phrase you used in the paper, I think, Mark we’ll ask you this is that in all of this, the entrepreneur can never know. Never know what the value outcome will be. So just take us there, how does the entrepreneur act in that situation?

Mark Packard:

Yeah, Per was kind of talking about this. But when you think about it in this way that we’ve been discussing, the uncertainties and the difficulties of business become a lot more apparent, and you start to see how business isn’t just production and sales, it’s really about providing consumers with the best means to achieve the best experiences.

Mark Packard:

But again, everyone is different, and their value experiences must be unique. Because we’re also different, and we experience things differently. And this means that consumers will, over their lives, end up with very different value learning processes and conclusions and that means different preferences.

Mark Packard:

And so even if you could know for sure that your product would be subjectively beneficial to someone, it doesn’t really matter what you think, it matters what they think. And so you can’t ever know, what the value outcome will be. But you’re you’re doing the best you can with this uncertain future, with what you have, and you’re making your product as beneficial as it can be. And I’m doing some work on kind of these narratives, we’re painting a picture, we’re telling a story that helps consumers understand how what we’re doing, what I’m doing as an entrepreneur, would help you. And that’s about the best we can do.

Hunter Hastings:

So in the paper, you find another fascinating and important route for pursuing this idea of subjective value and entrepreneurship, and that is the entrepreneurs choice itself to be an entrepreneur, to act entrepreneurially. And you say that they’re not looking for dollars and cents in profit exclusively, there are non monetary rewards and satisfactions from facilitating the satisfactions of others. So I think Per maybe that’s developing a little bit more what Mark said, but take us there, the entrepreneurial choice and it’s subjectivity.

Per Bylund:

Sure. It’s really the same value theory that we’re saying that well, value is the experience you get from something, which obviously is not the dollars and cents that you get as profits, because your experience of that is something else, either, it could be the prestige of becoming rich, or it could be the prestige of being an entrepreneur, but it can also be the getting the means to consume something for yourself. Or it could be just simply being your own boss, or it could be all of these at the same time.

Per Bylund:

So the question for the entrepreneurs is really, why am I doing this, which is not necessarily even related to profit. Obviously, you would need to cover your costs and breakeven in order to continue running the business unless you’re Bill Gates or something. But other than that, I mean, why are you doing it. Most entrepreneurs are probably not in business for just reaping in cash and getting rich. I mean, the data shows pretty clearly that starting a business, it’s not a super way to get rich because entrepreneurs they typically make a little less as entrepreneurs than they make as employees, if you can compare the situations.

Per Bylund:

So it’s the same situation as for the consumer, but the value that you get of something is the experience and how you treasure and how the experience satisfies whatever wants you might have. So it’s wrong to as we often do study entrepreneurship in terms of the profits they make and thinking in terms of just the dollars and cents that you get in and that you sort of put in your own pocket.

Per Bylund:

Because that’s probably not what drives the entrepreneur just like it’s not what drives the consumer, whereas we think it’s pretty obvious for the consumer because the consumer pays cash in order to get the experience. But I mean, the entrepreneur does the same thing. It really is a subjective value world. And the analysis of it should then be subjective value analysis as well.

Hunter Hastings:

So in the paper, I’ve got some language here that I need you to unpack for us, you describe that entrepreneurship as a choice. It’s a contingent voluntary action of goal driven actors. I think I can translate that. And then Mark, you say the entrepreneurs uncertainty is not epistemic, which I take to mean knowledge constraints, which we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast. It’s aleatory if I pronounced that right, it’s randomness. So can you explain those two terms about uncertainty for our listeners in business language? How do I deal with aleatory uncertainty?

Mark Packard:

Yeah, I pronounce it aleatory, but I’m not quite sure what the right… It’s a Latin term. But the difference between what we call epistemic uncertainty versus aleatory uncertainty is epistemic uncertainties are ignorance based, they are things that you can know if you collect enough information. If I toss a die, there’s a one in six chance it’s going to come up a six.

Mark Packard:

But if I knew exactly how that die was cast and all the factors and stuff, it is possible for me to predict exactly what face that, that die is going to land face up. But there are other types of uncertainties that there is just indeterminate, it’s not random, it’s not even happened yet. Right? It hasn’t been determined, like other people’s choices.

Mark Packard:

A lot of things happen based on what other people choose to do. And they haven’t made those choices yet. So we can’t predict those future outcomes, we are waiting for people, including ourselves to make those choices. And so the outcome in that sense is just inherently unpredictable. Doesn’t matter how much data we collect. And so I get a little frustrated when B-schools and just industry experts talk about the promise of say big data, and artificial intelligence in predicting consumers and all this stuff.

Mark Packard:

Because consumers are people, they’re not going to be… They’re not automatons, they’re not computers, they’re not predictable in that sense. We don’t know what people will value in the future. We have to predict it as entrepreneurs, as business people, we have to predict it. But we can’t predict just by collecting more market data. Market research is important. We need to understand our customers and consumers.

Mark Packard:

But we can’t kind of jump in assuming this conclusion is right, we understand our consumers. And so this is going to work, we have to accept the fact that people are unpredictable, that they can change their minds, that they can surprise us. And going in with that mindset allows us to be more adaptive, more agile, as you were saying, and adapt to what they find and what they discover over time. And we can learn from them as we learn ourselves, and that makes this learning process both two-sided. The consumers are learning and we are learning with them.

Hunter Hastings:

In fact, that’s a beautiful phrase that you two had in the paper, you say entrepreneurship is the two-sided navigation of radical value uncertainty. So both sides have radical value uncertainty. In the never ending quest towards higher value states. So that gave me a good feel for the dynamics of it. And it’s a new definition of what entrepreneurs do.

Hunter Hastings:

And if I can pick up on another phrase and Per maybe you can take as long as… It’s a mental journey or process. A series of imaginings, judgments and learning over time. So tell us about that. It’s a journey.

Per Bylund:

Well, it truly is a journey, and in a sense it’s a learning process where you’re trying to figure out and you’re responding to whatever feedback and whatever information that you might come across along the way. The problem of course, is that everything requires your interpretation and your imagination of what it might mean. It’s definitely not as easy as simply looking at statistics and then picking whatever is the most significant variable or something like that.

Per Bylund:

Entrepreneurship is nothing like that. And it’s funny that Mark mentioned that such statistical and big data analysis. I wrote an article before, I think it was on mises.org. Commenting on the Bing search engine, where they had an attempt to using big data to predict who would win in sports games, football and basketball, and ice hockey and what have you.

Per Bylund:

And I looked at some of those results. And it turns out that pretty much consistently they were two thirds right. And then they were talking about a sport where you know a lot of statistics about the players, you know exactly the rules, you know how much time they have, you know exactly their positions, you know the rules, they are pretty obvious, they’re explicit to all the rules. So, it doesn’t actually give you a lot of space for unknowns, because everything is already structured, and it’s clear, still big data could only predict two thirds of the actual outcomes.

Per Bylund:

Even given the historic data on say if the team is having a good streak, or whatever, even with this information, they still couldn’t get it right. And then, of course, trying to use big data to predict what will people value in the future, I mean that’s impossible, what you can do is potentially exclude things that are probably not relevant or exclude ways or routes that are not going to be very helpful.

Per Bylund:

But you still have to base it in your own imagination of what will be the case of your imagination of how consumers will use your product and how they will cherish the experience that they get, sort of empathize with them, placing yourself in their shoes. And of course, learn along the way and learning along the way that journey as we said before, it doesn’t end with placing the sale, it continues, because that’s where you can start to learn about your product, and how consumers actually experience the product when they’re using it.

Hunter Hastings:

So let me wrap up there with a question that’s pertinent for our economics or business project. And you’ve given everything that you’ve just explained and elucidated so much. We’re trying to facilitate more successful entrepreneurship, meaning you can better help consumers to get satisfaction, to experience value, we think of it as a GPS to use your journey metaphor, which is given where we want to go more satisfied consumers.

Hunter Hastings:

Here’s where I am right now. And here are some things you can do to make that journey more accurate and more successful. So is that doable? And the way you’ve just described it? Can we facilitate more successful entrepreneurship? Better two-sided navigation of the process?

Per Bylund:

Yeah, of course. I mean, what we’re talking about here is really facilitating the facilitators of value. And I think, getting your mind in the right place, thinking about these things in the right way. That’s the place to start. And unfortunately, not only do many entrepreneurs, not realize these things, and of course, they don’t have to read scholarly papers or anything like that, but they need to have a proper thinking about how the world works and what they’re actually offering that they’re not selling a valuable product, they’re offering a product that can facilitate value for consumers, which is different.

Per Bylund:

And unfortunately, many business schools are teaching this in the wrong way and using objectivist language and we had a podcast before when we talked about how they’re using analogies from military conquest and things like that. And that’s terrible, that’s not only misunderstanding value, that’s completely flipping everything upside down and putting it on their head because it’s not the case that you’re conquering a market and you’re subduing the consumer, you’re doing exactly the other way around.

Per Bylund:

You’re trying to figure out how to serve them the best way possible. That doesn’t make you a king or a conqueror. It makes you a servant in a sense, and you benefit and serve yourself by serving others. The consumer really is sovereign in the marketplace.

Hunter Hastings:

Mark I’m going to leave you with the last word on facilitating entrepreneurship.

Mark Packard:

I totally agree with Per. I mean, I think one of the tasks or goals of the Economics For Business program and project is to get business people and entrepreneurs to understand economics in a fundamental way. And as Per was saying, the current paradigm in social science, including management and entrepreneurship researches is objectivist view, where you just kind of look at these various factors A, B, and C and see what kind of effects, statistical effect it has on D.

Mark Packard:

And based on that analysis, they say, “You should do A or C, and that’s just not very helpful if you’re an entrepreneur, because you don’t really understand the mechanisms of why. But Austrian economics, this deep understanding of how economics actually works, gives us that why and that helps you to navigate the uncertainties, the dynamics of economic change and process. And that’ll help you a whole lot moving forward.

Hunter Hastings:

Well, I want to thank you both for the incredible work that you do throughout your research and your theorizing, this paper is a particular breakthrough I think. And it’s certainly facilitated a good experience for me, and I’ll do what I can working with you too and everybody else at the Mises Institute to get more and more people to appreciate the implications of it, because I think they’re colossal.

Hunter Hastings:

So thank you both for today. And thank you for the ongoing work and we’ll continue to try to make this as useful as possible for everybody out there who’s listening. Thank you.

Mark Packard:

Thanks Hunter.

Per Bylund:

Thank you.

Mohammad Keyhani: Implications Of Generativity For Entrepreneurship And Strategy

Implications of Generativity for Entrepreneurship and Strategy

Guest:

Mohammad Keyhani

Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary

mohammad.keyhani@haskayne.ucalgary.ca

 

This article is based on episode 104 of the “Economics for Business” podcast by the Mises Institute (www.mises.org/E4BPod) featuring Mohammad Keyhani in conversation with host Hunter Hastings. This text is a slightly edited version of the interview transcript. The original audio can be found here: https://mises.org/library/professor-mohammad-keyhani-generativity-new-digital-pathway-business-growth

Hunter Hastings

Entrepreneurial businesses employ creativity and ingenuity to serve customers in new and better ways in order to grow. They first choose a set of customers and invest in understanding those customers and their dissatisfactions. They then set in motion a development process to design, assemble, and deliver products and services to overcome those dissatisfactions. That’s the essence of the continuing process of generating value. Increasingly in the digital age, this process is being enhanced or even superseded. On the input side of the business, firms are foregoing the limitations of choosing and targeting customers, replacing that step with unlimited and unfiltered participation. Everyone is welcome. On the output side of the business, firms are aiming to unleash users to generate innovations and new ideas, and to share them, build on them, and improve them further. That’s open innovation. The Austrian underpinnings of this emerging business model lie in the knowledge process theory of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs require knowledge of customer dissatisfactions. They need to know what questions to ask, to ascertain these hidden or unarticulated needs. Entrepreneurs need to know the processes of product and service development, including digitization, app design, or hiring the right people, assembling the right resources, and getting the right financing. And when they’ve developed a product or service, they deploy it in the market they’ve previously identified, which by definition is knowledge constrained.

In summary, entrepreneurs don’t know all the questions to ask and problems to solve, only some of them. And they can’t assemble, examine, and test all ideas and solutions, only some of them. The new business model breakthroughs are aimed at escaping from knowledge constraints. What if the inputs from users were unconstrained and unfiltered? And what if the potential outputs of innovation could come from unlimited sources? And what if entrepreneurs could accurately match those unfiltered inputs and unconstrained outputs?

Answering that what-if question today is Professor Mohammad Keyhani, a professor in entrepreneurship and strategy at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. Dr. Keyhani is also a great supporter of practicing entrepreneurs by his Entrepreneur Tools website (https://entrepreneur-tools.zeef.com/) which we’ll talk about today, and his Crowdfunding Tools page (https://crowdfunding-tools.zeef.com/) . Professor Keyhani, welcome to the Economics for Business podcast …. I’ll ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners. They can find you on your website (https://www.mohammadkeyhani.com/). You have a deep research interest in entrepreneurship, you teach “Entrepreneurship: The State of the Art” and you teach another course called “Technology for Entrepreneurs.” So please tell us how you developed your expertise in entrepreneurship and some of your focus areas.

Mohammad Keyhani

Very well, thank you. So just some background on me: I’m an Iranian Canadian, I came to Canada to do a PhD in strategic management focusing on entrepreneurship in 2008. And the focus of my research during my PhD, was to try and build on my previous math background because I had an undergraduate degree in math, and I was somewhat familiar with modeling and simulation work. So I sort of leveraged that to look at the economic foundations of entrepreneurship. Interestingly, when I looked at what it is that the literature calls the economics of entrepreneurship, or economic foundations of entrepreneurship, I was pointed in the direction of Austrian economics as a school of thought. But surprisingly, there was very little modeling in that literature. And I later learned that it was sort of a conscious methodological decision by most Austrian economists to avoid mathematical modeling to the extent possible. Not that they don’t do any of it, but it’s just done very little in that field. So I attempted somewhat of a heretic move in that I said, OK, I’m going to engage Austrian economics, but I am going to model it mathematically with simulations, and that became my PhD dissertation.

I build on that work when I teach the PhD seminar at our school (Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary). We have a PhD program in entrepreneurship, and I teach that course “Entrepreneurship: The State of the Art,” as sort of a review of the entrepreneurship literature to our PhD students. I have divided the course mainly based on various disciplinary perspectives, including economics of entrepreneurship, psychology of entrepreneurship, sociology of entrepreneurship. But of course, my own PhD research was very much the economics of entrepreneurship.

The other course that you mentioned, I’m teaching “Technology for Entrepreneurs.” It’s an undergrad course, but it’s more representative of the more recent research that I’m doing. I can’t really describe it as the economics of entrepreneurship, but the work that I did on the economics of entrepreneurship is very much informing the work that I’m doing on the various technologies that entrepreneurs are using right now. It’s been an insightful effort to link my previous work to this new line of work that has been interesting me. I’m generally very much a technology enthusiast and follow the all the latest developments in software technology, and that’s sort of what’s got me into this new line of work.

Hunter Hastings

Thanks for that background. Just as an aside on Austrian Economics, I’m not an academic so I’m no expert but I certainly get the impression that the school is coming around to modeling through complexity theory. That the kind of computational modeling—simulation as you referred to it—that you can do when you come through the lens of complexity theory opens up some modeling pathways for Austrians that maybe they didn’t have before. I know that Todd Chiles said that Austrian Economics is a strand of complexity theory, and people are developing that theme I think. Does that sound right?

Mohammad Keyhani

That’s certainly what I have argued and others as well. There’s a famous paper called “Was Hayek an ACE?” with ACE meaning Agent-based Computational Economist. And I have a paper more recently in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (https://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1311) arguing for why simulation methods are compatible with Austrian economics, and how they incorporate the various aspects of dynamism, subjectivism, uncertainty that the Austrian School prefers, and that were mainly the reasons for why the Austrian School rejected closed-form mathematical models. I argue that simulation methods open that up, as others have argued, but I base my arguments mostly on what I was able to do with my own simulations. But yes, I think that is an opportunity. I’m not seeing that many Austrian papers being published with simulation methods yet, but I do sense a bit of a shift of thinking in the sense that there’s more of an openness to it. And I think if that openness wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have been able to publish my simulation papers. I think the openness is increasingly there to explore how simulation methods can advance Austrian theory.

Hunter Hastings

Well that’s a subject for a future conversation professor, but today we were going to talk about another area of business modeling that you have opened up and are a leading thinker on, and that’s generativity. The generative product or generative service. That’s going to be our theme today. It’s got a lot of promising implications for entrepreneurs. Can you start by telling us what generativity is? Defining generative with regards to businesses and business models?

Mohammad Keyhani

I think one of the most common definitions of generativity comes from Jonathan Zittrain, who’s the main person who has expanded and put forth this theory of technology generativity. His perspective of course was from a legal scholarship perspective because that’s his field. But he defines a generative system or the generativity of a system as “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” This is a variation of his definition from a couple of years earlier which is “a technology’s overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large varied and uncoordinated audiences.” So that’s typically taken as the definition. But there’s other ways to approach the understanding of generativity and one is through the particular characteristics of generative technologies as Zittrain outlines. In his book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It,” he outlines five different characteristics which were:

  1. Leverage: how extensively the technology is able to put its various functions to different uses.
  2. Adaptability: how much it can be adapted to different tasks.
  3. Ease of mastery: how easily people can understand it and use it.
  4. Accessibility: how easy it is for people to access it.
  5. Transferability: how any changes to the technology can be transferred to someone else so that other people can build on what previous people have done with the technology.

Zittrain talks about these as characteristics of a technology. But I think from a business perspective, we very much can view these as characteristics of products. There can be products that are more or less generative compared to competitors or compared to other products. Zittrain doesn’t have a very product-oriented view to this, but I think it’s just a very natural step to think of products as being less or more generative.

Hunter Hastings

Maybe we can go to that product level and talk about the features and benefits. This is the language with which we think about products and services, and maybe you have some examples that could illustrate that.

Mohammad Keyhani

Zittrain mentions this in his book, that the main things that identify generativity are the increase of participation as an input, and the increase of innovation as an output. So participation as input, innovation as output. There’s existing literature on how firms and companies can benefit from increased participation, because everyone recognizes that not all valuable knowledge is within the company. And so there’s this whole literature on open innovation, methods like crowdsourcing, and that sort of thing. It’s, it’s long been recognized that there’s benefits to increasing participation into the business of a company or the design of a product. And there’s also recognition that this sort of increased participation can lead to a higher number of innovations, and more interesting innovative ideas. But I think what’s new in the generativity theory and from the generativity lens, is that the product itself can have features or mechanisms that increases the participation into its own development, evolution, design, use, and also helps increase the innovations that participation can engender. Importantly, while open innovation is an organizational technique, generativity is a product characteristic. The main contribution of generativity is to ask, how do you build a product that almost automatically does that main function of generativity to increase participation and increase innovation? A a non-generative way to increase participation would be to organize a crowdsourcing competition, for example. You could do that, but that’s an organizational tool. It’s not a feature of the product. When the product itself has features that increase the participation of various users and various contributors to its evolution, that’s what we call product generativity.

Hunter Hastings

So my mind leaps to the obvious, something like Amazon where people enter searches, and so the more people you get asking more questions like “where can I find this?” or “can you solve this problem for me?” you’re getting participation in generating problems and more suppliers come on the other side with more solutions. Is that a form of generativity?

Mohammad Keyhani

I would say that is a form of generativity, because I think generativity applies both to products and to marketplaces, or markets as mechanisms. So I think markets are very much generative systems, and they can be designed to be more generative or less generative depending on the type of market that you need. For example, I think Uber or even Airbnb are very much narrow scope markets, and not very generative. Airbnb is a bit more generative than Uber, but compared to Amazon, both of them are not very generative markets. Amazon is a hugely generative marketplace, and it’s mostly benefited from the generativity of its marketplace as a business advantage. So that that’s why I’m thinking that it’s not necessarily that Amazon had a generative product, although I think, to some extent, they have tried to make their product more generative, but I think the main reason that Amazon has succeeded was the generativity of its marketplace. And I think markets are generative for different reasons than products are generative. But yeah, so if I wanted to give good examples of generative marketplaces, I would tell you about some of the tools that I found, while I’ve been curating a page for technological tools for entrepreneurs.

Hunter Hastings

Let me go back a bit and sorry I leaped ahead to markets and maybe I interrupted your flow on products. So what are some examples of generative products?

Mohammad Keyhani

Generative products are generally a bit hard to categorize. It’s a it’s a bit hard to describe exactly what they do, because they can do so many different things. They’re more like toolkits rather than products. They’re more like general-purpose products rather than narrow scope, specific-use products. So as I was curating my Entrepreneur Tools page (https://entrepreneur-tools.zeef.com/) one of my major value adds in curating that page has been to categorize the various tools that I find. And I’ve increasingly noticed that there are tools in there that are just very hard to categorize, because they’re general purpose tools. So examples that I could give are Zapier.com and other competitors to it like Integromat.com. These are tools that basically connect various other tools to each other through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). They’re kind of like the plumbing of the internet now, they’re connecting various APIs to each other. And there’s so many different things you can do with them. Just because there’s so many different possible connections between the tools that link to Zapier or Integromat. Another type of tool that I would call generative is something like Google Sheets or its relational database counterpart, AirTable.com. They have allowed users to do so many things with them. In general spreadsheets and databases are very generative products, and they can do a lot but a regular database like MySQL or MongoDB, or things like that are not very accessible to the regular person. And spreadsheets make databases more accessible and easy to master, easy to understand to regular people. AirTable has basically taken the additional step of opening up relational databases to the regular user. Not just a spreadsheet, but a kind of spreadsheet where its rows can be objects that have their own spreadsheets. And you could even say that because it’s cloud based, it even increases generativity, because there’s so many things you can do with software as a service or cloud software that you can’t do with client based or desktop software. So AirTable is another example of generative software.

Another category that I would call generative these days are these dynamic document creation and note taking tools, for example, Coda.io and its main competitor, Notion.so. These two tools are very hard to describe exactly what they do, because they do so many things. But they are becoming increasingly popular, people are doing a lot with them. They’re some people are creating blogs with them. Some people are creating websites with them. Some people are creating project management tools, or team collaboration tools with them, group note taking, knowledge base building, there’s so many things that you can do with these tools that they’re very clearly generative products.

And finally, another category that I would say are very generative products on the rise these days are no-code software development tools. Something like Adalo.com for building mobile apps VoiceFlow.com for building voice-based apps, Bubble.io for building web apps. These no-code software development tools are very much generative, because they’re opening up the ability to create software to so many regular users or regular people, people who don’t have computer science degrees or haven’t built the expertise as like a back-end or front-end or full-stack developer. They’re not really developers, but just playing around a few minutes with bubble, they can become developers. And it’s just amazing how it’s opening up participation into software development, and therefore increasing innovation, because now you have so many people who would otherwise not be building software, able to build software, and able to innovate using software. So that’s why I would definitely put these no-code development tools as a category of generative software.

Hunter Hastings

That’s really exciting. That’s cutting edge kinds of opportunities for entrepreneurs. One of the elements of explanation or the theory behind these things that you put forward which is also exciting is that generativity overcomes knowledge constraints that all entrepreneurs face. You can’t possibly know all the problems to solve and all the questions to ask. You can’t possibly know how to fix every need that a customer has. We see entrepreneurs as orchestrators and orchestration is a really hard thing to do when you’ve got knowledge constraints. Expand on that a little bit. Filling knowledge constraints or softening knowledge constraints for entrepreneurs.

Mohammad Keyhani

The knowledge-based foundations of the theory of generative products and markets is something I’ve already begun to explore in a paper we published in Strategy Science (https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/stsc.2019.0092) on what we called “firm-designed markets.” The idea is that the firm—and this is the main idea behind open innovation theory as well—the firm itself and its employees, no matter how big the firm is, even if you’re Google and you have 100,000 of the smartest minds in the world working for you, you still don’t have the majority of good ideas because you just don’t have the majority of the people of the world in your company. So if you can find ways to open up the participation that goes into your products beyond the boundaries of your company, you are able to address your own knowledge constraints, including and especially your blind spots. Sometimes you have knowledge constraints where you know that you don’t know something. Those are known unknowns. But sometimes you’re dealing with unknown unknowns. They are very much your blind spots, you don’t even know where to look, you don’t even know that you should be looking for an answer or that if you look for an answer, there might be opportunities there.

So I think one of the main features of generativity, whether it’s the generativity of products or the generativity of markets, a main feature, is that it sort of automates knowledge search. It is like detaching the search process from the searcher. The search process for knowledge is always constrained by the searcher, and that means that it’s constrained by the blind spots of the searcher, because the searcher only knows to search in certain places. So if you can find a mechanism that detaches the search process from the searcher, it unchains the search process in a way that potentially allows the search process to get into what otherwise would be blind spots for the searcher. So that’s I think the key feature of generativity, whether it is the generativity of products or markets. With products, you have features in the product itself, that result in that knowledge search that gets different users to come and play with the product and learn to do things with the product that the product designer couldn’t have even imagined. I don’t think the creators of spreadsheets or PCs or even Zapier, AirTable, Bubble, all these tools that I mentioned, I don’t think they could have fully imagined all the things that their users are building with their products. These products have features that allow them to un-constrain or unlink the search process from the knowledge constraints of the searcher. They don’t need to be directed in a lot of ways, because they have the features built-in that allow them to elicit participation and create innovations out of that participation without a guided search process.

Same with generative markets. Generative marketplaces allow the incentives of the market to take control of the search process and in a way so that no one person has to define what is the problem area we should be searching for. You just let the demand side of the market define problem areas and the supply side define solution areas. Sometimes it is a bit switched up, where the demand side might not even realize that it has a problem or that it needs a product or wants a product until a supply side solution is provided. But the point is that the marketplace creator as the owner of the generative product—here being the generative marketplace—doesn’t even have to know or define all the problems and solutions. They can just benefit from all the problem-solution matches that are created in the market. And that’s a huge, huge source of profit potentially, and a huge source of competitive advantage. When you’re able to automatically profit from problems-solution matches where neither the definition of problems nor the definition of solutions are constrained by your own internal knowledge as a company, it’s like opening a door to a whole new level of potential opportunities and profits that was previously closed because you were constrained by your own knowledge of where to search for problems and solutions.

Hunter Hastings

I was very taken in one of the early Zittrain papers that you sent me about—at a very high level—the idea that if you attach a personal computer to a network like the internet, there’s no telling what solutions that will generate. You couldn’t possibly imagine where we are today when somebody first did that and connected a PC to the internet. That was a very stimulating idea. Obviously it’s very high level but it kind of illustrates what you just said I think.

Mohammad Keyhani

For Zittrain, that’s when he’s describing the two main examples of generative technologies that he talks about in his book. One is the PC and one is the internet. So when you talk about connecting the PC to the internet, it’s like a doubling of generativity. I shouldn’t call it doubling because it’s not a linear addition process. It’s a combinatorial, nonlinear or exponential process. It’s a nonlinear, exponential synergy of generativity that happens when you connect multiple sources of generativity to each other. The theory that I’m working to build is, the next logical step for me now that I’ve sort of thought about how products can be generative, and how marketplaces can be generative, it to think about the combination of generative markets and generative products. Zittrain and the Information Systems literature have talked about how products can be generative. And then there’s theory that I’m building around how markets can be generative. I’m talking about firm-designed markets, but I’m basically borrowing theory from all the people in the economics literature that have argued that economies are knowledge-generating systems. All the literature on endogenous growth theory, and the works of Edmund Phelps on dynamic economies (see for example his book “Mass Flourishing”). I’m building on them to theorize how firm-designed marketplaces can be generative. So the next step logically would be similar to what Zittrain has described as this combination of two generative technologies. I would say that those companies that have been able to benefit from generativity in their products in exponentially synergistic combination with generativity in a firm-designed marketplace that they operate and they profit from, those companies have the potential for huge success. And I think if you look at say the top 10 most valuable companies in the world today, you will be able to identify some mechanism like this. Some mechanism involving the combination of a generative marketplace with a generative product. And I think that’s kind of a generativity-based theory of competitive advantage that mostly explains the outliers of success in today’s economy. It’s not meant to generally explain performance heterogeneity or competitive advantage in general for all firms, but it is a tool that can explain why some of the outliers of performance today are outliers.

Hunter Hastings

Could it be more generally applied in the future do you think? You talked about “Mass Flourishing” and dynamism at the economy level, at the national level, but perhaps it’s the future of growth on a broader basis. Not just for outliers which is true today but more entrepreneurs might be able to harness generativity in the future do you think?

Mohammad Keyhani

It’s very difficult to achieve the combination of generative products and generative marketplaces. In general, everybody out in the entrepreneurship world, in the Silicon Valley tech world, everyone knows that these marketplace businesses are very attractive, because the problems and the solutions are basically taken care of by the demand side and supply side and you basically just benefit as the orchestrator of the market or the governor of the market. So these business models are known to be very valuable, very lucrative. Although I would say maybe it’s not as recognized that generative markets are have the potential to be much more lucrative than non-generative markets. So for example, the profits that Apple and Google make from the Apple Store or the Android Play Store as marketplaces, or the profits that Amazon makes from its generative marketplace. I don’t think that a firm with non-generative marketplace, say like the Ubers of the world, I don’t think they can easily reach that level of profitability.

Because in the end, the Ubers of the world are very much allocative marketplaces, their main goal is to increase the efficiency of resource allocation in the world. And they will profit for as long as there is inefficient allocation in the particular market that they’re operating in. But generative markets are not just about resource allocation, so they’re not limited by the extent of allocation inefficiency that’s out there. They have unbounded potential for growth, because every time somebody comes up with an idea or innovation, they benefit from it. One of my favorite examples is that that game that came became popular on mobile devices a few years ago, it was called Flappy Bird. I think one student in Vietnam just sat down and wrote a fun mobile app game to play and the game went viral and got so many users to play and purchase that and it was making a lot of money. I think it was on the Android Market. Google was benefiting or if it was on iOS as well, then Apple was benefiting as well. Both benefiting without having to even think about or having to even be in the game business. They were benefiting from this idea for an innovative game that someone across the world had developed in their spare time.

Hunter Hastings

Would TikTok be an example of generativity? You’ve got an immense number of users creating all kinds of different ways to generate videos and animations and things on TikTok. Is that an example?

 

Mohammad Keyhani

To some extent. I wouldn’t call TikTok a very generative tool. But on a spectrum of generativity, it is relatively generative. So the benchmark to test how much a product is generative or not, is to see how much it’s able to be put to different uses that maybe it was not even intended to be in the first place. So for example, when Facebook creates a platform just for people to connect to their friends, and then it realizes that users are now using it to organize events or buy and sell used goods. It shows that the platform had generativity such that the users were able to adapt it to different uses. And then Facebook has often sort of caught up with these new uses by building specific functionality to address the ways that people are now using it. A benchmark to see to what extent a product is generative is to see if it’s allowing users to do things with it that nobody had expected or the initial product wasn’t really made to do that. So I guess TikTok is an example of a company or a product that is to some extent generative.

Hunter Hastings

User-generated innovation?

Mohammad Keyhani

One level of generativity is the extent to which it allows users to innovate. But sometimes those innovations are cumulative, they change the product, or they do something with the product that allows others to improve their own innovation as well. So I think that cumulative nature is what Zittrain was trying to get at with his “transferability” characteristic. If for example, someone does something cool with a spreadsheet tool, that they then put the template out there for other people to use as well, that’s an example of how these user innovations can be cumulative. If a market can incentivize those sorts of transferability, then that’s again, another level of generativity. So, for example, AirTable or Bubble.io, they allow users to create templates with their product, and then sell those templates or components in a generative marketplace that arises around a product that is itself generative. That’s a very powerful mechanism.

I’ve seen various companies that, for example, have generative products, but really don’t try or fail to create generative markets around them. Examples could include some 3D printers, which are very generative products, they can do many different things, and people build things with them that are very innovative that is not necessarily imagined by the creator of 3D printers. But the extent to which you have marketplaces that incentivize people to buy and sell innovations by other users of 3D printers differs I think, across the industry. I think there’s some websites that allow you to buy and sell and some are completely open source. There’s variations.

And then there’s also the issue of appropriation. As a company, how much are you appropriating or benefiting from the innovations that come out of the generativity of your products or your markets? An example of a generative product that also has a generative market around it, but is maybe not appropriated fully by any one company is the WordPress content management system. It’s a huge product. According to Wikipedia, 60% of all the websites on the internet that use a content management system are built on WordPress. That’s a huge amount. But WordPress is completely open source, not really owned by any one particular for-profit company, and there has been a generative marketplace around WordPress. So there’s so many other companies now building themes and selling themes for WordPress components, widgets, add-ons for WordPress, and service companies helping you customize and install WordPress. There’s so much of a market around it. But it’s not the kind of market that’s owned or appropriated by any one particular company. So that generativity is benefiting society in a way but there’s no one company like the way that Google benefits from the Android Market, or Apple benefits from the iOS App Store, there’s no equivalent of that for WordPress.

Hunter Hastings

You’ve given us an awful lot to think about, so thank you for that. You mentioned a paper that you’re working on that will tell us a little bit more about managing generative products. When do you expect to publish?

Mohammad Keyhani

I’m hoping to publish that one as maybe a book chapter and I have another one that I’m working on theorizing the generativity of markets and calling it a theory of market generativity. And then I want to take the next logical step of hopefully publishing a paper that outlines the generativity theory of competitive advantage. So that generativity theory of competitive advantage would describe how certain companies that have been able to benefit from generative markets and generative products have become outliers, and the extent to which they’ve benefited.

Some of the ideas in that paper around generative products and what they mean for entrepreneurship and product management include first of all, some of the advantages and disadvantages of generative products. Not all products should be generative or need to be generative. For example, when you’re trying to match the market of drivers and people who want to go from place A to place B, you don’t necessarily want generativity, you don’t want a lot of innovations to happen in this market. Because the product is very much well defined and narrow scope, and people need it. So you want to address the need for that product. You want to minimize the noise. So you actually don’t want it to be too generative, because generative markets are noisy, they are full of innovations. And they’re messy. And so sometimes you don’t want the market to be messy. Another example of a market you don’t want to be messy is the market for organ donations, for example, the matching of organ donors to organ recipients, which is a market design problem that Alvin Roth’s has worked on. His work on that and similar types of matching markets has won him the Nobel Prize. Those are often types of markets that you don’t want to be messy and noisy, you want them to be very efficient resource allocation mechanisms.

But sometimes you do want your product or your market to be generative, and there’s ways to design them to be more generative. But if you are going that route, and you want a generative product, there’s tricks to it, because you need, for example, to be more patient. And if you have venture capital backing, you need to have the type of investors that are more patient with their capital. Because generative products often are not narrowly defined or well-defined, and they sort of get their definitions and become co-created and co-defined by all the participants and all the users that use them and decide what they’re good for, and come up with ideas for what they’re good for. There’s this example of this company called SparkFun that creates products around very generative platforms like the Raspberry Pi, or the Adruino board. These are very generative hardware products that basically allow people to build their own homemade computers. SparkFun is a company that makes products around these platforms, and I read in a paper that at some point, when they realized how people are using their products for things that they didn’t think that they would be used for, they decided intentionally as a company to no longer label their products as having certain uses. Because what they would label as the uses would be limited by their own knowledge. Whereas when these products go out and get exposed to the innovations of a variety of users outside their company, they realize that it has uses that they never even thought of.

That becomes tricky for entrepreneurship, because a lot of the methodologies like the “lean startup” or the Value Proposition Canvas are the Business Model Canvas, the various tools that we use in the entrepreneurship world, a lot of them don’t assume generativity by default. They assume that the company can define exactly what problem it is trying to solve with the product, from the get-go. They assume that the company knows what the uses are for the product from the get-go. And when you don’t know those things, and you’re creating them with your users, things are different. For example, with this whole emphasis on customer feedback in the Lean Startup approach, in the case of generative products, you would need to go from customer feedback to customer play. You need to allow customers to play around with the product and discover new uses. Rather than just show them a demo and get their feedback because that’s the commonplace way to do it right now is to show someone a demo and get their feedback but it doesn’t properly address the generativity mechanism. Generativity really needs the user and many users to play with a product to learn what it can do, rather than just show someone a demo. So just imagine Coda.io or Notion.so, the way that they’ve been growing, it takes a long time for all the different users that have played with these products to realize what they can do with it. But they have to have the patience to let the users play, let them learn and then capture the learning and convey it to other users. It takes a long time. It’s a different process. But you just have to realize that if you’re working on a product that is generative, some things about how you manage the entrepreneurship process might be different.

Hunter Hastings

It sounds a lot like emergence. In complex systems you can’t predict what outcomes are going to emerge. You’ve just got to sit back and watch the emergence. As you say, that may take time.

Mohammad Keyhani

Exactly. That’s a very good term for it: emergence.

 

References

Keyhani, M. (2019). Computational modeling of entrepreneurship grounded in Austrian economics: Insights for strategic entrepreneurship and the opportunity debate. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 13(2), 221-240.

Phelps, E. S. (2013). Mass flourishing: How grassroots innovation created jobs, challenge, and change. Princeton University Press.

Tajedin, H., Madhok, A., & Keyhani, M. (2019). A theory of digital firm-designed markets: Defying knowledge constraints with crowds and marketplaces. Strategy Science, 4(4), 323-342.

Vriend, N. J. (2002). Was Hayek an ACE?. Southern Economic Journal, 811-840.

Zittrain, J. (2008). The future of the internet–and how to stop it. Yale University Press.

How To Manage: Learn From The People, Plan With The People, Begin With What They Have.

Learn from the people

Plan with the people.

Begin with what they have.

Build on what they know of the best leaders.

When that task is accomplished, the people all remark, we have done it ourselves.

Economics For Entrepreneurs Podcast Transcript

October 20, 2020

David K Hurst

Hunter Hastings

A listener asked us recently about our point of view about managing people in a medium-size, fast-growing firm. Specifically, this listener raised some issues around the different experiences of people in different roles in the firm, frontline workers, middle management process managers and executives. Are the terms blue collar and white collar still applicable? I’m not sure, but it’s that kind of issue. A midsize firm that has multiple functions like manufacturing, distribution, and marketing, and has its own administrative functions like accounting and HR can be a place with a lot of different lived experiences. How do you get everyone to buy into the mission and the purpose in the same way, and to the same degree, with the same level of commitment?

To answer this question, we turn to our good friend, David K Hurst. He’s lived these management issues in his role as an executive in the steel industry, navigating through turbulent times. And I might add managing from turbulence to a smooth result. After that he embarked upon an intellectual journey of discovery to understand why there are turbulent management cycles in some firms. How is it possible to go from turbulent to smooth, and why different ways of managing co-exist, and why there are what he calls tensions between the two, and how those tensions might be resolved.

Does Austrian thinking play a role here? Well, David, not an Austrian economist, but an avid learner, has discovered Hayek while on his intellectual journey and his thinking about the interplay between and within complex systems – individual order and the social order – and that there are tensions between them that are never fully resolved. And yet emergence can result that yields an outcome where everyone can be comfortable recognizing that they have to make some adaptations as individuals to reap the benefits offered by membership of the group.

David has authored a model of management to which he gives the title Management In A Field Of Tensions. There’s a cyclical element in how the tensions play out, sometimes favoring what he calls the soft humanistic side of management, where we Austrians tend to live, and sometimes demanding a shift to the hard scientific side of planning and data and goal setting. Both sides have to live together. The tension is never resolved.

We provide the graphic depiction of David’s Management In A Field Of Tensions Model, and he’ll refer to it during the podcast. So if you’d like to retrieve it from the internet, as you are listening, you can do so at [mises.org/e4epod pod or at hunterhastings.com.

David K. Hurst is a prominent speaker writer and management educator. But mostly, he’s a business guy. He was executive vice president of a large North American industrial distributor with over 1 billion dollars in sales, employing 1600 people, and was part of the senior management team that saved the organization from bankruptcy during a severe business recession, and turned it to profitability and growth. He has an MBA in finance and a BA in psychology, and he serves as adjunct professor at the university of Regina, his graduate school of business.

He’s a Harvard business review author and a contributing editor to the business magazine strategy plus business.

David, welcome back to Economics for Entrepreneurs.

David Hurst

Thank you so much, Hunter. Very good to be here again.

Hunter Hastings

It’s good to have you back. We had a lot of very high praise for the recent podcast that we produced together. And one of the reasons to continue that conversation among the many is that we had an inquiry from one of our listeners on the subject of managing a diverse set of employees. This was in a medium sized business, but the mix of employees included blue collar. If that’s still a term for people working on the frontline and white collar people and marketing and other areas, executives doing strategy and planning and so on. And the question is about the different considerations that arise when you’re managing and trying to motivate that kind of a very diverse group.

And that made me think of the model you call Managing In A Field Of Tensions. I’d like you to describe the model, why you use the term “the field of tensions”.

 

David Hurst

 

Oh, well, thanks so much, Hunter. Please understand that this model is the most recent station I’ve reached on a journey. And the journey began with my experience nearly 40 years ago in a leveraged buyout that went spectacularly wrong. We were taken over by a leveraged buyout artist and took on so much debt that we went insolvent, but not bankrupt because we owed the bank so much money. They couldn’t actually call the loan. And over the next four years, we learned more about managing than I had learned in a lifetime, and we broke through a mirror to get behind the looking glass. You might say to a topsy-turvy world where if you were a weak, you were strong. If you knew a lot, you are actually ignorant and you had to learn. And that experience set me on an intellectual journey, trying to understand this amazing experience, which was very successful. We came out of the mess after four years with the company, totally refinanced with new shareholders and a completely revitalized management group.

And I set out thinking about how this has happened. I wrote an article based on Daoist philosophy, yin yang philosophy, that got published in the Harvard Business Review. It was called Boxes & Bubbles And Effective Management. And from there I got into ecology, and understanding how forests have to burn to renew, or get attacked by insects in order to renew. That destruction is part of creation. And from there, I got into more sophisticated theories, complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, and more recent attempts to make sense of these complex phenomenon that we humans are, and problems we face. So this is a very high level abstraction. And I went up the ladder because frankly, the academics and the business schools have failed to do this. We talked a bit about the flaws in business school education last time, and how they got stuck in a 1950s conception of what science was about and tried to turn management into a management science in that mode.

And that has been a spectacular failure. At least as far as practitioners are concerned. For the academics, of course, it’s led to a boom in academic journals where they write for each other. But most of their articles, frankly, are unintelligible to practicing managers.

So let’s talk about Management In A Field of Tensions. The whole notion is that we’re not born static, awaiting motivation. I try not to use the word motivate anymore. The fact is we are born alive and struggling. We are motivated as part of being alive and we are continually living with two major concerns. The one on the right-hand side of the diagram is: what do I need and how do I get it? I need food. I need water. And so on. And on the left of the diagram are what I’ve called existential concerns, which is all about my identity and the identity of the group I belong to. Who are we? Why do we matter?

And this tension is absolutely critical. There’s continual tension between these two kinds of requirements, which cannot be reduced to each other. This immediately, of course, crushes the assumptions of neoclassical economics, which is always, always about a hierarchy of needs and that people can order their preferences. And they’re stable. Obviously, this kind of assumption makes no sense in the field of tension.

My understanding about the tension is very close to where the Austrian economists are coming from. And certainly where Friedrich Hayek, who has really been my guide in this area, was coming from. He saw the tensions between the hard scientific approach of treating people as objects to be motivated because objects are static and they need motivation; and, on the other hand, people as subjects, people as ends in themselves, people to be cultivated and grown, to find their own identity, meet their own potential, to fulfill their mission of why are they here in space and time for this brief period of our lives.

It’s all about finding meaning, if you will. It’s very much based on values and story and narrative. That’s how we make sense of who we are. It’s the story we tell about ourselves and when great crises happen – like the pandemic, or a disruption in a relationship. The shock is to your narrative. It’s to your story. That the person you thought you were is no longer viable. And you’re going to have to find another story, another identity, a story that embraces a crisis and sees it as an opportunity for renewal and as an opportunity for continual growth. And, and so the infinity loop with its long slow solid line on the front and the rapid dotted line on the back is this concept of an ecological balance between these tensions.

Everybody talks about balance, but nobody really elaborates on what it means, because we immediately think of a teeter totter, or a Newtonian scale. One goes up, the other goes down. This framework is a different kind of balance. It suggests an ecological balance of long periods of growth and development on the front interspersed with moments of crisis. When everything comes to a screeching halt, and you are thrown back into chaos to find your way up the backloop to a new identity, to a new story, a new narrative. And of course, as a species, that’s where we are at the moment with this pandemic, that all the comfortable assumptions of how we could continue growing without problems, that all our comfortable, hard, scientific assumptions, our measurements of prosperity through gross domestic product and an increase in wages, all this came to a screeching halt. And all of a sudden nature says, “not so quick, you’ve disturbed the equilibrium”. You’ve got too close to the wild areas where these viruses live and here they come to remind you that nature bats last.

And so this crisis is timely, and it gets your attention. It’s not a question of thinking our way into better ways of action. As we discussed last time, we are actually acting our way into better ways of thinking. Initially, we had to follow the most successful countries, who took draconian top down diktats to close the economy down, to stop the community, essentially, from functioning. And now we’re opening up on an experimental basis and we’re seeing what works better. Do masks work?  They work initially. We thought they didn’t. Now we think they do. Maybe there’s a vaccine and everything will go back to where it was before, but that doesn’t seem extremely likely. There’s going to be something, but whether it’s a hundred percent effective and whether it’s just one shot we don’t know. And, of course, there are other bugs hanging around. And so, once again, our minds are concentrating wonderfully and we are on the, backloop headed up towards a new concept of who we are as humans. We are living in a world that is alive and changing all the time and reacts and responds to all efforts to live in it.

Hunter Hastings

Let me step down one level in the abstraction, David. I’d love to talk about people as ends versus people as means as a way for managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners, to think about the challenge of managing their organizations. Let’s just look at that one particular element of your model.

David Hurst

Well, once again, we have to contrast it with where we are at the moment or have been historically. In general and on average business -particularly in America  – has looked at people as means. They are means to production. We’ve looked at them through an economic lens as human resources, just like material resources and financial resources. They are a means to our ends. And our ends are given by outside: it’s maximize shareholder value, or that’s what it has been; now maybe it’s stakeholder value, which is the new mantra. But that’s the way, historically, we have looked at people. Now at this time, once again, in the crisis, we’re reminded that people have another requirement, which is that they may work for money, but they live for story. And if we look at what has happened politically, and the support that the current president has had, it’s basically from people who lost their story, who lost have lost their identity of who they were.

As I mentioned last time, there were three generations in the furniture industry around High Point, North Carolina. You knew who you were, you had a stable job, you had a stable role, and that was your identity. And when those jobs went to China, yes, the consumers got a better deal; they got cheaper furniture. But the people round High Point, North Carolina lost their story of who they are. The same in the steel industry, in Ohio, and in all the other industries, which were affected by these moves. And it’s not just the move to China, of course,  it’s mainly a consequence of high technology. I know in the steel industry today , we need one tenth of the workers that we needed when I was in the steel industry,40,  50 years ago. It really has changed dramatically, but whether it’s the advance of technology or actual movements on the world stage, a whole group of people have lost their story.

And as I say, we may work for money, but we live for story. And if we lose our story, if we lose our sense of who we are, we become suicidal, or we become addicted, and we will do anything and support anyone who says, I’ll give you your story back. I’ll bring you back to the way we were. Of course, it may be an illusion, but it’s extremely powerful, extremely powerful. And so we can see this playing out on the political stage.

And I think the same thing is playing out at, at the business level. I’m thinking of a business like Costco. Costco’s business model is an innovation so on, but I don’t see many people copying it. What is difficult to copy in the Costco model is the way they treat their people. And the way when you go into a Costco store, the people are concerned. They care about you. When you ask them, “Where would I find this?”, they will put their work aside and say, you know, let me show you. I would say that’s almost impossible to duplicate. It’s very difficult to replicate. I can copy their business model, but I can’t copy that their people are treated as ends in themselves.

So this is a new way of thinking: of people as ends as well as people as means. And obviously it’s a tension. Sometimes you have to treat them as means. If you’re in a cash crunch and you need to cut costs, you may well need to reduce the workforce in some way. Now there are various ways of doing it. And I won’t go into those at the moment, but there’s no doubt that’s you need a faster response to a fast breaking crisis, that may include workforce reduction.

Hunter Hastings

Does the principle of treating people as ends apply to all levels in an organization, the frontline employees, the middle management, the executives? Everybody lives by story. And we can motivate…….. I shouldn’t use that word. We can give them a good working opportunity to tell their story, and opportunities to live their story.

David Hurst

Absolutely. This model applies at many different levels. The epitome of systems thinking is that it is a multi-level perspective. And the notion is that you are trying to create a space at every level in your organization where there’s room for people to live and embellish and create their story, find their identity. At the upper levels, of course, it’s a bigger space, but at the lower levels, it’ll be a smaller space and time. But nevertheless, it’s unique to them because only they have that fine-grained perspective.

Hunter Hastings

The Costco example would be like that: I am able in my own space to create a one-on-one relationship with that customer, who asks me a question and I take them and treat them in an individual fashion and thus express myself.

David Hurst

Absolutely. And that somebody at the end of the day, or the end of the week, or the end of the month, whatever the time period is, will come to see to me and say, what are you hearing on the shop floor? What are you hearing from the customers? And they’ll say, well, they were really upset when we removed this product and replaced it with that, or they’d really miss this one that we’ve discontinued. You know, once again, each perspective is unique. To go back to the steel distribution business, which is where most of my experience was, our steel was not different from anybody else’s frankly. The only way we can make decent margins in what the economists call a commodity business, is to add knowledge to it. How do you add knowledge to it? Well, it’s a very fine grained kind of knowledge.

Last time I talked about the truck drivers and their ability, when they deliver our steel to our customers, to assess how busy the customers are, whether our competitors’ trucks are in their yard, what products they’re carrying, and also to develop a relationship with the OD boss. So we can get our steel taken off before anybody else. Now that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’ve got all your truck drivers working in this space, which we’ve created for them, when they come back from their drive, that they started at four in the morning, and so they’re going to finish by noon at the latest, but when they come back, they will gather around and maybe somebody higher up the chain will come into the coffee room or whatever it is and say, okay, folks, what’s happening? And a one truck driver will say, well, I saw a new truck, a competitive truck there.

And another one will say, yeah, I saw it too in my customers. And you’ve got an early warning system that’s going to appear long before it shows up in any data, because it’s at the fine grained level. And now your truck driver is no longer a means to an end, just a steerer of a truck, but actually an intelligence gathering person who is alive to what’s going on around them, looking for clues. And they are part of the big story. So this is where we have to  go with their stories. What’s their story? And, and by the same token, ask yourself, what’s the story that reflects this organization at its best? And typically we’ll find it is a fine grained story. It’s a story about the time we screwed up on delivery and the heroic efforts of our truck driver or a salesperson desk clerk to, to remedy it. It’s the lengths they went to at FedEx to deliver a parcel.

I used to tell a story to illustrate the value that the packages have to get through at all costs. And there was somebody, very junior, on their own initiative, organized a helicopter to deliver this key package. And this story was FedEx at its best. And every organization has those good stories. They also have, of course, stories about us at our worst, and you can get those stories of horror shows and errors, and those can be taken apart and say, well, what went wrong here? Or when something excellent takes place, how do we replicate those conditions all over the place?

Hunter Hastings

Can you articulate some practical advice out of that, David, for our business owners and managers?  How do we get that started? How do we get that narrative started? I know a little bit about the history of Costco and Jim Senegal who created the culture, if you like, but just how do you do that?

David Hurst

Well, I think the approaches are as varied as the firms. Depending on your context, there’s got to be a different starting point. You know, when you ask the management consultants to give us examples of firms that have changed, they very rarely are able to do that. So for instance, some people will talk about W. L. Gore and Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex, and their amazing culture and their flat organization. They have what they call a lattice network as a way of organizing and they have something  they call “hierarchy on demand”, where there isn’t a traditional hierarchical structure, but rather a network of continual conversations going on. Every now and then they need an executive decision and they will….. I think of it as a fishing net, that’s lying flat on the ground…..when they need an executive decision, they just pick up the point in the net and just lift it a bit.

And there you’ve got a pyramid, a hierarchy, and you make an executive decision, and then you let the net go and it’s flat back on the ground again. So that, by keeping it flat, the hierarchy’s there, but it’s in the background. So it’s this fine grained relationship where the egalitarian network is in the front and the hierarchy is there at the back. It doesn’t go away. And once again, this is the tension between a right-hand structured, hard scientific, hierarchical point of view, and the left hand side where it is flat and egalitarian and everybody has an equal say and point of view. It has to start at the top. The stories they tell of firms like W.L. Gore and Associates, these are invariably firms that start off like Jim Senegal did at Costco. There is a charismatic founder who really believes in this different model.

Bill Gore, who founded W.L. Gore & Associates had worked in DuPont for many years. He noticed that the best conversations in DuPont took place in the carpools. They used to drive to work together. Obviously, this is back in the, in the forties and fifties, it’s a far cry from where we are today. But he said, why can’t we reproduce the atmosphere of the carpool, where a bunch of colleagues go in together and they have great discussions in the car, and then they get to work. And now you’re in the DuPont hierarchy and they can’t talk to each other. And there’s boxes and structures and vice presidents and assistant vice presidents. When DuPont came up with the chemical, the polyethylene compound that led to Gore-Tex, DuPont decided it was not a scalable product that they were interested in because they wanted products at very large scale. Bill Gore said, I’ll take it.

And he took it and ran his organization the way it always wants to run: that’s an organization that is flat. And so you get these wonderful stories and people go to look at W.L. Gore & Associates and say, my, this is amazing. But very few, in fact, I don’t know of any, try to emulate it because you’re looking at something that’s being cultivated and grown and you can’t design and build it. And that’s of course, exactly what Friedrich Hayek said. He said, just because an organization or an institution serves human purposes in a particular fine way, doesn’t mean it was designed. In fact, he says they emerged through the interactions of millions of humans, certainly scores and hundreds and thousands of humans. And don’t imagine that you can then go ahead and design it. And of course that was the theme of The Fatal Conceit: the conceit that we can design, we can make the world anew in Thomas Paine’s favorite quote, which, you know, Ronald Reagan himself was not beyond quoting.

But no, we can’t make it anew. We can create the conditions in which changes will take place, desirable changes that will take place. But essentially what you’re creating is conditions for emergence. And so we’re back into the gardener again. So to start, it has to come, I think from the top.

In fact, the first question you ask yourself is where is this happening already? Because some organizations, they might have made a good start. I can remember, I was dealing with a major multi-national and I said, “Where else are you already seeing this kind of behavior, which you want, this wonderful weave between the hard and the soft?” And they said, well, if we think really hard it’s probably our whole Waialea branch. And I said, what is it that makes the Hawaii branch so special? And they said, well, it’s because it’s a small branch and it’s only got one guy at the top. And so this person makes the trade-offs and we use them together.

If you come into our larger branches, you find that we split the responsibilities between two different people, and they often turn out to be competitive with each other. And so instead of cooperation within the organization, you start to get competition; hierarchy creates competition. It creates elites. It creates status differences, and we know how humans behave under those conditions. They will be competitive and strive for status.

In my own experience, going into a steel service center, which we had acquired, it was in Wisconsin actually. And we had acquired it from a single owner. It was a private company and he was an autocrat not to put too fine a point on it. And I can remember going to one of the first company-wide meetings I’d ever had. It was a dinner. There was a presentation from us, the new owners, and there was an executive table. And I was expected, as the incoming representative of the new owners, to sit at that executive table. And after about 10 minutes, I said, I don’t want to sit here. I’m going to go sit with the other folks, and I sat with the drivers who, of course, had all grouped themselves at one table. And then I sat with the sales folks who were at  another table, and I moved around the room. And that simple action speaks volumes. Once again, it’s behavior. Not the language. It’s all about trying. And it’s a process. It’s a journey you start wherever you are. The best place to start is, is where you’re at. And in fact, there’s no other place you can start from is where you’re at. What am I going to do differently? That’s going to send a different message tomorrow. And my going up with the truck drivers sends a message. The truck driver comes back and he says to his buddies, you know, that executive VP from Canada, he’s okay, he’s human just like me. And that’s it. It’s this shared human quality that we’re all struggling, that we’re all trying to make sense of our lives and ourselves at different levels in our different spaces and times. And it’s that recognition, which is absolutely key, the realization of our shared humanity. If you will, for lack of a better word,

Hunter Hastings

You have said, David, that smaller and private entrepreneurial firms may have an advantage. They can stay closer to that humanistic side of the model. And it’s the big public corporations that tend to be dragged to the hard scientific side. Is that right? Do you think there is an advantage for the smaller businesses?

David Hurst

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right, Hunter. In the front loop, that solid line. And now I’m talking about application at the corporate level. Eventually they come up with a formula, which allows them to scale. Everybody’s interested in scaling and scaling requires specialization. It requires hierarchy. It requires structure. And with that comes all the issues of competition and status and power and drags you inexorably towards the right hand side, which was, if you remember in the model that we talked about last time, where they are in the power trap. Going public for me is a critical catalyst for this. There is some evidence that small privately owned companies have several advantages. They’re frugal in good times and bad, they’re always careful with the cash. They have a very high bar for capital expenditure.

They’re not necessarily driven by investment metrics and so on. They try to not carry too much debt because debt gives the bankers power and they don’t want that. They make fewer and smaller acquisitions. So they’re not betting the farm.

Look at some of the acquisitions that Hewlett Packard made. There was one firm they paid $11 billion for and ended up writing off $10 billion within two years. I mean, just stunning, a stunningly bad fit.

So smaller companies tend to make fewer, smaller acquisitions. They also show a surprising level of diversity, because on the humanistic side, on the left-hand side, of course, it’s all about people. They tend to be more international and they’re better at retaining the talent inside. They discourage careerism. Once you get into a large company and you have young people coming in, as I was coming out of Chicago school of business in, in 1972, I was looking for a career path. I was looking for somebody who says, look, we’ll develop you, you’re going to have two years in this job, and then if you’re successful, you can move on and then you’re going to get a promotion. And that keeps repeating as you go on. I must confess, I found it very, very attractive. But for the corporation trying to become more humanistic, this is not good because it’s highly disruptive of the community. And it creates an incentive structure for individual managers to come in, look good for two years and then go off to their promotion, leaving their successor with a disaster.

I saw this, particularly in Canada with what we call our branch plant economy. We had branch plants of corporations like Sunbeam and all these Fortune 500 firms. And they would have American managers typically, and sometimes Canadians, but on two year cycles running through the plants. And, of course their job was to look good for two years. So they get that next promotion and then away they go. And of course, when you’re running something on a perpetual short term focus like that, you’re going to get into trouble because you’re going to run the plant and equipment and the people into the ground. And that’s what we found: that we had genius and then followed by an idiot and then another genius followed by another idiot. And of course the geniuses were the ones who were picking up pieces that the previous unfortunate had inherited from the previous genius and then we saw there was a well-defined cycle. And, and once again, you get into this, in these large corporations, large public corporations, where there’s an implicit contract with its management, that we will give you a career path and you can rise to the top and earn the fabulous sums that CEO’s earn these days. And so it’s very difficult to get out of that kind of cycle.

Hunter Hastings

So is it possible for our entrepreneurs, David, to stay entirely on the soft humanistic side of the model? Their careers would be to start a business and manage it for 40 years and I’m very successful. Can they stay on that side? Or are they always going to be fighting the tensions that drag them over to the scientific side?

David Hurst

It’s a dance. All I’m saying is that as you grow in scale, you are increasingly adding hierarchy. I’m not sure what the threshold number is – about 150 people in one location. 150 people in one location, but preferably a single level. Because as soon as you’ve got vertical levels, it creates communication differences. But 150 people in one location on the same level you can manage personally, you can know everybody individually, you can exchange stories. You can get your arms around it. As soon as you get bigger than that, you’re going to have to introduce some structure, some specialization, some hierarchy. And if you’re growing really fast, you’ll start hiring people for their technical ability. Not because their mindset – to use the popular word – necessarily fits in with your organization, because it’s a technical problem.

You need technical experts and that’ll solve your technical problems, but it moves you a little bit to the right. And then you need a head office specialization because we didn’t have purchase orders before, but now we’re going to have purchase orders. We didn’t have an HR department before, but now we need HR to, to handle the number of volume of people that we’re hiring and dealing with every day. And so we need a few people in charge of that. So before, you know it, you’ve got 15 vice presidents and they’re each structuring their own turf, and you’ve got to have battles and turf wars, and you move further and further to the right. And if the growth continues, you continue to struggle. You’re going to need more specialization and more levels of hierarchy. And so scale is the major dimension on the vertical axis of the ecocycle at the ecological level.

So it’s always a dance. Even as a small 10 person organization. You need some structure. You need to control the cash. You need to follow up and make sure you’re getting paid by your customers. There’s credit control, and so on. So it’s always a tension between the two sides, but it’s much easier if you start off on the left and then get pulled to the right, rather than dealing with an existing organization, which is already on the hard scientific side, in the power trap, and trying to bring it back to the left. That’s extremely difficult.

Hunter Hastings

One, one last question about the model David. On the soft humanistic side, you have the word judgment and we Austrians have a special relationship with that word “judgment” in the context of entrepreneurship. We think that’s what entrepreneurs do. And we apply it in this sense: in the face of uncertainty where you don’t know what’s going to happen, where you don’t have all the knowledge, you nevertheless, make a decision, and then you act, and then you deal with the results of that action. So we see judgment as part of the engine of the entrepreneurial economy. Is that the way you are using it?

David Hurst

Absolutely. There was an interesting article, from the Drucker Forum annual conference in Vienna – I can give you references for your listeners – on what Aristotle called phronesis. It’s quite obviously a Greek word: P H R O N E S I S. And it means practical wisdom. It is a grounded form of judgment. It’s the kind of, decision-making you default to, when you don’t have the data, when you can’t make the calculations, when you have to make the best decision based on your experience and what you can glean from the people involved with the situation. And that’s exactly what it says. Judgment is the exercising of a Phronesis. And it’s used in times of surprise, uncertainty and conflicting values.

When, there’s trade off or compromises that have to be integrated in some way. And so it’s precisely for those conditions, surprise and uncertainty and conflicting values. That’s almost the definition of the entrepreneur, right? And yes, that’s where judgment comes into its own. And it’s contrasted on the right-hand side with calculation. Calculation says, “we’ve got the data”. And once again, getting back to what Friedrich Hayek said: you never have the data. There’s never enough data. You might be able to come up with some general equations, which give you an idea of the overall economy, but you can never get the data needed to solve the myriad fine grain  equations. And of course in the entrepreneurial world, that’s even truer. I mean, the data never comes or when it does, it’s five years late.

I mentioned last time, I think, the tale of the two stories of how Honda got 50% of the North American motorcycle market. And the one story is from the people who were there at the time, and they tell a story of accident, surprise, and uncertainty, conflicting values, and judgment, which allowed them to be successful. And the other story is from the Boston Consulting Group. And it’s all about traveling down the learning curve, and it’s all very elegant. It’s all very plausible. But there wasn’t any data, the data to make those learning curve decisions was only available five years after they got 50% of the market. So the data is never there. And if it is there, it’s not on time, it’ retrospective.

Peter Drucker’s favorite philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, said we live life forwards, but we remember it backwards. And to remember it backwards is too abstract is to categorize. To live life forward is to be on the ground in the moment, in that time. And so lessons abstracted from looking backward can’t be applied right here right now, or by going from abstract to concrete. It won’t tell you what to do because it’s you in this unique moment, which has never happened before. I say to managers, each of you is in a unique situation, your organization is unique and that’s why it needs judgment. You can get some ideas from others, but they will never tell you what to do. They will just increase your experience. Judgment is based on experience.

Hunter Hastings

I’m going to wrap it up there just for time reasons, but thank you very much. We will exhibit this Management In The field Of Tensions model so that people can follow along as they listen. Any readings you can send me I’ll link to them in the Key Takeaways that we publish each week. And then next time I will try and devise a good discussion guide around Hayek and sensory order and emergence as it might be applied in complexity theory and business. I’ll try to make it practical. Because I know you’re becoming a Hayekian as you advance through your research,

David Hurst

Well, thank you, Hunter. There’s one thing that we did discuss possibly mentioning was a quote, a quote from the Dao Te Ching to end it. It goes like this.

Learn from the people

Plan with the people.

Begin with what they have.

Build on what they know of the best leaders.

When that task is accomplished, the people all remark, we have done it ourselves.

Beautiful. I can’t think of a higher praise for an effective entrepreneur – to leave his people with the feeling we have done it ourselves.

Hunter Hastings

David, thank you. You always leave us with an awful lot to think about and to act upon it and we appreciate it very much. Thank you.

David Hurst

It’s a great pleasure Hunter. Thank you so much for your invitation.

 

Austrian School Versus Business School: Dr. Per Bylund Compares The Insights Available To Entrepreneurs.

Podcast transcript. Sept 29, 2020

Dr. Per Bylund compares the insight of the Austrian school of economics with the models and theories and strategic frameworks that come from business schools.

Hunter Hastings:

Per, welcome back to economics for entrepreneurs, it’s always great to have you here. We’re continuing our series on business school fallacies. We started with David Hurst a couple of weeks ago, and we’re advancing a little bit further. And as I emphasized, we’re not trying to be disrespectful to business schools. We’re trying to point out that there may be some better thinking that’s more helpful in practical terms for businesspeople and especially entrepreneurs – more applicable is the term that you use, I think, and then you raise the question of the applicability of business school teachings and strategies. You talked about their simplistic models and fixed boundaries for industries and static thinking and various fallacies.

But before we go there, you said something interesting to me, which was that business schools may be struggling with an existential problem. So that sounds like a good place to start.

Per Bylund:

Well, it’s absolutely a good place to start. Because if you don’t have an existence or reason to exist, then obviously you have a huge problem. I think the problem is sort of historical: that the business schools were started as a practice oriented schools where you learn a trade. But the gold standard in academia is really research. And you can’t really do research on practice because research is supposed to lead to theory that explains something If you’re just doing practice and that’s sort of a huge problem. So what business schools did was take the sort of real scholarship disciplines and their theories and apply them. To help future managers. I guess the best example would be the MBA program where you’re trying to educate next generation of managers for big corporations. What they’re doing is basically taking economics and sociology and psychology and things like that, and developing models and rules of thumb that you can use when you become a manager. I mean, this is a little problematic as many of these are pretty static in how they view the world; their models and theories are very static. And we’ve talked many times about economics, how mainstream economics is basically about equilibrium. if you try to run a business based off of equilibrium, then obviously you have a huge problem on your hands because you’re not going to experience any equilibrium when you’re running a business.

Hunter Hastings:

In fact, a dynamic business is the goal, rather than equilibrium, right? Always changing, always responding to the marketplace.

Per Bylund:

Exactly. Either you respond to the changes that happen that are not inside your business, or you try to bring about changes from which you can benefit that are good for your business. So everything is about change. Whereas the business school theories tend to be about the opposite. They’re just static.

Hunter Hastings:

Well, let’s go from there to some of the specifics that you had mentioned. We talked about business school models, and I think the implication is that you’ve called them simplistic, or at least some of them. I know there are plenty of them. I did some research on models and strategic frameworks and came up with hundreds of them that the business schools teach. So there’s no shortage of them, but are they simplistic because of this attempt to emulate equilibrium?

Per Bylund:

In a sense, yes. I mean, a model is supposed to be a simplification, so that’s not really a problem in itself. It is a problem when you have such far reaching assumptions, that change how you see the world. And especially if you do not apply these models with a demand dynamic mindset. So the five forces model is one of those really famous models, where you look at your strategic positioning, how you position your business with respect to suppliers and customers and substitutes, and things like that. So you identify those five stakeholder groups, and you’re assuming that they are what they are, and then you can quickly and easily define where they are. And then on that map that you’ve created, you’re supposed to find the best position for your business. And of course, this is exactly the opposite of this dynamic world that businesses usually are in.

It’s based on some assumption about being static and these stakeholders not changing their positions and not reacting to you and so forth; but of course they are reacting. And if there is a gap, someone else will attempt to fill that gap. And maybe they’re already in the process of doing so. So focusing too much on the model will actually cause problems for you. It’s potentially a good rule of thumb to understand what is going on and to identify the different components of the dynamism of the market. But it’s not a model to simply apply in real business.  Doing so will cause problems.

Hunter Hastings:

Our Austrian school applications are not against models, per se. We have our own Austrian business model, which is a framework. It’s not something to follow mechanically, but the fourth element of the Austrian business model, we call value agility, which is what you just said. You’re constantly reacting. You’re constantly offering new value propositions to the marketplace. You’re reading the effects, it’s dynamic, ongoing. It never stops. And that I think is our point of view about the market, as opposed to the static components of five forces.

Per Bylund:

Exactly. It’s about finding how you can contribute in that ongoing market process and how you can find a way to contribute value and facilitate a value for consumers. That’s what you do as an entrepreneur. And that’s what you’re supposed to do as a business as well. It’s not really about positioning yourself with respect to these stakeholders already in the market, but it’s about creating value for consumers.

Hunter Hastings:

A specific piece of terminology used was strategy. And you had said at one point in time that, at business school, the strategy tends to be an upside down version of bad economics

Per Bylund:

It’s really based off of the basic economic model of perfect competition where no business really makes any economic profit because everything is efficient and there are no wrinkles. There are no additional costs. There is nothing undiscovered. So you know everything, and in that situation, you sort of maximize the uses of all the resources available. This is of course not where you want to be as a business. So a strategy is, in a sense, a way to figure out how to create inefficiencies. So, within the general equilibrium, there is no profit, but as a business you want to make profits, which means you have to somehow figure out how to insert or to add inefficiencies to that system. So that’s what I mean by having an upside down view:  that you’re using the same models as classical economics in the beginning where supply and demand and everything else is in equilibrium.

Per Bylund:

But then you’re trying to figure out how to achieve differentiation through different means, through using branding and patents and what not else. You’re trying to figure out how to make the market inefficient. And then you capture the profit that is available because the market is inefficient. And this, of course, a rather ridiculous way of viewing the economy and the market. Because as we know, as Austrians, it is first of all, a process. It is not in equilibrium ever. And then causing inefficiencies to create profit. You have, first of all, completely excluded the consumer who is not part of your equation at all, but instead it’s about breaking free from the competition. And again, positioning yourself with respect to what they are doing and make sure to exist under the, the equilibrium that by assumption was there. And because you create this inefficiency, you can capture the profits if you have positioned yourself correctly. Whereas what we would teach is that the economy is constantly in movement. It’s constantly in flux. And your task as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, is to figure out how to serve consumers the best way possible. You can always create more value. So it’s not about inefficiencies. It’s really about efficiency. It’s about creating more value with whatever resource are available. So in a sense, business schools go in exactly the wrong direction because their starting point as equilibrium, which is a flawed assumption.

Hunter Hastings:

Then you also use another interesting piece of terminology. You said sometimes the business schools think of value propositions as one way positioning. And we like to think of it more as, as co-creation of value or facilitation of value. Is that, is that part of the same distinction you’re making?

Per Bylund:

Business schools are talking about how businesses are positioning with only the market, trying to exploit whatever gaps there are, whatever opportunities there are already there, given consumers’ wants and needs. Whereas what we’re trying to figure out is how to better serve consumers. And these models are, very often, really about pushing your goods out, to as many as possible and beat the competition doing the same thing. So business school models are not really about the discovery of how to serve the consumer better, which could be a completely different product, a completely different way of doing things. Value is about the experience that the consumer expects from your offering and not about beating the competition necessarily.

Hunter Hastings:

Another example of that static thinking or an extension of it is this idea of industries that have boundaries. So business schools want entrepreneurs to think they’re competing within an industry, and they’ve got to arrange their efforts to compete within the boundaries of that industry. Whereas I hear you saying there’s no such thing as those boundaries; entrepreneurs shouldn’t even think about that.

Per Bylund:

Exactly. I mean, an industry, it seems like it’s an obvious thing. And we talk about, say the computer industry, or we talk about healthcare and things like that. And those are rules of thumb that we can use, but they’re usually based on the consumer goods already being offered. So when there’s an innovation, it’s usually by a business that is considered to be in an industry, but the innovation might not actually be in that industry. And that innovation might create something completely new, like the smartphone or the two-in-one Microsoft Surface kind of thing, to compete with laptops. And the point is really that the industry doesn’t matter all that much. It might matter in terms of organizing and having like a trade show or a trade organization or an association with others doing similar things are, but those are all about mature markets where you have already found that these products seem to serve consumers in a certain way and about firms who produce them already, and where all the competitors are trying to cut costs and position themselves in a sense, whereas this is not really what is going on at all.

Entrepreneurs are trying to serve consumers in a new way. So they are not limited to a specific industry. They can maybe span several industries, or they can break completely new ground and disrupt existing industries, just like Uber did with taxi-cab companies. And at the end of the day, they’re really competing for consumers’ dollars. So if they’re offering something that consumers consider to be very valuable, they are out-competing businesses who are not even in the same industry, but can be in an adjacent industry, because all businesses are always competing for consumers’ dollars. They’re not competing for who is going to produce the best widgets that this consumer is going to buy.

No, the consumer’s decision is: will I buy anything at all? Does this product satisfy my wants? Does it provide me with enough value for my hard earned money? Or can I get more value elsewhere? Or do I think that maybe I can get more value for my dollars if I save them and buy something tomorrow or a year from now instead. And it’s in this situation with the consumers that the sort of calculus of value versus cost X goes into the exchange, where the entrepreneur positions him or herself as providing value, facilitating value for the consumer. If you do that in a very good way, and the consumer finds no better way of satisfying their wants, then you get to sell to them That means you have out-competed basically any other offering in the world. This consumer has chosen your offering, the experience that you promise to deliver over all other experiences that this consumer is considering as potential, other ways of spending their cash.

Hunter Hastings:

That kind of consumer centricity, I think leads us to some very penetrating ideas and, and good places for entrepreneurs to do their thinking. You’ve mentioned the word disrupt. I don’t like to use that word because it sounds kind of defensive – defensive of an industry or defensive of a market share. I think it came out of business school; the now late Creek Clayton Christensen had that theory in The Innovator’s Dilemma. But it’s like Schumpeter’s creative destruction: the destruction part is emphasized as opposed to the creative part. And I think you’re trying to emphasize the creative part. You have advanced the idea of entrepreneurs creating islands of specialization that can be joined to many different industries, and which don’t disrupt any of them; rather, they bring new creativity to them.

Per Bylund:

Well, exactly. It’s not really about whether you disrupt an industry that exists or not. It doesn’t really matter for Uber, or any ride sharing service, whether they disrupted taxicab companies or not, whether they changed that industry. That’s completely beside the point. What they’re trying to do is simply facilitate value for consumers and get paid for it and make ends meet. And we can discuss whether they do that. But, but I mean, they’re trying to supply a service and they’re trying to capture some of that value. Whether an industry that existed beforehand is disrupted or not, why would they care about that? It doesn’t really matter. Of course, they might consider it beforehand, before they enter, so that they do not compete head to head with very successful businesses. But other than that, it’s really about the consumer experience.

And that is why I emphasize the Islands of specialization that you mentioned. It’s really about finding a new way of doing something or finding new things to do that are of great, great value or greater value for consumers. It doesn’t really matter what other businesses are doing. Your only role as an entrepreneur is to provide more value, to facilitate more value for consumers. And if you can do that, then it doesn’t really matter what other businesses are already doing. So in that sense, disruption is a necessary part of what you’re doing; if you’re successful, you are disrupting the other producers. But what you’re really doing is it’s creating a new way of satisfying consumers. And we can call it creative destruction; or maybe creative replacement would be better – you’re sort of replacing businesses that are already out there and supplying consumers with goods and services, but then you have a different and better idea.

And you execute it better. So you provide consumers with greater value or facilitate greater value for the consumers. And then of course they will choose you over alternatives. And if enough consumers do that, then there is no space really for the incumbent. So they will go out of business or they will choose to close their doors or renew themselves or whatever it is that they might do in order to respond, but they’re not creating enough value in the marketplace. So they shouldn’t be there using resources that are precious that we could use in other ways to potentially provide more value to consumers.

Hunter Hastings:

Yes. Creative advancement or creative improvement rather than creative disruption or destruction. But there is one more foundational premise, Per, that underlies all of this, I think, from an Austrian economic standpoint. That is our focus on and understanding of entrepreneurship; the role of entrepreneurship in this dynamism. Entrepreneurs don’t exist to invade or destroy or disrupt industries. They exist to create new products, services, and solutions that consumers want, as you just explained. So do the business schools misunderstand entrepreneurship, or you call some of their models, entrepreneur-less. How do they, how do they get that wrong?

Per Bylund:

If entrepreneur-less is not a word, then I would like to coin it. I think it captures quite a bit of what is going on in business school thinking. And, in truth, all of economics is in a sense, entrepreneur-less. Entrepreneurship has become a rather fast growing field in business schools over the past few decades. And I think that is that it’s appropriate and that’s proper. I think historically, and sort of traditionally in business schools, it started with an application of economics and psychology on to businesses. And this, of course, this was, as we talked about before, starting at the wrong end. And then if you go through the sort of sociology of the departments and disciplines, applying economics and psychology became management and the study of management, I mean, it started with Taylor’s scientific management where you timed people’s different movements and you calculated how many, how many times they should be able to squat down and lift up this little thing on the factory floor, things like that.

And then management strategy was created and sort of was an offshoot from management where they realized that it was not simply about managing the resources inside the business, but it was also the strategic decision making and positioning your business with respect to other businesses, but still talking about the existing businesses only, and on this sort of business landscape And then entrepreneurship became sort of an offshoot from strategy. So it’s, it’s sort of the most recent title for a discipline in the business school. But strategy scholars are not rarely a part of management departments and entrepreneurship scholars are part of this strategy group. And if there’s a strategy department, then usually a hundred percent of scholars are part of that department. And I’m fortunate to be at a university where entrepreneurship is its own department.

So we can, we can do actual entrepreneurship stuff, but we’re still sort of treated us as a younger sibling in a sense, whereas we, as Austrians of course would say, no, no, no, no, no, you can’t, you don’t have any market whatsoever unless you have entrepreneurship. And that’s at the very core. And I mean, we would also argue that an existing business is not going to last, unless it renews itself and uses entrepreneurship and attempts to meet consumers by providing them with even greater value in the near future. because you cannot, in an actual market, just sit back and, and sort of just let the profits flow to you because you have already established your position. That’s not how it ever works. That’s how people tend to think of it. How big business is assumed to have a lot of market power and things like that. But that market power is always temporary. If there is any at all. And these big businesses can always topple and crumble, as soon as there’s an entrepreneur with a different view who provides more value to consumers. Consumers are not loyal to a business just because they’re big. Consumers try to satisfy their own wants, and they have limited cash. So they will do us as much as they can with their cash, of course,

Hunter Hastings:

Business schools are running so-called incubators and simulations and entrepreneurship competitions. You see them publicized a lot. It seems like all the universities and business schools are doing it. What’s your point of view about those?

Per Bylund:

Well, there, there are, there are several different comments I could I have on this. In a sense, they’re good in terms of the education of the next generation of entrepreneurs, in the sense that they get to do hands-on things and try out what they’ve been taught in the classroom and things like that. So, so they, they get some, some sort of feedback and they get to implement their ideas. So that’s positive. On the other hand, it’s very structured and it’s based off of various strange ideas. Like incubators tend to be based on the idea of protectionism, where you have the idea that if, if a country just closes borders from competition and, and let their small and inefficient businesses grow big, then they can lower the trade barriers afterwards. And then those businesses can compete with other businesses.

Of course, this is complete nonsense, cause that’s not how you do it at all. What you’re doing is just propping up businesses that are wasting resources. And in a sense, incubators are the same in that you’re providing all these services to new businesses and sort of protecting them, shielding them to allow them to grow bigger so that they can then compete. But that’s not really how you do entrepreneurship. You, you need to start with value and if you can facilitate enough value, it doesn’t matter how small you are. So the problem very often is that they’re solving the wrong problems. The same thing is true with these business plan competitions, that it’s great to have a business plan and think through everything you’re doing before you actually do it, but that’s not a market test. Y9ou are pitching to what is typically an inexperienced panel.

So, so, so they have a lot of good thoughts and good presentation experience, but not how to run a business and how to be successful and things like that. But the real market test and what you really need to accomplish with your business plan is to get consumers and your customers to buy your products and to have the price right, and to have the value much higher than the price and maintain your production costs much lower than the price that you are able to charge. And that’s really after you have the business plan. So, I mean, in a sense, what I tell my students is that yeah, the business plan is great because you get to think through everything and make sure that you haven’t missed anything obvious, but in real life, there are really just two kinds of people who want to see your business plan.

One is the banker and the other is your professor. But no consumers or customers will ask you, Oh, well your product looks great. It looks great. And I’m willing to pay the price, but what does your business plan look like? I mean, they don’t care. They only care about the product and your offering and whether they trusted it and whether they can see you in a value in it. And the business plan is before you actually started anything. So it’s a way of satisfying your professor. And it’s a way of satisfying the bankers that you get a loan and can finance starting the business. It’s a way of thinking through everything too, but you haven’t done anything yet. That’s, that’s, that’s the problem.

Hunter Hastings:

The other thing that it strikes me about some of the business school, examples that they use is that they elevate the idea of the heroic and charismatic entrepreneur, as opposed to examining the value proposition to the consumer. And that seems to me a little bit like what you said, focusing on the, who of entrepreneurship, as opposed to the watt, which is the wrong end to look at.

Per Bylund:

Yes, it is. Because I mean, it’s not really about who you are, it’s about what you do and, and everything that you do in. In the marketplace is really it’s evaluated after the fact. It’s really the same when you get a job too, which I also tell my students that if you can provide value in your job, you will never lose your job and you will probably get promoted or getting a better job somewhere else or, or whatever it is. But you have to provide value. If you don’t do that, then, then you’re worthless. And you have not earned your salary and it doesn’t matter how long and hard you work on something. It’s the result that matters. And of course, part of the reason I tell them this is because I always have a number of students at the end of the semester, claiming that they should have a higher grade because they’ve worked so hard.

So I make sure to tell them in the beginning of the semester that it’s not how hard you work, it’s what you actually accomplish. But that’s also true in everything you do. If you are in the marketplace and you’re producing things, no one cares who you are. That might be a way of getting noticed to begin with. But what people want is to our offering, they don’t care who you are or what you might’ve done before, or how hard you worked or anything like that. They want to go get a product or a service and that’s it. That is what you’re offering. And if that takes you a lot of time and effort, you probably should do something else.

Hunter Hastings:

Well, let’s shift our focus to consumers. We’ve mentioned them from time to time in this discussion of entrepreneurship and business models. But I think you’re also implying that the business schools don’t get the right view of the consumers. You mentioned a problem of substitute products and services, and we talked about industry boundaries. Austrians always think of the dynamic viewpoint that consumers are continuously changing their preferences and their value scales. And it’s a real challenge, as you said, to respond to this. So do business schools tend to miss that about consumers, for example, they might talk about segments and markets from a consumer standpoint, as opposed to this constant change in value scales.

Per Bylund:

Yes. In a sense they do. They’re sort of assuming that things will not change much, at least not in the foreseeable future. So you can explore this and you can get some data on what things are actually like. And then you can work your way based off of that data. Whereas we, as Austrians, we know that consumers have value scales. Sure. But you ask them about something and they will always compare with their options. So if you offer them a product, they might say, Oh, I want this. I want this so bad. And I’m going to buy it. No matter the price. And then the next day they might say, well, I don’t want that. It’s not because they’re not satisfied, but because they’ve seen something else that’s more valuable to them. So they’re responding to, and making decisions and changing their value scales in response to the offerings that they see and the offerings that they understand.

Talking about the economy and the market in terms of segments and things like that, those are again important and potentially productive rules of thumb, but they’re not actually how it works, right? So you can do a market analysis and figure out exactly where people stand in terms of whatever industry you want to enter, say, and how consumers value different things. But then the next day, if there’s an entrepreneur they met with a new type of offering that makes these people change their minds, then your research was not worth anything at all because people respond to the new offering and changed their behavior. And they changed their value scales. They change practically everything in response to what they see and what they understand. Again, use the smartphone as an example: before the smartphone people behaved in a certain way and would use the phone in a certain way.

We texted and we called each other, but we didn’t do a whole lot more. And we had paper maps that we folded out and, and all these things, right. We had to stop all the time to look at the map, but we weren’t on a road trip with a smartphone, which completely changed our behavior. And we communicate a lot with other people through the smartphone. We shop through the smartphone while we’re doing other things. And if you try to position yourself with respect to flip phones, so just before the first iPhone, and you had a, a business plan for the next 10 years and you would be completely screwed. So it’s looking at the psychology, trying to figure out what wants people have and what are their most urgent needs and things like that. Any busines plan sort of misses the point from an entrepreneurship point of view. And from our perspective, it’s pretty much worthless information because if there is another product or another service or something like that, that is offered that these consumers respond to, and that these consumers really value, then whatever you found before is going to have changed just because the consumer has responded to this new product or service.

Hunter Hastings:

And that’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about the work that you and Dr. Mark Packard are doing on the idea of value as experience: that the value of something is experienced by the consumer, that it can’t be objective. It can’t be measured quantitatively. It’s emotional, it’s idiosyncratic, as you say, it’s always changing and they’re discovering the experience that can be had with an iPhone, the individual experience. And they’re the ones who are creating value in that sense. That that’s an exciting idea.

Per Bylund:

Yeah, exactly. And in a sense, it’s the entrepreneur’s job to provide the tools and sort of the vision for how to use the tools, but whether the consumer actually uses tools in that way, that’s out of your control. Anyway, you can’t determine that, but you can communicate how to use something, right? So we tend to think of entrepreneurs coming up with new ideas that simply replacing a previous product, but that’s not really what they’re doing. I mean, it’s easier to communicate to consumers that this is a new way of doing X, what you did before. Like Netflix is a new way of going to the theater without having to get into the car. You can do it from your own home. So it’s much more convenient or something like that, but it’s a different experience. So people still go to the theater to watch movies there, even though they have Netflix, and some people who really like movies, they do both a lot and others, they do neither.

And some do one, but not the other and those are different experiences. That is what we value as consumers. So of course we value them differently too. When we’re in different situations, we value them differently as well. So sometimes we can, if we’re having a first date, say, we might go to the movie theater with our girl or boy. And then if we have a fifth or 10th day, we might prefer Netflix instead because it gives you all these other opportunities that are not available in the movie theaters and whatever it is. But all of these things play into how you value things at different times in different situations. And, and it is the full experience, but contingent on what you want to get out of it, then where you are in your life right now.

Hunter Hastings:

Those ideas are central to what we’re trying to develop in this podcast and elsewhere, focusing on value. A business school might think about value as shareholder value or, or other form of value, but we are heavily focused on this value-as-experience. I think that’s truly distinctive.

Per Bylund:

I think one of the problems here for us in education and research is that value facilitation is very difficult to study. So even if you would not do it as research, but instead try to teach students to facilitate the value for others, but whether there is actually value or not, that remains to be seen because you cannot know, all you can do is try to figure out whether this is probable from your perspective, with everything you know about the economy, one thing and people, the other thing, and you combine those two sort of areas of knowledge. And you think that this is really a good opportunity, and this is, has good potential in being valuable to enough people. And then you do set out to make it happen, but you can’t really do anything else. The consumer is still sovereign. The consumer will still decide whether there is value or whether they can see value, whether they can create value with what they’re offering.

Hunter Hastings:

I think that’s related to something you said at Mises University earlier this year, that successful entrepreneurs are often Austrian and they don’t know it, or they’re subconsciously aware of it, perhaps.  I took that to mean that that’s if you attempt to create value and you learn whether or not you did, but you can’t know it in advance. And one of our previous guests, David Hurst, talked about that as acting one’s way to better thinking. Entrepreneurship is acting first and then you can step back and, and do the theory and the thinking. Can people be successful entrepreneurs by action? And that’s what you mean by saying they’re subconsciously Austrian.

Per Bylund:

Well, yes, what I meant was that if you have any experience and having exposed yourself to how the market works, then you will be much more Austrian than those who have not. I still think that in order to have a chance to be successful as an entrepreneur, you need to think through the logic of your offering and what type of person in what type of situation would value your offering and is able to create a lot of value out of it. So try to figure that out, of course, and, and not having an offering that is sort of contradictory or that doesn’t make any sense to you because that’s very hard to sell, to begin with. And it’s very hard for the consumer to make sense of. But I, I think I see with experienced entrepreneurs, how they tend to think about things differently and they tend to almost intuitively exclude certain ways of approaching the market.

And certain types of products may fit certain distribution channels even, and things like that, that they have learned through experience that this doesn’t really work, or this is really hard, or, and there’s a better way. And since Austrian economics uncovers how the market actually works and the mechanisms in the economy based off of consumer sovereignty and entrepreneurs, as those who serve consumers and provide them with offerings that consumers can accept or not, Austrian economics explains how it actually works. So experienced entrepreneurs will get pretty close to understanding the marketplace as an entrepreneurially-driven process and not as an equilibrium system. And they will understand that consumers respond to certain things, not because of what psychologists have found in terms of their objective ranking of needs or something like that. But rather as a situational thing. And they will also realize that all they can do is really provide something as an offering to consumers and communicate to them what this offering means and could mean in their lives.

Whether consumers accept their offering or not is not really something that the entrepreneur can do much about. It’s still completely the consumer’s decision. One of the examples that is often used to try to rebut this is someone who’s starving to death or, or really, really thirsty or something: you’re exploiting that person because they can’t choose anything else. But there’s always a choice. And you can always choose not to buy something. You can always choose to negotiate a little more or buy it a little sooner. And really what matters here is the sovereignty of the consumer, and realizing that that is the case: that the consumer will, based on whatever variables are of importance to him or her evaluate and assess what, what value they can get from your offering compared to all the other alternatives that they see that they value. And then they will pick whatever is best for them.

Hunter Hastings:

Good. Let’s sum up there, Per. Thank you very much. You’ve emphasized the core elements of consumer sovereignty and their subjective view of value. Everything else stems from that. We’re going to keep trying to communicate these ideas in ways that are valuable for entrepreneurs. We really appreciate you helping us with that goal. Thank you.

Per Bylund:

Thank you very much, Hunter.

 

 

Bob Luddy Is A CEO Who Applies Principles Of Austrian Economics In His Business Every Day.

One of the things that I really like about the Austrian economists, regardless of the subject, they work hard to get to the truth of the matter. So they’re not hung up in formulas or things that happened in the past or general beliefs. They’re looking for the truth and the best methodology, and that’s the methodology we use in CaptiveAire, and it’s proved to be tremendously successful.

Podcast Transcript: Conversation With Bob Luddy of CaptiveAire; September 22, 2020

Listen to the full episode here.

Hunter:

Bob, welcome back to Economics for Entrepreneurs.

Bob Luddy:

It’s my pleasure to be here today.

Hunter:

You were our guest very early in our series of podcasts, in episode number four. You talked to us about specialization, which is important for entrepreneurs: choosing your specific target customer and your specialized market and becoming uniquely superior in your offering in that market. You’ve done that with your company, CaptiveAire. It’s the out-and-out leader now in commercial kitchen ventilation systems, which your website calls a complete solution of fans, heaters, duct work, and HVAC equipment. But you also talked to us about systems thinking, selling solutions, customer service, cashflow management, and a host of other things that are really elemental to your success and others too.

You mentioned briefly in that discussion that you’re a student of Austrian economics. Austrian economics has been a companion for you on the road to success. You apply the principles of economics directly in your business. You actually contribute time and resources to teaching everybody in your company some of those principles, both executive management and employees. So we’re going to talk today about how Austrian economics is applicable in business and some of the specific principles you’ve applied.

So I thought I’d start with Say’s law, Bob. You summarize it to me as supply creates demand, and every business wants to create demand, obviously. But tell us how you interpret Say’s law, because it’s not all that easy, and then we’ll talk about how you’ve applied it.

Bob Luddy:

The way I interpret Say’s law is if you bring a new product or service to market, the assumption is that you’re bringing a product to market that someone needs at a price that makes sense. So that’s the underlying assumption. But when new supply comes on the market, it may solve existing problems that are not currently being addressed, or it could be a new piece of clothing that’s attractive, and you may not need it, but you’re compelled to buy it because it’s an attractive offering. In our case, we’re primarily dealing with engineering. So the products we bring to market, while they have to be aesthetically acceptable and pleasing, they’re primarily solving problems within the restaurant or commercial building.

If we can bring products to market that solve those problems in the simplest way possible, at the best possible price, we’ve got a good chance of both creating new markets and also attracting customers from existing suppliers.

Hunter:

So that would imply that the typical words that get used in business writing, which are that firms create demand, are not quite right. It  sounds like identifying potential problems, then making the production leap, you design and produce, and then demand is a result of that. Is that a good way to summarize it?

Bob Luddy:

Yes. That’s exactly correct. I can provide some examples in our kitchen ventilation business. If you went back to the 1980s, many of the harmful effluents from cooking in a restaurant were escaping into the kitchen and sometimes even into the dining room. So that’s a serious problem because those effluents could contain carcinogens, and at the very least, they’re very unpleasant. That was the state of the art. So my thought was, if we could solve that problem at an acceptable price, we’re going to have a lot of customers. That turned out to be exactly right.

Bob Luddy:

Now, you might say other people did the same thing, other companies, and that would be true. But our vision and our target of how to solve that problem was superior to theirs, is that it’s really just that simple. So it’s not just a matter of solving the problem. It’s solving it with an acceptable idea, technology, or service, and also, again, it applies at an acceptable price, not at any price.

Hunter:

Right. But you’ve got to produce, right? Do you take that entrepreneurial risk that you’ve identified the problem correctly, you’ve designed the solution correctly, but you’ve got to produce before you create the market result, or you create the reward?

Bob Luddy:

I can give you countless examples of competitors that had some methodology of solving the problem, which we deem to be either deficient or actually didn’t solve the problem. So many people take a stab at this. But it’s only the ones who have a more precise vision of what’s acceptable to the market. So there’s market risk – that’s Say’s law – and there’s the uncertainty, so to speak, as to whether your product will win and actually create a new market. We know the greatest example of all time: the iPhone literally created a new market. In that case, they did it at a relatively high price. So that would break the CaptiveAire rule, whereas we try to be the low-cost producer. So visions can vary pretty widely. But in the end, the entrepreneur has to be very correctly aligned with that user.

Hunter:

You used a great term there, Bob, which I’ve never heard before, but it’s very evocative. You said precision vision, getting to a precise vision. How have you learned to do that over the years? How do you get to that precision? What’s the secret?

Bob Luddy:

Well, for example, just kind of a mundane product that people don’t maybe put a lot of thought into, but duct systems are fire protection systems, and they tend to be difficult to install and not as effective as they should be. So we developed a duct system that could be put together like an erector set. It’s got a good set of instructions. It actually ships like an erector set. Over time, we were able to buy highly automated equipment. It can produce this at a very low price. So we have price. We have quality. We have sustainability. We have ease of installation. We have guaranteed fire protection with the assumption that it’s installed correctly. All those bases are covered within the product design manufacturing process and installation.

Bob Luddy:

That’s supposing that we had seven of eight requirements, perfect, but one not. If a competitor was able to perfect that last requirement, we might be out of business. So that’s where I came up with the term, you have to be fairly precise and understand all the requirements, meet all those requirements, and meet them in the best way possible, based on technology that exists today.

Hunter:

I was reading an analysis the other day that said… It used the term small details, and it said, “In today’s customer experience, small details are not only important. They’re critical.” Because service and competition are so good these days that it’s the small details that make all the differences. Would you agree with that?

Bob Luddy:

We stress that continuously. So pretty much, you could look at any of our manufacturing engineers, managers, et cetera, and they are very engaged in the very fine details of everything that we do. Many times managers get to a level where they feel like the details are left for other people, so to speak. That’s a completely wrong headed idea because it’s the small details that usually trip you up. So we put a very high focus on those details.

Hunter:

In all that process, when you’re talking about production and design, Bob, what’s the role of feedback from the customers? Is that something that’s going on all the time, or is it something you actively go out and collect with a piece of research? How do you feel about customer feedback?

Bob Luddy:

First, we do our research to ascertain what the problem is. Then we determine how we’re going to solve it. Then once we put together the product, we put it into what we call a beta. So we go to some select customers and saying, “Let’s install this unit in your restaurant and see if it solves your problem.” Then over time, we widen that beta because as you get a wider beta, you get more commentary, and you can figure out some nuance that potentially could have been missed. So we found that to be a very effective process.

Bob Luddy:

But keep in mind in engineering, the end user or the customer, they can be very clear as to what their problem is, but they don’t know the solutions. So if you are able to bring a solution to them that solves those problems, they’re going to intuitively know, is this a good solution, an acceptable solution, or are there some things about it that are not acceptable? So it’s very important to get that user commentary because no matter how brilliant your engineers are or how well thought out your process, nuance is going to be missed, and that brings us back to the point of details are extraordinarily and absolutely important.

Hunter:

But the feedback is to a beta product. It’s not to a survey question or asking an opinion. You’re getting feedback, and it’s feedback about a specific product, not a concept or idea.

Bob Luddy:

For the most part, I find surveys and small groups, et cetera, to be not very useful because all you’re going to learn from them is a status quo. If we’re doing our job correctly, we better know the status quo.

Hunter:

Let’s move to another subject, which is subjective value. It’s one of the core elements of Austrian economics, understanding the value created by the customer. But we tend to associate it, I think more easily with consumer businesses. In fact, at the outset, Bob, you talked about fashion. We understand that people have different subjective tastes and attitudes to fashion, or their attitudes to food might be different. Some like fresh nutrition and others like fast food. Those are subjective values. I think a lot of our entrepreneurs have a little difficulty in dealing with subjective value in business to business. But that’s your space. So tell us about your understanding of subjective value and how it’s helped you.

Bob Luddy:

Mises made some comments about this. So for example, if we bring an integrated system to a restaurant, and if we were successful in explaining all of the problems it’s going to solve, the sustainability of it, then it still comes down to the user saying, am I willing to pay X amount of money to solve these problems? The user very well could say, “No, I’d rather live with some of the problems and depart with that much money. So Mises makes it pretty clear that’s where the decisions are going to be made.

Bob Luddy:

So our strategy is we solve all the problems. We clearly communicate to the user how we solve this problems, and then they make the decision. Now, if we don’t communicate well, the value of the product in the user’s mind may be lower. So part of the issue of getting a higher subjectivity of value is to have a full understanding of what the product does. But in the end, even if we think we’ve established a good price point, and we solved all the problems, the user can just simply say, “I’m not willing to pay that amount of money to solve those problems.”

Bob Luddy:

So the subjectivity is very, very clear, and it’s reinforced in the market every single day. It could be that if the user said, “That’s simply too much money for the problems you’re solving,” he’s sending us back to the drawing boards to say, “Yes, you have an acceptable solution, but the price is wrong. You’re going to have to figure another technology.” So I think the same concept comes into the industrial world and commercial world just as it does in fashion or food or anything else.

Hunter:

Sometimes the trouble that people have thinking that way, Bob, is you’re often not dealing with a single decision-maker, a single buyer. It’s not an individual. It might be a procurement committee, or it might be a decision that has to go up the hierarchy. So people are confused about, whose subjective value is it? Is it the CFO who signs off on the cost, or is it the engineer who signs up on the functionality, or is it the owner who signs off on the decision itself? What’s your experience about dealing with multiple customers in one sale?

Bob Luddy:

Yeah. You’ve just brought up a very important challenge for the entrepreneur. Anything that goes to committee is going to be a challenge. People tend to default to the status quo. So if you have a new type of solution immediately, a committee is going to feel more comfortable even with a poorer current solution. So within groups of that nature, you have to have an advocate, even if it’s going to be a committee decision. I’ve seen cases where you have eight people on a committee. You completely convince seven, and the eighth one is just dead set against making any change or doing anything differently.

Bob Luddy:

We had that occurred recently, and thankfully, we were able to win the day. But that’s a big challenge for entrepreneurs. I gave you an example. There was a company some years ago that had a new type of street sweeper. Of course, they were going to sell it to government. They were convinced that it was vastly superior to what was on the market, and I think they were probably right. But nobody in government ever bought the solution, and they went out of business.

Bob Luddy:

So it’s a prime example where a company says, “Well, we have the right solution at the right price.” People are going to line up a door and buy it is simply not true. You have to convince those buyers or decision-makers that this is the best choice. That is a formidable challenge, even with the best product and best pricing. So it should be always on the mind of the entrepreneur.

Hunter:

You said something really interesting, that communicating better actually raises the value of your offering. I think one of the things that we Austrians believe is that communications – call it advertising, call it marketing, call it sales, whatever you call it – is part of the offering. It sounds like you agree with that. Is that right?

Bob Luddy:

It’s absolutely imperative, particularly with new technologies that users do not understand. In the case of the iPhone, since it was so intuitive, and say since they are good marketeers, they were able to pull it off. But many products that we buy, we don’t have a full understanding of the technology, all the things it can do, and the future value to us. So if we’re not informed, we’re going to make a lot of bad decisions. So I think an effective entrepreneur has to be able to communicate with the user what the advantages of this product are and why they should buy it, and failure to do so essentially devalues their product in the marketplace.

Hunter:

One of our contributors here, Bob, Dr. Mark Packard has divided this subjective value process into components that take place over time. So he says that your customer first anticipates value. So you do the communication. They’ve got to say, is there something in it for me? It’s kind of an absolute judgment. Then they make a relative judgment compared with other choices. Then they make what he calls the exchange value judgment. You called it, do they part with the money? Then they have the actual experience. They use the product and service, and then they assess it afterwards and say, did it meet my expectations? Did it function properly? Is that helpful, do you think in thinking about your relationship with a business-to-business customer?

Bob Luddy:

Absolutely. You’ll probably notice with a lot of consumer products, when you open the box, there’s a little note in there, and it says, “You just made a great choice.” So they’re continuing to reinforce the value of their product. In that regard, if we hear even the minor’s complaint from a user, we take immediate action to make sure that’s resolved. In some case, it could be a software issue that could be corrected. It could be misuse of the product, any number of things. But we’re very tuned into after the fact, and we use the word sustainability in the context that we want our products to last 20 years or longer.

Bob Luddy:

There’s very few manufacturers today that talk about a 20-year lifespan. In some cases, we even have limited warranties that are 20 years. So the idea of having a permanent relationship with the user is very important in this whole process, and very often, manufacturers think in terms of, once they bought it, I’m done with them. I’m moving on. We’re the exact opposite of that. We want that customer for life. Even the most minor thing they’re not happy with, we’re going to fix it, and we’re going to resolve it.

Hunter:

Yes – small details. Talking about Apple, it reminds me about one of the innovations they introduced, which was the beauty of the box and what they call the unpacking experience. So as you said, you get this beautiful box, and you open it, and there’s a so carefully constructed, and there’s communications in there. I bought a pretty industrial product the other day on Amazon. It was shipped to me. It was the same thing. It was in a beautiful box, and you unloaded it, and it had this great piece of communication in there and had the little Apple-like indents in the polystyrene. So you pick everything up carefully. It was beautifully done. Does that come to your business, the unpacking or delivery experience? Is there anything there for-

Bob Luddy:

Oh, absolutely. Maybe not as much in the end packing, although we try to ship things in the most upscale way possible. It comes in if the outside crate is all messed up or the box is a problem. Immediately, you’re going to have a poor perception of that product. But we also are very conscious of aesthetics. So you can have a high function product with poor aesthetics, and just right out of the gate, the user’s going to say, “Well, this is just a piece of junk. They’re going to have a very poor perception of it.” So aesthetics count, and you’ve just iterated how that box counts a lot, even though it has nothing to do with the product. Again, you’re pointing to the details. People fail on these details.

Bob Luddy:

If you look at very complex systems that we’re engaged in, the smallest detail can shut that system down. One short wire out of place can cause a major problem. So if anybody involved with that product is not into the fine details and not executing at a very high level, we’re not going to be as successful as we should be.

Hunter:

I want to turn next to comparative advantage, Bob. We’ve had Dr. Peter Klein and Dr. Per Bylund and others on the podcast. They stress the difference between competitive advantage – I can perform better than my competitor – and comparative advantage, which is something more inherent in the company itself and its leadership. So how do you think about comparative advantage?

Bob Luddy:

I think of competitive advantage as essentially ephemeral for the most part. So you can gain advantage, but it’s very hard to hold that advantage in a highly competitive market. Whereas comparative advantage, you have a very distinct advantage that’s much longer term, maybe not absolutely invincible, but very hard to overcome. So outside of our field, I would say, if you looked at Napa Valley making wine, if you decided you wanted to make wine and compete with Napa Valley, it’s going to be a hard way to go. In our case, over time, we’ve been able to develop those design technologies, techniques, automated equipment software, and when you marry all those things together and you integrate them, we gain a major competitive advantage. It’s very hard to overcome because it’s not one thing. It’s many things, and they’re all well thought out and have been developed over a number of years.

Bob Luddy:

Whereas the competitive advantage is something that can be again, ascertained and overcome in some period of time. So you can gain these advantages, but they’re going to be ephemeral. So the goal of the entrepreneur should be to try to gain a long-term comparative advantage if possible. In many businesses that’s really difficult. In very competitive businesses, you’re lucky to gain a competitive advantage much less even thinking about every gaining comparative advantage.

Hunter:

Let me pick out one word you used there because it’s a fascinating one, and it’s a place where you can perhaps get comparative advantage over time. You call the techniques. Unfold that a little bit for us, Bob. What’s a technique, and how do you gain advantage with techniques?

Bob Luddy:

Well, for example, we have to bend a lot of sheet metal for a product. The way it’s been traditionally done is manufacturers will bend a lot of metal, and they’ll have it ready to go. So when the product comes in, they’ll pull the bent metal off the shelf, and then they’ll assemble it. Well, that requires a lot of storage anticipation of what you’re going to sell – a laundry list of challenges. So over time, we were able to buy automated equipment that will bend that metal in real time and dynamically stack it right up on the assembly line rate to be assembled and all that’s done in hours.

Bob Luddy:

So we can have a very rapid turnaround time. We eliminate all the inventory. We eliminate all the losses for inventory put together that can’t be used, and then we get into the actually assembly of that product, and we have our own unique methodology of assembly that doesn’t require traditional manufacturing jigs and devices. It’s what I call self-jigging. So it’s coming off these high-speed machines, is hitting that line, and then we have a whole series of techniques of how the product is assembled.

Bob Luddy:

So in a matter of hours, it’s the end of the assembly line ready for checkout, and it’s going to be shipped. All that has taken many, many years to develop, but that gives us a very strong competitive advantage that’s not easy to overcome. Many companies have tried it. But they don’t get all the details right, and they may miss some important steps. So it’s very hard to replicate. So I would consider that more than a competitive advantage, it’s a comparative advantage.

Hunter:

Do you design your way to those techniques on a drawing board, Bob, or do you just work your way towards them through trial and error and learning? How do you develop techniques?

Bob Luddy:

Actually, it’s both. So we design our way through initially design. We build prototypes. We revise the design, and we get that product ready for our production process. But once we get in production, we find components that are less sustainable than we wanted. We find a better technique. We may find a component that we could design better. So it’s in a constant state of renewal, looking for again, a better way to do it. We call it Kaizen from the Japanese word for continuous improvement. So our engineers are very connected to those assembly lines, and they’re also very connected to the field, primarily through software-delivered data, which is being fed to them all day long. Any minor problems are aware of, and they’re working on to fix them. So yeah. Our whole team is totally engaged in that process.

Hunter:

One of the techniques I know in Kaizen on continuous improvement is to identify what the Japanese call waste, either wasted time or wasted effort or wasted energy, and then you eliminate the waste. Is that part of the process?

Bob Luddy:

Absolutely. Yeah. That waste could be human, it could be time, could be components, could be any number of things. That’s a constant that we’re working on that process, and our design engineers and our manufacturing team, they’re all on the same team, and they’re working very closely together. Even though we are radically decentralized company, we’re tied together with software, with visits, with telephones. So we function like we’re all in the same building, but in fact, we’re all over the country.

Hunter:

Is the software feeding back from operating machinery and the restaurant or from inspections and people or both?

Bob Luddy:

All the above. So we get inspection reports. We have real-time data being fed from restaurants that will give us any aberration in performance. It also allows the engineers to look at restaurant operations and see if that equipment is performing the way it was designed. Field service is constantly feeding back any concerns they have to the manufacturing plants on a daily basis. Sales teams have software that they communicate with us. If a customer has any complaint, any issue, it’s tabulated on a software program. So the engineer in charge is very cognizantly aware of when, how often this happened. So the information we receive is extremely good, but more importantly is we’re working on it every day.

Hunter:

Do you call it big data? That’s a fashionable term these days.

Bob Luddy:

We don’t use a lot of the conventional terms. We just call it data.

Hunter:

Information.

Bob Luddy:

Yeah. Information.

Hunter:

I’ve got one more item on my list here, and that’s opportunity cost. You said that’s one of the concepts that you apply. I know that I personally have a little bit of difficulty in thinking of that through in application. I understand that the concept is that any choice that, say, your customer makes has an opportunity cost, which is they reject something else, or they don’t take another course. That sounds a bit theoretical. How does it apply in your business?

Bob Luddy:

Well, I’ll give you an example. We bought a make-up air company (see CapitiveAire website for technical explanation) in the year 1999. These companies and the controls for air coming into the building, being heated or cooled, there tended to be a lot of customization from engineering, sales reps, customers. That customization requires an enormous amount of engineering, and it’s fraught with problems because you buy a new component, you don’t know if it’s going to work under the right terms and conditions. There’s endless number of problems. So we decided in 1999, we would move toward what we call high standards. So we would a very high standard product that would suit 95% of all users. There’s flexibility within the ordering software to customize voltage and phase and certain aspects of the product. But it’s all done in software. Whereas our many of our competitors same time said, “We can be all things to all people. You tell us what you want, and we’ll figure out how to make it.”

Bob Luddy:

Most of those companies, 20 years later don’t exist any longer. So it’s an important thing to understand that opportunity costs also means turning down opportunities, getting the best utilization out of your human resources possible, making the most sustainable solutions, which are going to save time and money over a period of time. Companies tend to get these things wrong. So we’re more in the range of, we call it a category killer. We make 10 major categories of products. To keep those products at the right price, at a high level of performance and sustainability requires all of our time. So if we divert any of that time, i.e. opportunity costs, onto something, it better be something really important, or we’re failing at our most primary mission.

Hunter:

Is that an active piece of analysis, Bob, every time you look at something like that, a new opportunity that you also look at the downside, you look at the opportunity cost? Do you actively make that AB decision?

Bob Luddy:

Absolutely. Every single time.

Hunter:

So opportunity cost is an active process for you.

Bob Luddy:

Yes. Entrepreneurs, you’ve heard the term serial entrepreneur, which I don’t like. I think it’s very bad because we’ve been at this business for 44 years. While we’re really good, we’re not as good as we want to be after 44 years. So what does that tell you?

Hunter:

That you always keep going?

Bob Luddy:

That there’s always ways of improving, and the higher you get in perfection, the more and more opportunity costs. The more opportunities arise that you can get to another higher level. That’s not necessarily intuitive because people think in terms of where they want to arrive, and we don’t look at it in those terms. We just know where we’re at today, and we have laundry lists of things that we want to correct and resolve for the long term.

Hunter:

That’s an active list that you keep?

Bob Luddy:

Yes. Yeah. Well, we have long lists of things. If I went to our engineer in charge, he might have a list of 50 items that they’re working on at any given time. He’s got a lot of engineers working on these processes and products. A lot of them are, back to your word, details. They’re small details that make that product perform better, more sustainably, more useful to the end user but unlocking kind of scientific information is a slow arduous process. But every time you make that breakthrough, that product becomes more viable, and it’s gonna have a higher perception with the user. That’s pretty much how we operate the business.

Hunter:

That’s very impressive. I’m going to try and squeeze in one more topic, Bob, if you’ll bear with me. You might not be able to do it justice, but it’s one that entrepreneurs, especially B2B entrepreneurs, I think have a real challenge with, and that’s pricing: getting the price right. You always quote Bill Peterson on this topic whom you’ve mentioned before is as a mentor. So distill for us in just a few minutes, as I say, we might not be able to do it full justice, your experience about price and pricing.

Bob Luddy:

From the very beginning, my idea was that we would price under the market, which would be our primary means of gaining market share. Very interesting, if you went back into the 1980s, very often, people were telling me you’re leaving money on the table. I said, what does that mean? Well, you could charge the customers more money and get away with it. I would continuously say, “That’s just not how we operate.” We want to have the best price we can bring to that user, gain market share and grow as a company. If you fast forward 35 years later, we are still the low-cost producer. We have the highest market share, and virtually no manufacturer can get to our price because we spent 35 years figuring out how to do it. Again, we talked about our comparative advantage.

Bob Luddy:

I hear people make comments where price is not that important. Value is what counts. So my retort to that, which maybe came from Peterson, well, why put prices on anything, just go to the store, buy what you need and put it on the credit card. Well, that undermines their argument very quickly. So when Peterson said, “Price tells us a lot about the product, and it informs us and helps us make a decision if we want to pay that price for that particular product.” So I would say, of the most important strategies for CaptiveAire over a 44-year period, price is number one. Now, obviously, it has to be connected to quality execution service and so on. But pricing is a primary strategy, and our senior engineer and myself, we do all the pricing. We have an ultra short way of pricing, all the products that takes virtually no time and is definitely accurate.

Hunter:

So one of the statements that Dr. Bylund and others have made is that the entrepreneur doesn’t choose the price. The market chooses the price, and the entrepreneur chooses the cost so that you make a profit based on the price that the market gives you. So it sounds like maybe you are in that process. When you say you’re going to price under the market, that means the market’s telling you what that price level is, and then you choose your cost. But would you agree with that, or is that too facile?

Bob Luddy:

Yes. Now, most manufacturers couldn’t price the way we do if they didn’t have a comparative advantage. So we actually price based on cost, which if you go to B schools, they’ll tell you that doesn’t make any sense. As a matter of fact, many of the things they tell you in B school we don’t use as it may not make sense to other people. But us, if we can price based on costs and have a defined profit level, we don’t want to try to make more than that, even though the market may allow it because we’re looking very long term at growing the business every single year.

Bob Luddy:

So this is kind of back to a Peter Drucker argument. Yes, we could price higher, but we would have lower sales. So what does Drucker say? You should price as high as you can, but still have the highest amount of sales possible within the market. There’s obviously no formula for that. My strategy is more simple. We’re going to price based on cost. We’re going to continue to drive costs down, and therefore, we are going to be the low-cost producer, and most of the time, we are going to be the low-cost producer.

Hunter:

But you’ve achieved that without any compromises in quality and service, obviously.

Bob Luddy:

Now, in most cases, our quality is vastly superior to what people could buy. People have what I call bad buying habits. They just keep buying from the same user. So you may have a better product. But until you convince the user you have a better product. You’re not making sales. But our strategy is we’re going to have the best product, the best service, most sustainable, and the lowest price, and that attracts a large volume of customers.

Hunter:

Then you referred earlier to the integration that makes that possible. Every element is so integrated that you can have that combination.

Bob Luddy:

It took us 20 years to fully integrate kitchen ventilation systems. It’s taken another 20 years now here in 2020. We can fully integrate the mechanical systems in a restaurant or most commercial buildings. So it’s taken a long period of time to get there. But futuristic integration is absolutely critical, and even the smallest detail you miss in that integration are very, very critical and may allow a competitor to take the business away. So our long-term commitment is full integration, continuous improvement, Kaizen, figuring out ways and means of driving down price, and that’s where I would say the value proposition comes in. But just to announce that you have the best value in the market, well you know the answer to that. The user will make that determination.

Hunter:

The value is always in the customer’s mind, not in your proposition.

Bob Luddy:

Absolutely. I think manufacturers and developers, people get that very confused. They think in terms of absolute value. We think in terms of subjective value. That puts a burden on us. We have to convince the user, and we have to be right, to begin with, that this is the best value they can buy in the market today.

Hunter:

Bob, you’ve been very generous with your time today, and we really appreciate it. There are so many lessons to learn from your long experience and your great achievement, and we thank you for showing us how these concepts of Austrian economics can be applied in business, and that’s what we’re trying to do with our new economics for business platform is to share those connections between theory and practice, and you’ve shown us how it’s done. So we thank you very much for your time today.

Bob Luddy:

Can I add one last comment?

Hunter:

Yeah, please do.

Bob Luddy:

One of the things that I really like about the Austrian economists, regardless of the subject, they work hard to get to the truth of the matter. So they’re not hung up in formulas or things that happen in the past or general beliefs. They’re looking for the truth and the best methodology, and that’s the methodology we use in CaptiveAire, and it’s proved to be tremendously successful versus when I went into B school, so versus going to B school and learning certain things, and then spending your whole life trying to apply those principles, some of those principles are going to be good, and some of them are going to be, as Dr. Bill Peterson would say, the conventional wisdom is either wrong, or it’s going to be wrong.

Bob Luddy:

So it’s wrong we have to change it. But we also have to aware that someone else may have a better way of doing it. But we’ve got to be paying attention to the market. The Austrians do an excellent job at that, and that’s why I think Austrian economics is critical to every single entrepreneur.

Hunter:

We’ve developed this tagline for our project, Bob. We call it Think Better, Think Austrian.

Bob Luddy:

I love it.

Hunter:

Distilling  that, how do you think better I think is one of our challenges. We’ve got to help people to do that. So as you said, getting to the truth, a lot of that is Carl Menger’s first sentence. Everything is cause and effect. Is that one of the ways you get to the truth?

Bob Luddy:

Absolutely. Clayton Christensen made this comment in his book, the Christensen Reader. If you look at the technology companies that were founded around the same time as CaptiveAire, so these are companies that are well financed, smart individuals, good technology. Virtually every one of them is gone today. Just a couple of exceptions. Either they’re gone, they merged, they were bought out, or they went bankrupt. What does that tell you? They simply did not look ahead. They were enamored with the technology they had. When someone came along with a better technology, they were gone.

Hunter:

There’s a great example of that, I always think, which is Bill Gates at Microsoft when he made the pivot to the internet. That was a really bold decision. It was forward-looking. It was controversial, but he was the boss, so he could make it happen. But that’s one example why Microsoft is right up there now today with Amazon and Apple and so on.

Bob Luddy:

They definitely have pivoted over the years. They’re one of those companies, one of the few that did survive for that reason.

Hunter:

Well, we’ll continue to try and figure out how to think better and think Austrian, and your example will be the leading one, Bob. So again, thank you very much for your time today.

Bob Luddy:

Hunter, it was a pleasure to be with you today.

Hunter:

Thank you.

 

David K. Hurst: The Organic Approach To Strategy And Business Management And The Ecological Business Model.

Podcast Transcript: Conversation With David K. Hurst; September 8, 2020

Listen to the full episode here.

Hunter Hastings:

David, welcome to Economics for Entrepreneurs.

David Hurst:

Thanks, Hunter. Good to be with you.

Hunter Hastings:

We’re greatly favored to have you with us today. You’re a deeply experienced and highly accomplished business person. You’re now an educator and an advisor, and that’s at the highest level such as the Global Peter Drucker Forum. We’re fans of Drucker’s work here. You’re an author, you’re a writer, and you say you’re a reflective practitioner. You make sense of experience and you reach out for theory where it can help you make sense of experience, and we very much support that way of looking at business in the world. Sense-making begins and ends and practice. Theory can help rationalize it, and that’s what theory’s for so we support all of that approach.

Where I’m going to start, David, is you’ve said that a lot of how we’re traditionally taught to think about business and management is wrong. That could be formal teaching in business school or it could be business books or it could be other forums. So let’s start there. Let’s understand what’s wrong with the way we’ve been taught to think about business.

David Hurst:

Well, thanks, Hunter. Not quite so much wrong as totally inadequate to the requirements of the situations in which one finds oneself in business. I should say, by way of background, that I was born in the UK but actually grew up in South Africa, where I had all kinds of unusual experiences, and had an opportunity in the early ’70s to go to the University of Chicago and study finance on their MBA program, which I did.

I emerged from Chicago believing, or at least accepting, the basic assumptions which lay behind business education at that time, which was heavily influenced by what I came to understand was neoclassical economics. That is, it believed in greed as the primary motivation. It was all about individual self-interest and utility maximization, I think, was the word. It was heavily rationalistic in that it believes that we ought to behave like little mini scientists with everything based on evidence and data and then lastly, the focus was very much on equilibrium, that markets were self-equilibrating and that the natural condition in organizations was stable. Stability was the norm and change was something that you had to manage and that if things went awry, it was mainly because you weren’t following standard procedures. Management was essentially about allocating resources… It was nothing about innovation… and making sure things ran in a steady, linear, rational fashion.

David Hurst:

When I got into the real world, I found that these principles were, well, wrong, that people acted for all kinds of reasons that had nothing to do with their own self-interest. Sometimes, there was greed, but often there wasn’t. That people were not rational certainly in the mini science sense, and that the economy and businesses in general were far from stable. In fact, whenever I joined a business, it seemed to get into trouble. At first, because of my education, I thought it was me. Obviously, I’m doing something to destabilize things. But then I realized that’ of course, the linear, stable, rational model is the way academics think businesses ought to run, if only they would listen to them, and the fact you can’t run them that way because the world is nonlinear. It’s dynamic. It’s not rational because we’re not just lone individuals. We also work in collectives, in communities. And of course, that stability and change are intrinsically entangled with each other.

David Hurst:

And I went through one particular experience. This was, by now, in the early ’80s and I had emigrated to Canada, which is where I currently live. I started working for an industrial distributor as a financial planner, I think I was. Within a few months, we were put in play. We were a public company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. We were put in play by a greenmailer… Greenmailers, at the time, if you remember, were folks who came in and bought the stock and promised to act up unless they were bought out, hence the term of greenmail… which triggered us into a takeover play and a leveraged buyout with far too much debt on the eve of the great recession of 1982, which, if you remember back that far, was characterized by very high interest rates up to 25% plus and a sharp drop in demand for everything.

David Hurst:

So we were acquired on the eve of this recession by the son of a brilliant entrepreneur. Very wealthy. He had made two fortunes, so one in steel fabrication and the other in real estate, and we were acquired by his son. His leverage buyouts borrowed from our bank, who was only too eager to lend money to such a wealthy family. However, it turned out to be rather more complex. The family was highly dysfunctional. The son had not got permission from his father, and he hadn’t even discussed it with his two brothers who were joint shareholders of the takeover vehicle. They read in the papers that they were each going to be on a hook for about a hundred million personal guarantee and they were not amused.

David Hurst:

Over the next six weeks, we were swanned over by all their advisors. They all had a different [inaudible 00:07:09] of accountants and consultants and the like. It turned out, far too much had been paid for us and the family… In fact, the father sat on the board of our bank and told the bank to withdraw the loan, which they did, and so we found ourselves looking to finance… It was only 300 million dollars but back in the 1980’s that’s probably the equivalent of about a billion today… just as the 1982 recession hit. We went insolvent overnight, but not before another bank agreed to finance it just before everything fell apart. We found ourselves insolvent but owing the bank so much money, it was their problem, not just ours. That was one of the lessons I learned, that either you have to owe the bank very little or a whole lot. Otherwise, you have a problem.

David Hurst:

So, what were we to do? We were merged with the purchaser’s steel fabrication business which, as far as we could tell, had not made a profit in about 20 years. Budget was a place where you rented a car. The whole thing was run in a very informal fashion with about 700 people reporting to the loan entrepreneur. Quite chaotic. We ended up with about 19 different challenges that didn’t fit into anyone’s job description. One challenge, for instance, was that the fabrication company was building a bridge across the Mississippi. A huge bridge. In fact, it was the first stable-cayed bridge to be built across the Mississippi to carry interstate. They were six months late. They were being sued by the state of Louisiana for liquidated damages and the cables, which were polyethylene-coated steel made in Switzerland, were rusting.

David Hurst:

You get that kind of problem, what do you do? We formed small, informal teams of folks we felt we could trust. They had to be generalists because we didn’t have any cable-stayed bridge-building specialists in our business, and the times were frantic. We formed these 19 teams and set them off to just find out what they could discover on the grounds. They went out to Louisiana. They went all over North America to look at projects and plants and activities of various kinds that were in deep trouble.

David Hurst:

I can’t tell you how different this was from our organization before the crisis. Our steel distribution business, or industrial distribution business, had been conventionally organized with a hierarchy and extensive planning. We had three books of manuals on how the world should work. People went through career paths and they had job descriptions. The usual paraphernalia. And of course, that proved totally inappropriate for our conditions. We needed small. Agile is the current word today. At this stage… I’ll cut a long story short but over the next four years, we were turned upside down. The hierarchy receded into the background. It didn’t disappear, but it went into the background and the teams… We call them hunting teams… came to the foreground. We were turned inside out because this was no longer about individual self-interest, which the formal hierarchical organization cases do. This was about survival of the community. It was survival of organizations. It was different communities all over the countries of Canada and the States. We turned inside out. We became much more concerned with community than we were with individual success or failure.

David Hurst:

It took us four years. We went through the fires and eventually came out the other end with new owners and new bankers, and recapitalized business which emerged just in time to benefit from the boom of the late ’80s. I think we went into the crisis with 700 million dollars in sales and about 4,000 people. We came out with 220 million dollars in sales and 700 people. And then over the next five years, we grew to over a billion dollars in sales, a combination of economic recovery and acquisitions.

David Hurst:

Being a reflective practitioner, I sat down at the end of this and tried to make sense of what had happened because it’s quite clear the frameworks I’d learned in business school just weren’t up for the task and I wanted to understand why. I found a framework, initially, in Daoist philosophy, yin-yang philosophy. It seemed to us that there were two dimensions or two processes going on in parallel in the organization. There was a hard, productive yang process which had always been in the foreground and a softer, creative, informal, collective yin process in the background. When we hit the crisis, the two had reversed. The yang had gone into the background and the yin came to the foreground. I didn’t call them yin and yang in the article I wrote. I called them boxes and bubbles, boxes being the formal box structure which productive, large-scale organizations end up using, and bubbles were these soft, informal teams that we formed at a moment’s notice. They formed easy coalitions with each other and when they did the job, they burst. They disappeared and went back into the mixture out of which new bubbles could come.

David Hurst:

I wrote the article, I sent it off to the Harvard Business Review, never expecting in a million years they would publish it, and they wrote back six weeks later and said, “We love it. We’re publishing it almost without editing,” and it was published as Of Boxes, Bubbles, and Effective Management. It became a bestseller at the time. It attracted some interest from academics, particularly heterodox academics, academics who were not in the mainstream who taught greed, rationality and equilibrium.

David Hurst:

There was a young PhD candidate by the name of Brenda Zimmerman at York University, it was then. She had lost her organization she was doing a case study on for her thesis, and we made a presentation at the university and she came up afterwards and said, “Would you be interested in letting me use your company as a study for my focus on using complexity theory and chaos theory to understand how organizations really work?” And I said, “Well, sure. Let’s do that.”

David Hurst:

She introduced me to complexity theory, to systems thinking. I’d always been into systems thinking somewhat, but this was a different take on systems thinking. What had struck me was that it had taken a great crisis for this change to take place. That fitted with my career experience where organizations went through relatively long periods of apparent stability and then it was interrupted by a crisis of some kind, just like the pandemic we’re currently experiencing. I couldn’t find any theory to support this, and I looked around for other organizations that change in times of crisis and of course I found them in nature.

David Hurst:

Nature uses crisis to shake up the established order and to renew its systems. In particular, Brenda Zimmerman introduced me to the writings of Canadian ecologist by the name of Buzz Holling, and Holling has something he calls an adaptive cycle, which he used to understand ecosystems like forests, for example. Just to explain it to you with a graphic, it’s an infinity-shaped loop. A mobius strip, if you prefer.

David Hurst:

Yes. Absolutely. Well, I will try and do it as graphically as possible.

David Hurst:

You have this infinity-shaped loop and you can begin anywhere on it. But for argument’s sake, let’s think about a forest, particularly a lodgepole pine forest, the kinds that you find in the Rockies up and down the West Coast of North America. The lodgepole pine begins in an open patch where there’s equal access to sun and rain and everything grows. The initial growth in that open patch, and we’re in the bottom left of this figure eight lying on its side, are of course weeds. They are the entrepreneurs of the natural world or certainly the flora. The weeds are the first movers. They come in. There’s equal access to sun and rain. Everything grows like crazy and there’s no competition until they start bumping into each other.

David Hurst:

At that stage, in order to survive in an environment where there’s emerging competition, you got to start to build economies of scale, and the next what appears in this ecology are the shrubs. The shrubs sink a root to get to the water quicker. They put up a branch and leaves to get to the sun and cast shade over the weeds and they outcompete them. They’re more efficient in the way they use resources and they start to build scale.

David Hurst:

And so you see this forest succession, as it’s known, where the weeds are supplanted by the shrubs and then the shrubs are supplanted by the fast growing trees, which might be aspen, say, in the mountains, which are very fast growing trees and they have even greater economies of scale. They grow higher and they sink their roots deeper and they actually form a community with each other. Their roots entangle with each other and they outcompete the shrubs. And then eventually… And this is idealized. It varies from system to system… the fast growing trees are supplanted by the conifers, in this case, the lodgepole pine. It grows straight and tall, gets to sun first, shades out everything else and grows beautifully. At that stage, it’s a mature forest.

David Hurst:

Ecologists used to think that this was the end of the process. It certainly marks a slowing down of the process because now the ecology is populated with these tall conifers, these tall lodgepole pines, but change has not stopped. It turns out that the lodgepole pine is a self-pruner. As it grows up, it drops its lower branches on the ground. Then eventually, after about 30, 40 years, depending on the climate, it gets attacked by insects like mountain pine beetle that actually kill it and creates standing firewood. As a result, you get fires in the forest when lightning strikes because there’s so much fuel ready to burn. The fire clears away the fallen branches and the dead trees, recycles their ingredients for the next generation and of course, now the young big trees survive and carry on to last a little longer.

David Hurst:

I suddenly thought, “Wow. This is interesting front loop.” By now, we’re at the top right. We’ve grown in scale. The vertical dimension is scale. We started off small and fast weeds and we ended up big and slow trees, and then the forest had to renew itself by burning the obsolete, decadent growth to create the space into which new growth can come. At that stage, it drops down into the bottom of the right-hand side and you start to build a new community as you travel up to the top left, which is essentially community out of which new growth will come, and so you go around and around this infinity-shaped loop with the forest existing for indefinite periods of time, once again depending on climate change and how fast everything’s warming and changing.

David Hurst:

But I suddenly thought, well, this is how an ecosystem survives and it’s [inaudible 00:22:25] that in the 1880’s when the US Park Service got responsibility to look after the parks, their initial effort was in fact to put out fires in the forest. Their mandate was to make the trees big and beautiful and obviously, fires destroyed trees. They thought, “Well, we need to stamp out fires. We want big, beautiful trees.” And they did that very successfully from early 1900s on until ’60s and ’70s, at which stage they started to get fires that they couldn’t put out because it turned out, by trying to keep the forest too stable, you were interfering with the natural process of destruction and renewal. You could keep small fires out but eventually, you were building fuel on the ground and you’ve got fires you couldn’t put out.

David Hurst:

In 1988, they had that huge fire in Yellowstone. I read about the story and I thought, “Oh, wow. Isn’t this what happens in our large-scale corporations as well as government, is by trying to keep them too stable, we actually set them up for eventual crisis?” All of a sudden, I had a sense-making model of how the world worked because it works not only in natural ecologies, but also in human systems as well, and certainly in organizations.

David Hurst:

At that stage, a sort of revelation came over me. I’ve been a closet academic and I find I could read stuff and understand I’ve never been able to understand before like sociology and philosophy and all these big things. I start to set out on to an inquiry as to how does this all fit. What does it mean? How did the business schools get to teach this totally inadequate model? What I discovered, of course, was that the period when the business schools adopted this model was the late 1950s. That was in the aftermath, of course… The World War had ended in 1945. The US had emerged victorious, the liberator of the West, the savior of mankind. They were the only large industrial economy that had not been devastated by the war, and of course with their generosity of the Marshall Plan and so on, the defeated Axis Powers were customers to rebuild their economies which had been totally devastated.

David Hurst:

When the business schools were reformed in the late ’50s… Because they were seen as really vocational training colleges. They weren’t seen as academically serious. When they were reformed, it was all about how to come up with systems to produce economies of scale, how to produce more of the same. The steel business, which I was on the fringe of and I understand a little bit, US Steel, for instance, was using open hearth furnaces in the early ’60s, and these were totally obsolete technology. Very inefficient, highly polluting. But of course, they had tremendous demand for steel for rebuilding the world and there was no reason to change. They were making money like bandits and there was growth. There was prosperity. I mean, even in the political debates today, we hear the ’50s and ’60s looked back on with great nostalgia when we had our story together. We knew who we were. If you were a blue collar without education, you could get a great earning job and have a home-maker at home and two cars in the driveway. It was the middle class dream.

David Hurst:

The theory that emerged was how to perpetuate this success. And, of course, then the story changes from there because as the ecological [inaudible 00:27:10] says, nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed. Japan and Germany rebuilt and when they rebuilt, they didn’t put in open hearth furnaces. They came back with electric furnaces. Scrap fed, which were far more efficient and cleaner and cheaper. They came back with new technology and all of a sudden, the story started to change. It wasn’t being able to produce more of the same. Now, you had to innovate. Of course, the whole notion here is that the organization structure required to run something with economies of scale, a very mechanical, machine-like, productive hierarchy, is very poor at innovation because those are exactly the dynamics that you’ve got rid of in the pursuit of efficiency, in the pursuit of low prices.

David Hurst:

It seemed to me that organizations needed a better balance. But the theory that business people use to support them in this productive model was of course neoclassical economics. They appealed to them to explain why it was all focused on greed, self-interest, why it was all about rationality and it was all about stability, keeping things the same. And it was at-

Hunter Hastings:

Now, I know you don’t have a dog in the fight, David, but our Austrian economics school believes the opposite of all those things. We believe in the flexibility and [crosstalk 00:28:56]-

David Hurst:

Well, of course, and that’s when I discovered mainly Hayek. Friedrich Hayek has been my guide and I know some Austrians don’t regard him has authentically Austrian. Ethnically, he’s Austrian but they don’t regard his economics… And in fact, his economics-

Hunter Hastings:

No, no, no, no. He’s a great Austrian economist. He wandered into some other fields later in life.

David Hurst:

Yes. Well, I actually liked his other fields. I think he had interesting things to say.

Hunter Hastings:

Well, he does.

David Hurst:

My favorite book of his is The Fatal Conceit, which was his critique of socialism and central planning and I’m with that, that the world is just too complex to do that.

Hunter Hastings:

Well, yeah. You’re a hundred percent right.

David Hurst:

But it seemed to me that that applied to the corporate world, the mini socialist structures. I mean, when I graduated from business school, the Fortune 500 were the sort of last refuges of Stalinist bureaucracy. I mean, that’s the way they work. People at the top were dictators, the word for it.

David Hurst:

They were central planners so Hayek’s critique applied to them as well and of course, I was very keen to make them much less rigid. Now, I think there’s very real limits as to how innovative you can make these large-scale organizations. Nature does not rely on large trees to reinvent themselves. She sweeps them away with flood and fire and wind and pestilence and then recycles the ingredients for the next generation.

Hunter Hastings:

It’s an interesting discussion, David. There’s nothing inherently wrong with scale as size itself but as you point out, that becomes bureaucratic, sclerotic. It’s about retention, not innovation. We shouldn’t be thinking in antitrust terms of scale. We should be thinking in effectiveness terms. It just doesn’t work anymore.

David Hurst:

Yeah, it certainly gets to that stage. Well, I’m not entirely sure we can dispense with antitrust because the temptation… In fact, when I took Holling’s adaptive cycle and applied it to human organizations, of course people can think and move and trees can’t do that. I had to add some extra dimensions. The extra dimensions, I took the infinity loop and the left-hand side, I called all about passion. I said, “Enterprises are conceived in passion. They are born in communities of trust and practice.” That’s how the first stage is one of passions.

David Hurst:

And then, most of them actually die in that stage. They’re stillborn. But those that come up with a recipe for success, something that works, they move into the stage which is reason. They start to connect, cause and effect, “This produced a good result. This is our segment. This is our product. This is where we should be,” but maybe some strategic pivots at that stage as they calibrate where they’re at, and they start to get into the rational mode. And that’s fine. The rational mode is there, but it’s not universal.

David Hurst:

And then they grow like crazy and it’s really about more of the same. This is the American economy of the ’50s and ’60s: tremendous growth, organizations going global, growing like crazy. And then they get to the limits that the market is just about as big as we can serve. They start to think about making acquisitions. They start to head towards essentially thinking like monopolists or oligopolists. They want to get more control of the market.

David Hurst:

The third stage on the right-hand side of our infinity loop is power. This was something that we never really talked about in business schools. In fact, I felt the business schools used rationality to cloak power. This is certainly what I found in practice when I went out into the real world and worked for some large organizations. You would be asked to look at an acquisition and you would come up with some spreadsheets showing possible impacts based upon various assumptions. And then particularly with the emergence of the computer-based spreadsheet where you can produce these things very quickly and as many as… would like, the boss would come and say, “Well, I want to do this deal so find me some assumptions that make it work.” Instead of getting evidence-driven strategy, you got strategy-driven evidence. It was totally inverted. The process was actually a process of power. The boss is saying, “This isn’t what I want to do. Find a way to do it,” and we had left reason. We were now in the power phase.

David Hurst:

I’m afraid that this is where everything ends up. It ends up in structures of power. It ends up with elites, in the case of the political process. Michael Porter has just written a very interesting book on what he thinks has happened to the American economy and that essentially, it has got stuck in what I would call a power trap. There are traps, whirlpools at each end of the infinity loop. On the right-hand side is a power trap, rigidity trap, a competency trap. This is not a moral judgment. It’s just you’re very good at these things. Why would you change?

And then on the left, of course, it is the entrepreneurial trap where you’re trying a zillion things and nothing is working and nothing wants to break out and [inaudible 00:35:33]. Hence, to get back to the monopoly thing, we have to be very wary… And this is true at the political level as well.. of getting caught in power traps where people, it’s all about getting elected if you’re a politician, and it’s all about keeping your job and rationalizing what you’re doing using neoclassical economics. And-

Hunter Hastings:

I want to make the leap, if you don’t mind, from that scale and that economy level to the ecological mindset for the business manager today. Because you’ve said some really fascinating things about how to manage in this manner that you suggest. Let me mention one, which is… You say that act and learn is the right way to use experience as a source of input. You say, “Act ourselves into better ways of thinking rather than think our way into better ways of acting,” which is a very impactful phrase. Tell us about acting ourselves into better ways of thinking.

David Hurst:

Exactly. I had the opportunity earlier in my business career to work with entrepreneurs. The situation was I was with a very acquisition-minded industrial conglomerate. They would snap up small entrepreneurial businesses, and they would put me in for three months to work alongside the entrepreneur who had sold them the business and understand what was needed for it to be folded into one of our larger units which would then pursue economies of scale. I mean, classic acquisition to build scale kind of process.

David Hurst:

I would sit alongside these entrepreneurs and see how they worked. I mean, they weren’t applying any abstract principles. In one case particular, I remember was a guy… He was Austrian, but not an economist. He was a tool and die maker in Austria and he had come out to South Africa and he had set up a tool and die business to make stampings and drawings… I’m talking metal drawing… fuel tanks, in fact, for the automotive industry in South Africa. This guy was a wizard on the technology of stamping and being able to do deep draws in one draw that his competitors took five draws to do and so on. It was just know-how, practical knowledge, and everything really moved from there.

David Hurst:

He wasn’t dealing in abstractions at all. It was all about practice and things emerged on the shop floor, “Oops. Okay, so that’s interesting.” He was continually experimenting, tinkering, and he was hugely successful because he had this extremely efficient effective process. And he was not intellectual in the remotest. If you tried to ask him, “What principles are you operating by?” he wouldn’t be able to tell you and that was okay. It’s the power of practice and that the actions come first and the words come later.

David Hurst:

As I see any particular enterprise and I put them on my infinity loop, you got traps on each side. You got the power trap where you get really stuck, particularly if you’re a public company. Going public for me is absolute watershed in this process. It pushes you to the top right of the infinity loop, gives you a determined shove there because all of a sudden, it’s about finance and short-term outcomes and quarterly earnings and, I mean, you’re addressing an audience whose interests are very different from what they were when you were an entrepreneur, small-scale, bottom left.

David Hurst:

There’s that trap on the right-hand side and then there’s the left-hand trap which is the entrepreneurial trap, which is trying a zillion things and nothing’s work. And I said, “Well, clearly, there must be a zone in between where you’re big enough but you’re not falling into that success trap power trap, but at the same time, you’re got a program and innovation that you’re working on that’s producing enough innovations to come into the business and keep people creative and thoughtful and so on.” What I saw was this space, this zone in between which was, on the left-hand side, it was all about acting your way into better ways of think and on the right-hand side, it was about thinking your ways into better way of acting.

David Hurst:

The two are melded together. It’s a dance, if you will, between the two sides. You’re trying to weave in the middle here, balancing in a very dynamic way, the way nature does in the forest. It’s continued balance between new patches with new growth and the next generation coming in and the old patches, the mature businesses and operations and products that are giving you your daily bread. And you need them both. It was this weave which was important.

Hunter Hastings:

David, another phrase… Tell me if it fits into what you’ve just described… that I read in your book which was really also impactful is managing like a gardener analogy, your ecological analogy. You say, “Help things happen rather than make things happen.” Tell us about that mindset. How does that work?

David Hurst:

Exactly. The way you came out of business school in the 1970s was thinking about the job of management like an engineer. You had this machine which required to be maintained, lubricated, fixed, parts replaced sometimes, but it was essentially a machine, a smooth running machine, and you think like an engineer. That’s okay in certain circumstances. There are machine-like aspects to enterprises. But taken to the limit, if that’s all what you’re doing, you’re going to end up in the power trap on the right-hand side.

David Hurst:

On the other hand, on the left-hand side, you’ve got wild nature and it’s “Let everything hang out.” That clearly is very much hit or miss and you can… It works at the ecosystem level. It works at the Silicon Valley level, but it doesn’t work well at the enterprise level. I see the manager in between as a gardener. A gardener has engineering aspects, but they also have wilder aspects to them. The gardener creates the conditions in which, in the case of enterprises, people can grow. They grow people. That’s what it’s all about. I see this gardener as the one being able to conduct this dance, this weave between mechanical… I mean, sometimes you need to dig up soil and replace it. You may need to tear down existing plants and put them on a bonfire and burn them, break out the chainsaw and saw. At other times, you need to supply structure, lattice on which they can be trained and pruned and all that kind of stuff. The gardener seemed, to me, to capture this duality to the manager’s task.

Hunter Hastings:

Good, and then one other thing that you’ve said is that this chasing the numbers, making the numbers, that’s a little bit of a challenge or problem. You said, “Non-measurable results are a big part of the solution.” Which particular non-measurable results are you thinking about?

David Hurst:

Well, as we said at the onset, I’m involved in the Drucker Society in Europe. I like Drucker’s stuff and of course, he was Austrian. He had the same duality to him. But of course, when he began his writing, it was in a time when management was still very intuitive. The practitioners and the business schools had nothing but old timers telling war stories. Peter Drucker emphasized the possibility for rationality in management. He was leaning towards that [inaudible 00:45:27] because that’s what it required.

David Hurst:

In the process, however, he acquired a reputation and had attributed to him phrases like “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” It turns out that this is completely wrong. He not only didn’t say that, he actually said the opposite. He said that a lot of unmeasurable things which are absolutely valid and are absolutely critical… Because he says measurement is always about the past. It’s always about what happened. He says, “The things that really matter are the unmeasurables that refer to the future.” The example he gives is the ability of the enterprise to attract young, high motivated people. He said, “If you can’t attract these people, eventually it’ll show up in the numbers, but it’s not something you’ll see in the numbers right now because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s straws in the wind.”

David Hurst:

For me, this was an entrepreneurial sensibility which I think was absolutely critical. In the steel delivery business, I can recall… Not very often because it was very early… I’d get up at 4:30 in the morning, they put an [inaudible 00:46:49] seat in the passenger side of a steel delivery truck and I’d go out with the driver delivering steel to your customers. And you think, “Wow, Senior Manager, what are you doing that for?” Well, it’s interesting because this guy ends up in the customer’s yard and who else is in the customer’s yard? Why, your competitors. What are they carrying? What kind of product do they carry? And oh, by the way, how busy does the customer look? Is their plant busy? Hey, have you talked to the foreman and you ask “How business?” What do they say? In turns out that your drivers are potentially capturers of these unmeasurable factors because you’re not going to get any metrics on whether your customers are busy, but drivers are eyeballing it on the daily basis.

David Hurst:

How do you capture that information? How do you turn your driver into an entrepreneur? Thinking like an entrepreneur, what does this mean in terms of our priorities, the kinds of results we’re trying to achieve? In the steel business, which the economists say is a commodity business… They’re quite wrong in that. In fact, you can only make money in the steel business if you don’t think of it as a commodity… it’s all about having a thousand people doing one percent a little better. There’s no great technology. There’s no product breakthrough, but it’s all about being able serve the customer, adding knowledge to the transaction so you’re not just selling commodity, you’re selling solutions to problems, essentially.

David Hurst:

That all is based upon those nonmeasurable aspects of getting everybody in the organization talking to each other about what’s happening, about what they’re seeing every day, because that’s where it’s happening, on the ground. This is all a part of acting our way into better ways of thinking, getting ideas, seeing the opportunities emerge out of what we’re doing, out of the action.

Hunter Hastings:

Good. Well David, we’re going to have to wrap up for time reasons. We got a lot more to talk about, and maybe we’ll do it on another occasion. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but think about our core listeners here. We think of what the government derisively calls small business but it’s actually the entrepreneurial business and the growth businesses. If you think of businesses up to a thousand employees, that’s 99.9% of all the employing business in the USA. But it’s not Apple and it’s not Amazon and it’s not General Electric, obviously. Can you help our business owners and managers think about how best they can start applying this manage like a gardener and act and learn kind of approach?

David Hurst:

Well, I think it needs a change in overall government policy, which has tended to favor the large-scale. I’m not a great fan of the leverage buyout people, now called private equity or whatever you want to call them, because I think it’s actually a recipe for liquidation of the business. The shareholder value movement which, once again, came out of a crude interpretation of Milton Friedman has, I think, been extremely damaging to the American economy. You’ve got large oligopolies. It’s led to a focus on a bloated financial sector. Financial sector is, in my view, dysfunctionally large. You’ve got lot of brilliant minds going off to Wall Street when they should be on Main Street. I mean, that’s the life blood. That’s where the jobs are. That’s where the meaning is. That’s where the stories are. It’s all about story.

David Hurst:

If you worked in… Your family worked in a furniture factory built around High Point, North Carolina, you could have had three generations there. Send it off to China, you’ve destroyed an entire family story, not only just the earnings, it’s the meaning of what they do every day and that’s in the local work. I see them as the vehicles for rebuilding community, and they need a lot more help from the federal government.

David Hurst:

This other aspect of developing people, growing people, private companies, I think, are in the best position to adopt this ecological model because they’re very leery of debt, which is a real issue when you get to the public companies, and they discourage careerism where every two years, the manager moves on to a new assignment. I think this is all about building a community of trust and practice. I think that’s absolutely critical.

Hunter Hastings:

Good. Well, that’s a little bit of what we’re trying to do. David, thank you for today. It’s very inspiring and instructive to listen to you talk about where business management thinking has gone wrong and some ways to think about it in a better way. We left a lot unsaid, so I hope I can persuade you to come back again, maybe in a few weeks and we’ll talk about some of the things we didn’t cover. But today was magnificently helpful for us and I thank you very much.

David Hurst:

It’s a great pleasure, Hunter, and thank you for the invitation to be with you and your community.