I am a scaler

Reading the blog about digital transformation I saw how the executives are struggling to answer simple questions like:

• What is your point of departure?
• What is the direction your industry is headed?
• What is the role your company should play in that digital future?
• How do you articulate  the path forward for your organization?

These questions are very clear, logical. Yet they are almost impossible  to use as a working tool in practice. 

"Imagining the future is not straightforward. Customers can’t tell you what they want when the technology hasn’t been invented yet."

A general sense of direction is discernible if you ask the right questions. For example:

• If you had a movie of your customers purchasing and interacting with your products and services in 10 years, what would you see?

• What are the most hated parts of your industry, and how could they be disrupted?

• Who are your partners today, and which of them could be competitors in the future?

• How could someone take out 50% of the costs in your industry using digital technologies?

 How do I make real progress without being certain where I am headed?

This question is about life, not just business. I ask every morning, what shall do, because every morning is new beginning.

The traditional road maps don’t apply. One human being can not make a road map of his life, We are not machines. we need an aspirational view of the future, and at the same time starting to make progress today.

Edge computing and free will

I did spend the quite some time trying to learn what Edge Computing is. I was lucky to meet exceptional people who have free will. They toy with exceptional ideas. We have a definition of strategy  that we ask directly what to do, and we have an answer.

Rabbi Nachman is a famous teacher who passed away in 1810, nearly 200 years ago.

Someone once asked Rebbe Nachman, “What is the idea of free will?” “Very simple,” Rebbe Nachman replied. “If you want, you do it. If you don’t want, you don’t do it.

”It is the ability to choose to do whatever you wish to do, whenever you wish to do so, in any kind of situation. Knowing that you have this power, you can take any idea or suggestion that you hear and apply it for your benefit. As Reb Noson (the disciple of Rabbi Nachman) explains, free will is the most amazing power in the entire world

For a newcomer, the first impression is that Edge Computing means you do whatever you want, whenever you want, in any kind of situation, as long as we take any idea and we transform it to our benefit

The true edge computing

Rebbe Nachman explains that there are many lies, but there is only one truth. You can call a silver cup, “a silver cup.” That’s the truth. But if you use any other description, like “a gold cup,” “a copper cup,” or “a paper cup,” it’s not the truth. Either it is what it is, or it isn’t. That’s the truth.

But edge computing is not a silver cup. I can not take it in my hand and look at it.

The truth is always one. But each person has a different perspective of truth, which stems from the fact that God, Who is One, created each of us differently. Since each of us is very different from the next person, we each have varying perspectives of the truth. 

The scalers 

85% or more of  the people are the ones who execute ideas and strategic initiatives flawlessly, using established playbooks, fixed routines and common behaviors.

Second is your disruption community. They're steeped in Agile ways of working and encouraged to disrupt current products and services, business processes—even the company’s business model—to create new value.

There is also a third, less-recognized community: the scaling community. These people provide a critical bridge between those developing innovative prototypes and those executing industrialized solutions.

The scalers are not well liked.

They are the ones who interrupt discussions with questions like, “This is a great idea, but how can a salesperson explain it to a customers when they have 50 sales visits a day?” They are not anti-innovation—they are pro-execution. They put in practice a confluence of all brilliant ideas into truth

Yet edge computing is a business

The scaling community not only focuses on the innovation, but also on building a business that can be handed off to the execution community. Once you’ve confirmed that you have a good product, the scaling community determines how to get these ideas to customers, how to create leadership economics, how to partner, and how to determine the thousands of decisions that must be made in the future.

Confession

The name was coined  in 2015 by Bain & Company in the article Strategy Beyond Scale

I am a Scaler. Yet the term is little known and not yet applied in practice