The New Factory Thinker (The New Factory Trilogy Book 1) by Bill Bishop

Author:Bill Bishop
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-09-14T14:00:00+00:00

SECTION FOUR

NEW FACTORY FOUNDATIONS

CHAPTER 26 VALUE HUBS

Karl Marx was right about a few things. In his economic theory, he conjectured that societies organize themselves around their "means of production". The means of production has two parts: raw material and the technology used to increase the economic value of that raw material. In an agrarian society, the means of production consists of soil (raw material) and the shovel or plow (technology). In an industrial society, the raw material is human labor and the key technology is the assembly line. Marx believed that class warfare was inevitable because the owners of the technology (capitalists) exploited the providers of the raw material (the workers). What Marx didn't foresee was the new factory.

The central premise of this book is that the means of production in our society has changed fundamentally. It now consists of thinking (the raw material) and networked communication (the technology). This change in the means of production has transformed the marketplace on a fundamental level. It is now possible for everyone to be the master of their own means of production. To do this, however, we must rewire our minds, and reorganize how we provide value in the world. We must relinquish assembly lines and become value hubs.

When you act as a value hub, you help your customers achieve their big goals and solve their big problems. Your intention is to get the job done by providing whatever resources are necessary, even if they are provided by another company or industry. Instead of trying to pump out a pre-determined product or service, you route a stream of value to your customers and capture wealth in the process. Constantly shifting and adapting, you develop new ideas and source new resources depending on the ever-changing needs of your customers. To stay resilient, you develop an operational structure with minimal fixed assets, and as much as possible your operation is virtual.

By "routing" value to customers, a value hub mirrors the physical structure of the Internet itself, where information is sorted and distributed by routers connected together in a network. The routers take incoming fragmented information "packets" and directs them to their destinations where the packets are reassembled and presented in the form of emails, web pages, videos, voice-over-Internet, and a myriad of other forms.

As the Internet and its networked structure has become the dominant means of production in our global economy, the marketplace and our society has increasingly come to resemble it.

Companies and individuals who use new factory thinking and operate as value hubs are more successful because they have organized their thinking and operational methods to match the new means of production. Old factory thinkers who continue to operate like assembly lines are now realizing less success because their thinking and methods are not congruent with the new means of production.

Old factory thinkers will be further marginalized because the structure of their operations (assembly lines) won't fit into the networked structure of the emerging new factories. It will be like trying to stick a square peg into a round hole.

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