It’s time to return to “products”

In the 90s and early this century, many companies and institutions focused on “process.” Engineering-centric academic institutions in the East and West Coasts of the US, pushed ideas around process optimization as if it is only the “process” that adds value to companies. Business schools started offering courses in process optimization and supply chain engineering. Consulting firms sprung up everywhere, like mushrooms in the dead of night, peddling the ultimate solutions – such as "business process reengineering." The engineers were running amok in companies, consulting companies and academic institutions, “optimizing” everything they can get their dirty hands to.

In the financial world, rocket scientists and technicians were awakened by the jolt that led their fine equations astray. In large companies, the executives sat in plush conference rooms, unable to comprehend what is happening to their finely tuned organizations, filled with cronies and people of the same ilk. Strategy consulting firms were left in the cold, unable to craft their own strategies as they advised the world’s largest companies to mediocrity. Best known academic institutions around the world, filled with the largest brains and even larger egos could not determine why their “precise theories” led them to the wrong forecasts. The recent crisis revealed an important lesson to the engineers and scientists.  Optimizing is not just an end goal; it is a “process” in itself.  More importantly, without “product,” optimizing processes to fine detail is not necessarily good. It is also important to note that the world does not quite work in a deterministic fashion and the end outcomes are always, not predictable.

It is time to return to “products,” for without innovation that creates new products, the most finely tuned “processes,” are worthless. If extra-terrestrials exist and can see what was going on in the last few decades, they will laugh so hard, their antennas will twinkle. Perhaps, we can pick that up to prove life exists outside solar system and stop the madness of sending humans on planetary missions.