About

Wel­come on Core Edges. This is where I orga­nize some of my thoughts about busi­ness strat­egy, tech­nol­ogy, and the shifts cur­rently under way that are reshap­ing dra­mat­i­cally the global land­scape. You can read more below about the frame­work I’m using and see my LinkedIn or Face­book pro­file for more about me. After Hous­ton and Lon­don, I’m cur­rently based in Paris where I am the IT Inno­va­tion man­ager for Schlum­berger.

I am reach­able by email at jln /at/ coreedges.com, on twit­ter: @jnestour or through IM: Chat with Julien Le Nes­tour. You can also see where I am on Dopplr. I’m also a mem­ber of the 2.0 Adop­tion Coun­cil.

If you’re in Paris or see we’ll be in the same place at the same time, get in touch and we’ll meet :) Hope you’ll enjoy those pages.

Dis­claimer: The opin­ions expressed on this site are mine and do not nec­es­sar­ily rep­re­sent those of my employer or any com­pany I advise or may be asso­ci­ated with.

What will you find here? Macro Prin­ci­ples and Schum­peter­ian Edges

Macro-Trends

A grow­ing num­ber of global trends is shap­ing the envi­ron­ment indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions have to live and oper­ate in. I will call these trends Macro-Trends, for they influ­ence the Macro con­text with­out any pos­si­bil­ity for an indi­vid­ual or even an orga­ni­za­tion to coun­ter­in­flu­ence them. Think of Global Warm­ing and you will have a pretty good idea of my view of a Macro-Trend. MTs range from nat­ural trends (e.g. the expo­nen­tial rate of deple­tion for most nat­ural resources), Geopo­lit­i­cal (e.g. grow­ing sta­bil­ity and open trad­ing envi­ron­ment until recently, ris­ing pro­tec­tion­ism of late), Macro­eco­nomic (e.g. restric­tion of credit for the years to come, impact of state deficits for the next 15 years at least), or Tech­no­logic (e.g. expo­nen­tial growth in com­put­ing, stor­age, band­width and net­work­ing technologies).

These Macro-Trends define the evo­lu­tion of the envi­ron­ment where we all have to oper­ate. Though we are not be able to influ­ence it, it isn’t less cru­cial to under­stand how this con­text is shaped.

Macro-Principles

From this under­stand­ing of the var­i­ous Macro-Trends at play, we can extract Macro-Principles, heuris­tic tools that trans­late Macro-Trends into guid­ing prin­ci­ples for action. Macro-Principles can be char­ac­ter­ized as Shifts under­way com­ing from one or more Macro-Trends.

Fun­da­men­tal Shifts

Fun­da­men­tal Shifts are deep, struc­tural changes that are mostly a given. For exam­ple, the ris­ing rel­a­tive scarcity of atten­tion is a Fun­da­men­tal Shift, com­ing from the expo­nen­tial growth in the core dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies we described earlier.

Strate­gic Shifts

Strate­gic Shifts are changes in how lead­ers, indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions need to oper­ate to be suc­cess­ful in this new con­text. They should guide you on realign­ing your strat­egy and vision. Con­tin­u­ing my the exam­ple of atten­tion scarcity, the strate­gic shift to suc­ceed in a world of atten­tion scarcity, is to mea­sure and act on the Return on Atten­tion busi­nesses are pro­vid­ing in all areas of their oper­a­tions, to their employ­ees as well as to their customers.

Schum­peter­ian Edges

Macro-Principles are crit­i­cal, because they are foun­da­tional. But they are not read­ily action­able. Action­able frame­works directly com­ing from these Macro-Principles are what I will call Schum­peter­ian Edges. In a world where the pace of cre­ative destruc­tion (music indus­try? news­pa­pers? car mak­ers? Lehman Broth­ers?) is accel­er­at­ing and becom­ing more bru­tal, they pro­vide edges to weather this chaotic environment.

You will notice in the attached PDF fig­ure that Schum­peter­ian Edges span mul­ti­ple domains: I have put 4 of them (Strat­egy, Mar­ket­ing, Orga­ni­za­tional Struc­tures, IT Appli­ca­tions) but there are many more. Those 4 are the clas­sic ones being rein­vented though, and need to be tack­led as a coher­ent set. Rein­vent­ing 1 in your orga­ni­za­tion won’t work if the other 3 stay the same.

I have iso­lated an “Enter­prise 2.0″ Edge. The rea­son is sim­ple: com­bin­ing inno­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tional changes with pow­er­ful IT Appli­ca­tions is the deep­est and eas­i­est oppor­tu­nity to real­ize today. It still is dif­fi­cult, but the means to achieve this poten­tial are grow­ing and matur­ing daily, and need to be acted on.

This fig­ure describes a bit how I see the world, and can guide you through this site (links are click­able). This is still a per­sonal blog though, with its mess, lack of time, etc. I will of course quote exten­sively, par­tic­u­larly around the Macro-Principles: great thinkers (John Hagel and Umair Haque in par­tic­u­lar) are doing a much bet­ter job I would have been able to do, ever.