Jim Maxmin and Shosanna Zuboff argue in The Support Economy that dominant managerial capitalism has reached the end of its adaptive life. In the failure of the market to meet the needs of a "new society of individuals" shaped by self-determination and unfilled, intangible wants, Maxmin and Zuboff identify a widening chasm between new forms of individual value and values on one side and firm's "consumerist" objectives, behaviour and actions on the other - actions characterised by an "incremental tinkering" of, rather than a radical and discontinuous breakthrough in, the means to identify, create, design and deliver "consumer" value.
Gary Hamel in Leading the Revolution discusses such incrementalism at length, and pinpoints a failure of organisations to ...
build a deep-capability for business concept innovation – a capability that continually spawns new business concepts and dramatically reinvents old ones. … Despite all the pro-innovation rhetoric that one encounters in annual reports and CEO speeches, most still hold the view that innovation is a rather dangerous diversion from the real work of wringing the last ounce of efficiency out of core business processes. Innovation is fine so long as it does not disrupt a company’s finely-honed operating model. … As change becomes ever less predictable, companies will pay an ever-escalating price for their lopsided love of incrementalism.
Using Zuboff & Maxmin's chasm analogy, we can view this adaptive market incrementalism as generating the “innovation scree" that lies deep in the rift between commercial organisations and individuals. In marketing in particular, many new attempts or approaches to identify, predict, understand, reach and respond to the new individual are now being “lobbed off" the side of the chasm by a marketing profession desperately searching for the next breakthrough in efficiency. Unfortunately, most just roll off the side of the chasm, fall into the abyss, and end up only a few feet ahead of the previous "little innovation boulder"!! And as all this activity continues, the new society of empowered and engaged individuals amasses on the other side of the chasm, conversing in new terms and new ways about their value-goals and the "value-failings" of the organisations on the other side..
There are some "excellent" and “astonishing” examples of marketing’s "little innovation boulders". Some of these brave attempts to breach the chasm have the flavour of Vance Packard's famous expose of the subliminal marketing techniques of the 1950's and 1960's (as described in his book "The Hidden Persuaders") ... They represent a last desperate attempt to squeeze a little more life out of the adaptive reaches of managerial and market capitalism ...
In the next few days, I’ll be blogging about these little boulders.
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