Knowledge Economy and the End of the Assembly Line

There’s plenty of variety in the business world. Companies around the world vary in shape, goals and scale. Yet one feature is fixed — from global boardroom to roadside merchant. Companies need to be profitable to fulfil their mission. To survive every firm needs to routinely see more pluses than minuses in its end-of-year balance sheet.

Nowadays, very few companies can benefit from a consistent (and renewable) intellectual property base and\or from an unchallenged dominant market position. While firms used to be capable of shielding the business’s revenue and duly pleasing investors and shareholders, innovation today is more frequent but its impact is less marked. This explains the intense focus on productivity. Where demand is weak, a business needs to look inward and find ways of doing more with less.

Automation has helped and is certainly working to reduce many existing overheads. Especially among big organisations there is usually a lot of meat that can be cut before actually getting to the bone. While these are often difficult and unpopular measures, they are the kind of decisions a CEO and the company board need to be ready to make during difficult times.

This approach appears to makes sense and it is normally backed by numbers (and pie charts). It also fits our internal narrative. Walking down the…