Michael Lissack
recombined by third-party developers to create applications that Apple itself would never have imagined. This “platform thinking” represented a fundamental shift in how the company saw its products. Consider the realization by Boeing engineers that commercial jetlin- ers would have a big advantage over propeller-driven planes. Although Boeing’s engineers had not designed such a plane and did not have a ready market for one, their context allowed for exploration, whereas the Douglas Corporation (now incorporated into Boeing) lacked such a context. Rival airplane manufacturers were not prepared to handle the market that opened up after Boeing introduced the 707. Henry Ford’s realization in 1907 that he could manufacture affordable automobiles using mass production to cut costs is a well-known example of a leverage point. At the time, Ford was just one of 30 competing au- tomobile companies. In the early 1960s, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., at IBM, realized that a state-of-the-art system (to become the IBM 360) could change business in the way that Henry Ford’s standard model automobiles changed transportation. We have already discussed the importance of seeing parts and wholes. Now we want to focus on how what you see changes with experience and context. For example, intuition simply depends on the use of experience to recognize key patterns that indicate the dynamics of the situation. Articulating this fact removes a good portion of the mystery and fear surrounding such intuition. Because patterns can be subtle, people often cannot describe what they noticed, or how they judged a situation as typ- ical or atypical. Their lack of ability to describe pattern recognition does not negate the recognition itself. In today’s data-rich environments, this pattern recognition has become even more important. Organizations now have access to vast streams of information about customer behaviors, operational perfor- mance, and market dynamics. The challenge is no longer accessing data but seeing meaningful patterns within it—identifying the building blocks that matter.
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