The Next Next Common Sense
a style functionality separate from their designs. One building block be- comes two (or more if you have multiple subsidiary lines). Donna Karan sells not only her own brand but also DKNY and then licenses both to others. In the healthcare industry, telemedicine platforms like Teladoc have separated the “diagnostic functionality” of medicine from the “location functionality,” allowing patients to receive care without visiting a physical office. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this separation became essential, accelerating the adoption of remote care models that had previously strug- gled to gain traction. This functional separation has continued to evolve with companies like Amazon’s Amazon Care, which combines virtual consultations with in-home visits when necessary, offering a new hybrid model that recombines functionality in novel ways. Recognizing functionality and being able to separate it out as a new building block is a key to innovation and to ongoing corporate success. Much like the designers recognized the value in separating their name and their designs, it is critical to learn to see how something is used as separate and distinct from the thing being used. With people, there is defensiveness about such a separation. If my job is a garbage collector, I am resentful and worry if you try to tell me that I am a truck driver and an object lifter, and that the processes of truck driving and object lifting which I have mastered may be better deployed for a different purpose. (And wait until I tell the union, boy will you be hearing about this.) What do you mean by suggesting that perhaps garbage could be com- pacted or composted on site and that there is a need for school bus drivers? You probably have not thought of your administrative assistant as a travel agent (who could be earning a decent supplement to their income while booking others over your Internet connection whenever you are out on the road), nor as a librarian (who could earn lots of money for their skills at ferreting out obscure information from corporate databases or the web), nor as an events coordinator (those people to whom resort hotels pay good money to prevent expensive affairs from having that “fatal” problem which keeps the client from returning next year), nor as a transcriber
111
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease