From Creative Destruction to Intelligent Design

Abstract

When the late Steve Jobs prominently adopted Wayne Gretzky’s slogan wanting to “skate where the puck will go, not to where it has been”, it sounded simply as a pragmatic response to the limitations of chasing the elusive ‘environmental fit’ (for the notion of strategy as a fit with the environment, see Porter, 1996, 1998). Yet, it prefigured a truly paradigmatic leap. With information technology becoming the dominant technology of the day, firms are no longer confined to either being simply part of the problem, part of the solution or part of the landscape. They now can quickly capture and move the entire landscape; but even more importantly, they can become an entire landscape in their own right. Firms need no longer be mired in perpetual reform efforts, endlessly defining, designing, and developing themselves form the inside out as transactional systems, configuring dimensions of strategy, structure, scale, and scope hopelessly imperfectly given environmental turbulence, technological transience, and socio-politico-economic complexity, and perpetually, almost wastefully tuning their internal synergies to merely becoming incrementally agile and increasingly nimble. The commonality among the recently quickly emerging complex information technology-intensive firms that are breaking the mold, especially represented by the social-media movement, is their deliberate and explicit social positioning. These firms are demonstrating a level of creative intelligence that allows them to aspire to, design, and construct, in their entirety, the very environments into which they want to project themselves. To enable and to leverage this new transformational nature they cultivate and nurture two additional dimensions that define such social positioning: scheme and soul. Scheme represents their agenda for social stance, positioning, action, and change. And soul is their intentionality to go beyond economic rationality and business logic in order to create logos from chaos. But while people may have overcome the controversy of creating social outcomes with economic means, one now has the mandate to design and govern how one creates economic outcomes with social means.