Europe has so much history that there is no room for the future
I hope you have found peace and lightness around Christmas and New Year’s Eve with your family, your friends and also within yourself.
I myself have found time to read about topics that interest and concern me: innovation and Europe. Thus, I took out Ilja Pfeijfer’s novel Grand Hotel Europa again. The main character stays in Grand Hotel Europa, an illustrious hotel where time has stood still. Everything in this novel is in decay and, of course, the novel is an allegory on Europe. With a sense of irony, Pfeijfer writes about the continent ‘where there is so much past that there is no place for the future.’
The Economist, a magazine, sets a counterpoint. An equally alarming but optimistic tune. In its weekly newsletter Café Europa, it writes: ‘The EU needs to rearm, rewire its energy system, reinvent its tech industry and recast its posture towards autocratic Russia and China.
Europe risks becoming a digital colony
Many people share a diffuse sense of unease: dark clouds are gathering on the horizon, but close to home things are still going well.
As long as companies are generating turnover and making a modest profit, there are no acute concerns. The same goes for governments and NGOs that have sufficient budgets to keep their organisations and their country running.
No worries for as long as it lasts. Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist who set a standard with his description of the innovation process, argues that sooner or later companies that resign themselves to the status quo will be overtaken by those that innovate. Schumpeter calls this creative destruction. New products, services OR processes replace things that cannot stand the comparison with the new and thus become obsolete.
The magnificent seven are a shining example of what Schumpeter describes. Amazon, Apple, Meta and co. have reduced industries like bookshops, photography and journalism to niches. America, the motherland of the magnificent seven, benefits, while Europe threatens to become a digital colony. An overseas territory where big tech realises much of its sales and profits.
Figureheads like Jeff Bezos und Tim Cook seem not to be in sight in Europa.
American and European figureheads
Fortunately, European variants of these figureheads do exist, albeit in a more modest, more European form. In any case, I consider it a privilege to speak and work with leaders in the energy infrastructure and defence sector who are imbued with a vision and the ambition to realise it.
We work with leaders in the (energy) infrastructure sector an the defence industry. You can read their views on the successes they realised with our support on the why-page of our website.
The ambition to realise a vision raises problems. This seems paradoxical, but is perfectly logical. A problem is the delta between the status quo and the ambition to improve it. Whereas the guests at Grand Hotel Europa avoid problems by not harbouring ambitions, visionary leaders, through their ambitions, make visible the problems that stand in the way of achieving them. Visionary leaders initially (!) have more problems, but a more interesting life as well.
Time and again it is very interesting to examine the connection between the problems that come to light in organisations that want to increase their productivity with the available capacities.
Even more interesting is the question of which problem is the bottleneck. There is logically only one problem that most constrains an organisation’s productivity: the bottleneck. This is the only point where solving one problem leads to improving the productivity of the organisation as a whole. Conversely, any change that does NOT address the bottleneck can have NO EFFECT on your organisation’s productivity. This is why so many changes are no improvements…
Visionary leaders can make it to world fame by systematically solving bottleneck problems. Witness this short film about Elon Musk.
Needless to say, you don’t have to follow Elon Musk in everything to agree with the logic of his approach. I am not a Trump supporter, quite the contrary, and do not follow Musk to Mars, but his improvement logic is right.
Not Lean, but Flow
American and European figureheads who consistently increase productivity are leading their organisations to the top of their industries. Moreover, they serve society with solutions that, for example, enhance our security or improve energy and mobility infrastructure.
I hope the above strengthens your belief that much more is possible than the guests at Grand Hotel Europa may presume. But if you are sceptical, I can understand that.
Perhaps you have applied a lean method before and perhaps it was not a success. There is a simple explanation for this. The person who developed Lean within Toyota, Taiichi Ohno, became successful only after a years-long and painstaking innovation process. He was not afraid of competitors copying his methods, he even invited them to come and see the Toyota factories. His explanation was, ‘They will just copy the applications anyway, and skip the analysis of the problems. Things won’t work then.’ This is exactly what you can see happening all around you: applying solutions without deep understanding of the problems, let alone bottleneck analysis.
Our Flow techniques are based on the same principles as Lean. We use the word Flow because we start with a proper analysis, focusing from the outset on exactly THAT which is needed to improve productivity, or Flow.
You can find leaders who are successful with this on our WHY page. You can find the experts who can support you in here: who are we?
I wish you health, happiness and good luck in achieving your goals in 2025!
By Willem de Wit, 8th January 2025
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Founder & Managing Director of Mobilé 4 flow & innovation.