Showing posts with label Nussbaum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nussbaum. Show all posts

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Davos, Switzerland

I have highlighted the writings of Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek magazine on this blog before. Among other things he writes the NussbaumOnDesign weblog, (subscribe to the RSS feed). My previous posts of his are here and here. Since his writing, the topics he covers (Design and Innovation), and the ideas that he raises are valid to this community, I am setting up a label (to aggregate his posts within the Innovation in Oil and Gas weblog) and Technorati tag / URI for Nussbaum (to aggregate posts within all blogs that have been tagged Nussbaum.)

He is in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum. In a series of articles he is metaphorically letting the rubber hit the road. Arguing that the people that are discussing the economic consequences of the current economy are the ones that brought the problems to us, and are not necessarily the people who will be getting us out of this economic mess anytime soon. I highly recommend reading his post here.

A “transformational crisis” is the term used in the opening session of the World Economic Forum by founder Klaus Schwab to describe the state of the global economy today. Institutions are not working, unemployment is soaring and we have to first manage the crisis, then manage a new world post-crisis. (Italics are my emphasis.)
The real critical aspect of his posting is that he suggests the people who are the ones that will be making the transition are not necessarily in attendance, or are relegated to the sidelines at Davos. Nonetheless there are a number of very valid quotations that I would like to highlight.
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, News Corporation, USA, and Co-Chair of the Annual Meeting 2009. “Don’t let’s lose sight of what creates wealth; it’s open markets, capitalism and we’ve proved this again and again in last century,” he cautioned.

Werner Wenning, Chairman of the Board of Management, Bayer, Germany, and Co-Chair of the Annual Meeting 2009. “We’re talking about growing populations; we have to address issues of how to secure energy supply and of climate change; we’re also talking a lot about sustainability and returning to the basics of sustainable behaviour.”
Bingo, we are being challenged by so much more then just an economic mess. This is why this community that we are building for the oil and gas industry is so critical. Without the necessary systems being built for the future organization, we will not get anywhere close to this future. Software systems are the glue that make organizations work. Using the Joint Operating Committee in the oil and gas industry is the critical organizational construct of the innovative producer. It is the legal, financial, operational decision making, cultural and communication frameworks of the industry. SAP and Oracle, who define and support the bureaucracy, are able to provide compliance and governance for the SEC, Tax, and Royalty regimes. They DO NOT recognize this critical organization, the JOC, in their software.

Nussbaum in a second posting for today, writes the following highlights from what he has entitled "Fear in Davos"
It’s midnight and I’ve talked with maybe 20 really smart people so far at Davos (yep, very dense population of very smart people at the World Economic Forum) and the consensus is that a deep fear is running through the conference this year. Things could be much worse, is the message.
And,
One senior public European figure told me “First we had the financial crisis. We still have that plus an economic crisis. Now we’re getting both plus a political crisis. This is getting ugly.”
We can chase new ideas around the table for a number of years. We no longer have that time or luxury. Understanding that using the JOC is the real key to innovation in the industry is something that I have been doing for the last 5 years. The idea of using the JOC has been thought through to the point where a total overall vision (the Draft Specification) is ready to be implemented. It details what using the JOC could provide if we built this software. Wasting time thinking of new ways to organize is unnecessary.

Critical to this possibility is the ability of a community to take the Draft Specification and produce a Preliminary Specification. But this community, which is very large and understands what I have been writing about, is ready to move. The oil and gas people in Davos are not the ones that are going to see these changes implemented. It is you the reader of this web log, and the concerned member of the oil and gas industry that belongs in this community, please join me here.

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