— Michael Hussey Blog

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December, 2001 Monthly archive

Published as an addendum to a business plan written for an online entertainment concept

The new economy is by no means a fundamental shift in the capabilities of capitalism. However, what excites many people is that we now have at our disposal technology that empowers individuals light years beyond even a few years ago. In order to fulfill the promise, we must utilize the fullest efficiency provided to us by such technologies. Too many potentially profitable models turned sour after entrepreneurs used venture investments to hire large staffs in an effort to amass as many talented minds as possible. By lacking the understanding of an individual’s new found empowerment, unknowing managers wasted untold dollars by hiring more employees than were necessary to succeed. The overlap of the job and employee-capability was a huge problem leading to innumerable wasted resources and man-hours. The new economy is really about a fundamental shift in how the division of labor is applied with individual-empowering technology.

Because through the use of today’s technology a single industrious person can now accomplish tasks that used to take many people’s simultaneous labor, unprecedented amounts of wealth may be generated by individuals practicing a profitable idea. Execution matters; individuals matter.

Every day, fewer individuals will be needed to execute projects on a given scale. Of course, this is the history of capitalism. Rather than focusing management on repetition and labor uniformity throughout the production process, the individual laborer is now enabled to accept many more responsibilities because the labor time required to complete a given task has decreased in many instances infinitesimally, although always to varying degrees. To dedicate an individual of talent to one specific and menial task is not only a waste of resources: it creates overlapping skill sets when this individual may have successfully completed many such tasks on their own. This problem, so common to the dot-com bust, causes wasted capital outlays as a result of too much employee down-time; it also offers cause for the employee to become distracted from the goals of the company.

Thus, the new economy continues to increase our capabilities of specialization, and individuals are capable of eliminating many previously necessary man hours. However, because the vast amount of wealth production possible today via new technology is hard to fathom by many, management decisions lacking the vision of how much an individual can accomplish in relatively so little time, have limited the labor pool’s production possibilities.

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