I'm going to talk a little bit about strategy and its relationship with technology. We tend to think of business strategy as being a rather abstract body of essentially economic thought, perhaps rather timeless. I'm going to argue that, in fact, business strategy has always been premised on assumptions about technology, that those assumptions are changing, and, in fact, changing quite dramatically, and that therefore what that will drive us to is a different concept of what we mean by business strategy.
我今天想谈一下战略 以及它与科技的关系. 我们通常认为商业战略 是一个非常抽象的概念, 是一个仅仅关于经济的想法。 甚至可能是没有终止的。 我想对这一观点发出挑战。 实际上,商业策略都是以 与科技相关的假设为前提的。 那些假设在不断变化中, 并且实际上变化非常大 所以这种假设引领的方向 和我们原来对于商业策略的概念 有很大不同
Let me start, if I may, with a little bit of history. The idea of strategy in business owes its origins to two intellectual giants: Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, and Michael Porter, professor at the Harvard Business School. Henderson's central idea was what you might call the Napoleonic idea of concentrating mass against weakness, of overwhelming the enemy. What Henderson recognized was that, in the business world, there are many phenomena which are characterized by what economists would call increasing returns -- scale, experience. The more you do of something, disproportionately the better you get. And therefore he found a logic for investing in such kinds of overwhelming mass in order to achieve competitive advantage. And that was the first introduction of essentially a military concept of strategy into the business world.
请允许我 以一小段历史作为开头 商业领域策略这一概念 起源于两位天才: BCG的创始人,布鲁斯 亨德森 以及哈佛商学院的教授 迈克尔 波特。 亨德森的中心理论是: 集中力量 对付敌人弱点的拿破仑理念 亨德森认可的是: 在商业领域, 许多包含被经济学家称作报酬递增 的现象,比如: 规模,经历 你做的越多 会不成比例地获得好的结果 因此,他发现一种投资逻辑 用这种大规模投入 以此获得竞争优势 那便是历史上首次 将军事领域中战术的概念 引入到商业领域。
Porter agreed with that premise, but he qualified it. He pointed out, correctly, that that's all very well, but businesses actually have multiple steps to them. They have different components, and each of those components might be driven by a different kind of strategy. A company or a business might actually be advantaged in some activities but disadvantaged in others. He formed the concept of the value chain, essentially the sequence of steps with which a, shall we say, raw material, becomes a component, becomes assembled into a finished product, and then is distributed, for example, and he argued that advantage accrued to each of those components, and that the advantage of the whole was in some sense the sum or the average of that of its parts. And this idea of the value chain was predicated on the recognition that what holds a business together is transaction costs, that in essence you need to coordinate, organizations are more efficient at coordination than markets, very often, and therefore the nature and role and boundaries of the cooperation are defined by transaction costs. It was on those two ideas, Henderson's idea of increasing returns to scale and experience, and Porter's idea of the value chain, encompassing heterogenous elements, that the whole edifice of business strategy was subsequently erected.
波特赞同这种假设 但他也提出了一些限制理论 他指出,这一假设的确成立 但是从商业上来说它需要更多的步骤 它们有不同的组成部分 而且每一个组成部分 可能都是由不同的战略引导的 一个公司或者经济模式可能在一些活动中占有优势 但可能在另一些活动中有劣势 他提出了“价值链”这一概念 实际上,这些步骤的顺序是这样的 比如说,一个原材料成为零部件 然后被组装成最终产品 之后它又被分销出去 他认为优势产生于 每一个组成部分中 而整体的优势 在于所有部分的 总和或者平均值 这种价值链的观点 基于对一种理论的认可 该理论认为交易成本使商业整体化 基本上,你需要合作 这些机构在合作中 通常比市场更高效 因此合作的本质、角色和界限 被定义为交易成本 它是基于这两个理念的 亨德森关于规模化和经验化 增加收益的理念 和波特的价值链的理念 围绕着异质的元素 这些元素使整个商业战略的大厦 随之建立起来
Now what I'm going to argue is that those premises are, in fact, being invalidated. First of all, let's think about transaction costs. There are really two components to transaction costs. One is about processing information, and the other is about communication. These are the economics of processing and communicating as they have evolved over a long period of time. As we all know from so many contexts, they have been radically transformed since the days when Porter and Henderson first formulated their theories. In particular, since the mid-'90s, communications costs have actually been falling even faster than transaction costs, which is why communication, the Internet, has exploded in such a dramatic fashion. Now, those falling transaction costs have profound consequences, because if transaction costs are the glue that hold value chains together, and they are falling, there is less to economize on. There is less need for vertically integrated organization, and value chains at least can break up. They needn't necessarily, but they can. In particular, it then becomes possible for a competitor in one business to use their position in one step of the value chain in order to penetrate or attack or disintermediate the competitor in another.
我现在要反驳的是 这些前提实际上渐渐不成立了 首先,我们来看交易成本 交易成本有两个组成部分 一个是加工信息,另一个是通信 这些是加工和通信经济学 因为它们已经发展了很长时间 正如我们所知道的 它们从根本上改变了 从波特和亨德森 首次提出他们的理论时 也就是说,从90年代中期开始 通信成本已经下降了 甚至比交易成本更快地下降 所以通信、互联网才能 如此迅速地发展 如今,这些下降的交易成本 造成了更深远的影响 如果交易成本是 粘合价值链的因素,而且它还在下降 那么可利用的资源就少了 对垂直化整合机构的需求减少了 价值链也会随之断裂 他们不一定必须断裂,但是很可能 特别是对于同一商业中的竞争者来说 他们就可能 利用其在价值链中的位置 以此来对对手进行渗透、攻击 或作非居间化交易
That is not just an abstract proposition. There are many very specific stories of how that actually happened. A poster child example was the encyclopedia business. The encyclopedia business in the days of leatherbound books was basically a distribution business. Most of the cost was the commission to the salesmen. The CD-ROM and then the Internet came along, new technologies made the distribution of knowledge many orders of magnitude cheaper, and the encyclopedia industry collapsed. It's now, of course, a very familiar story. This, in fact, more generally was the story of the first generation of the Internet economy. It was about falling transaction costs breaking up value chains and therefore allowing disintermediation, or what we call deconstruction.
这不仅是一个抽象的议题 我这里有一些具体的故事 告诉我们这些是如何发生的 百科全书业就是一个很典型的例子 在皮面精装的时代 百科全书行业 基本上是分销业务 大部分成本都归于销售员的佣金 光盘和网络随后盛行 新技术大大降低了 知识传播的成本 百科全书行业随之崩塌 当然,这个故事听上去很熟悉 实际上这是第一代 网络经济的普遍现象 这就是交易成本下降 使价值链断裂的例子 随之而来的是脱媒现象 或者说解构理论
One of the questions I was occasionally asked was, well, what's going to replace the encyclopedia when Britannica no longer has a business model? And it was a while before the answer became manifest. Now, of course, we know what it is: it's the Wikipedia. Now what's special about the Wikipedia is not its distribution. What's special about the Wikipedia is the way it's produced. The Wikipedia, of course, is an encyclopedia created by its users. And this, in fact, defines what you might call the second decade of the Internet economy, the decade in which the Internet as a noun became the Internet as a verb. It became a set of conversations, the era in which user-generated content and social networks became the dominant phenomenon. Now what that really meant in terms of the Porter-Henderson framework was the collapse of certain kinds of economies of scale. It turned out that tens of thousands of autonomous individuals writing an encyclopedia could do just as good a job, and certainly a much cheaper job, than professionals in a hierarchical organization. So basically what was happening was that one layer of this value chain was becoming fragmented, as individuals could take over where organizations were no longer needed.
曾经有人问我 当大英百科全书不再有商业模型的时候 什么会取代百科全书? 我被问及这个问题时,答案还没有那么明朗 现在,我们当然知道答案就是维基百科 维基百科的特别之处不是在于它的传播模式 而是在于它的生产方式 维基百科是一种 由用户自己创造的百科全书 这实际上就定义了 第二代网络经济 在这十年间,网络有一个名词 转变为一个动词 它成为一系列的转化 一个用户创造内容和社交网络 成为主流现象的时代 因此 对于波特-哈德逊体系 我们通常指的是某种程度上规模经济效益的瓦解 事实证明,由千千万万个 个体自发所写出的百科全书 也是非常出色并不逊于专业人员 并且由于是自发完成,这一工作 变得比由层级组织中的专业人员完成的更加便宜 所以 由于个人可以取代曾经由组织或者公司完成的事情 价值链中的某一层 已经开始断裂
But there's another question that obviously this graph poses, which is, okay, we've gone through two decades -- does anything distinguish the third? And what I'm going to argue is that indeed something does distinguish the third, and it maps exactly on to the kind of Porter-Henderson logic that we've been talking about. And that is, about data. If we go back to around 2000, a lot of people were talking about the information revolution, and it was indeed true that the world's stock of data was growing, indeed growing quite fast. but it was still at that point overwhelmingly analog. We go forward to 2007, not only had the world's stock of data exploded, but there'd been this massive substitution of digital for analog. And more important even than that, if you look more carefully at this graph, what you will observe is that about a half of that digital data is information that has an I.P. address. It's on a server or it's on a P.C. But having an I.P. address means that it can be connected to any other data that has an I.P. address. It means it becomes possible to put together half of the world's knowledge in order to see patterns, an entirely new thing. If we run the numbers forward to today, it probably looks something like this. We're not really sure. If we run the numbers forward to 2020, we of course have an exact number, courtesy of IDC. It's curious that the future is so much more predictable than the present. And what it implies is a hundredfold multiplication in the stock of information that is connected via an I.P. address. Now, if the number of connections that we can make is proportional to the number of pairs of data points, a hundredfold multiplication in the quantity of data is a ten-thousandfold multiplication in the number of patterns that we can see in that data, this just in the last 10 or 11 years. This, I would submit, is a sea change, a profound change in the economics of the world that we live in.
但是,从这个表里,可以非常明显地看出有一个问题 我们已经经历了两个时代—— 那么这第三个时代有什么不同吗? 那么我将要试图说服你们的是,是的 这第三个时代确实是与前两个不同 并且这种不同 恰好是我们所说的波特-哈德逊体系逻辑的映射 这就是,数据 如果我们回到2000年 许多人都在谈论关于信息变革 并且这个世界的数据储存 在当时也在增加,并且是飞速的增加 但是在那个时候是可以进行大规模模拟的 我们前进到2007年 这时候不仅有数据的全球股市发生爆炸 还有数字模拟的 大规模替代 更重要的是 如果你仔细看这个表 你会发现接近一半的 数据都会有一个 IP地址 这个地址会在服务器上或者个人电脑上 但是有IP地址意味着 它可以连接到任何一个 有IP地址的数据 这意味着 将这个世界一半的知识放在一起变为可能 来研究这些配对 一个全新的东西 如果我们将运行的数字放在今天 它看起来可能是这个样子 我们并不确定 如果我们把他们放在2020年 我们当然有一个确定的数字, 非常奇妙的,对于未来的预测将比对现在的预测更加容易 这暗示了通过IP地址的连接 成百倍乘法的信息 储藏在里面 如今,如果这些IP之间的连接数与成对的数据点 是成比例增加的话 我们看到这个数据中 上百倍的数据数量的增加 将会是这些配对的 上千倍增长 而这,仅仅发生在过去的十年到十一年间 这个,我可以说,是一个非常海量的变化 在我们所处的这个世界里 这个经济变化是非常深刻的
The first human genome, that of James Watson, was mapped as the culmination of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000, and it took about 200 million dollars and about 10 years of work to map just one person's genomic makeup. Since then, the costs of mapping the genome have come down. In fact, they've come down in recent years very dramatically indeed, to the point where the cost is now below 1,000 dollars, and it's confidently predicted that by the year 2015 it will be below 100 dollars -- a five or six order of magnitude drop in the cost of genomic mapping in just a 15-year period, an extraordinary phenomenon. Now, in the days when mapping a genome cost millions, or even tens of thousands, it was basically a research enterprise. Scientists would gather some representative people, and they would see patterns, and they would try and make generalizations about human nature and disease from the abstract patterns they find from these particular selected individuals. But when the genome can be mapped for 100 bucks, 99 dollars while you wait, then what happens is, it becomes retail. It becomes above all clinical. You go the doctor with a cold, and if he or she hasn't done it already, the first thing they do is map your genome, at which point what they're now doing is not starting from some abstract knowledge of genomic medicine and trying to work out how it applies to you, but they're starting from your particular genome. Now think of the power of that. Think of where that takes us when we can combine genomic data with clinical data with data about drug interactions with the kind of ambient data that devices like our phone and medical sensors will increasingly be collecting. Think what happens when we collect all of that data and we can put it together in order to find patterns we wouldn't see before. This, I would suggest, perhaps it will take a while, but this will drive a revolution in medicine. Fabulous, lots of people talk about this.
在2000年人类的 第一个詹姆斯瓦特生的 基因图谱的绘制 是人类基因组绘制工程的顶峰 它耗费了2亿美元和十年的功夫 才绘制出一个人的基因图谱 从那之后,绘制基因图谱的花费开始下降 而事实上,这些年这个花费 下降得非常厉害 现在已经下降到不到1000美元 并且我们非常肯定的预测 到2015年这个 花费会下降到100美元—— 基因组绘制的花费 在仅仅15年间 下降了五个或者六个级数 这是一个非常不寻常的现象 当基因组绘制的花费在百万级别 甚至数亿美元的级别时 绘制组是一个研究机构 科学家们会搜集一些具有代表性的人 然后他们会研究这些人的配对 最后在这些具体挑选出来的个体中 科学家们从找出的抽象配对里 概括出人性和疾病 但是,当基因组绘制 只需要100美元,或者99美元立等可取 那么这个行业将变成零售业 它将成为最重要的临床方式 当你生病去找医生的时候 他们会要求你首先做一个基因绘制 如果你还没有做过 医生也不再会由一些抽象模糊的 基因药物治疗开始 看你适合哪种药物 而是会直接找到那个具体的基因然后开始治疗 想想这个东西的能量 想想当我们可以 将基因数据和 临床数据结合起来 这些临床数据是药物与周围环境交互产生的 并且这些数据可以通过 我们的手机设备和医学仪器 进行不断地收集 想想当我们可以收集所有的数据 并且可以将它们放在一起 找出我们从来不曾见过的配对组合 我会觉得,或许需要一段时间 但是这将会是医药界的一次革命 很多人都觉得这是非常棒的一次革命
But there's one thing that doesn't get much attention. How is that model of colossal sharing across all of those kinds of databases compatible with the business models of institutions and organizations and corporations that are involved in this business today? If your business is based on proprietary data, if your competitive advantage is defined by your data, how on Earth is that company or is that society in fact going to achieve the value that's implicit in the technology? They can't.
是这里有一件事并没有引起太多的注意 这个所有类型的数据 进行巨大共享的模式 如何与所有机构组织和企业 都参与商业的模式 进行兼容 如果你的生意主要以产业数据为基础 你的竞争优势则在于你的数据 究竟这个公司或者这个社会 如何实现这个 隐藏于技术中的价值?他们不能
So essentially what's happening here, and genomics is merely one example of this, is that technology is driving the natural scaling of the activity beyond the institutional boundaries within which we have been used to thinking about it, and in particular beyond the institutional boundaries in terms of which business strategy as a discipline is formulated. The basic story here is that what used to be vertically integrated, oligopolistic competition among essentially similar kinds of competitors is evolving, by one means or another, from a vertical structure to a horizontal one. Why is that happening? It's happening because transaction costs are plummeting and because scale is polarizing. The plummeting of transaction costs weakens the glue that holds value chains together, and allows them to separate. The polarization of scale economies towards the very small -- small is beautiful -- allows for scalable communities to substitute for conventional corporate production. The scaling in the opposite direction, towards things like big data, drive the structure of business towards the creation of new kinds of institutions that can achieve that scale. But either way, the typically vertical structure gets driven to becoming more horizontal.
本质上来说 基因组绘制仅仅只是一个例子 现在技术正在推动 商业活动规模的自然形成 这一变动超越了我们通常意义下所认识的 机构之间的界限 尤其是超越了 由商业战略为纪律 而形成的界限 这个故事的基础在于 曾经是在相似类型的 几个主要竞争者之间的 垂直结构、寡头垄断控制下的竞争 通过一种或者其它的方式,由垂直结构变为了水平结构 为什么会有这样的变化? 这是因为交易成本的急剧下降 以及规模的两极分化 交易成本的急剧下降 削弱了使价值链聚集的粘合物 并使价值链分化 经济规模的两级分化 使规模趋于小型化——小即是美—— 得可伸缩的社区经济 替代了传统化企业生产 反规模化的趋势 就像大数据 促使商业的结构 开始向可以完成这种规模的 新型机构发展 但是总之,典型的垂直结构 已经变得越来越水平化
The logic isn't just about big data. If we were to look, for example, at the telecommunications industry, you can tell the same story about fiber optics. If we look at the pharmaceutical industry, or, for that matter, university research, you can say exactly the same story about so-called "big science." And in the opposite direction, if we look, say, at the energy sector, where all the talk is about how households will be efficient producers of green energy and efficient conservers of energy, that is, in fact, the reverse phenomenon. That is the fragmentation of scale because the very small can substitute for the traditional corporate scale.
这个逻辑并不仅仅指的大数据 比如说,电信通讯行业 或者相同的,纤维光学 如果我们看一下医药行业 或者就此而言,大学研究 你同样可以由此 得出所谓的“大科学” 我们来看反方向的 比如能源部门 大家都在讨论如何使家庭 变为绿色能源的有效产生源 和能源的有效利用者 事实上,这是一个相反的现象 正是由于规模化的破碎 而由小规模来替代 传统企业规模
Either way, what we are driven to is this horizontalization of the structure of industries, and that implies fundamental changes in how we think about strategy. It means, for example, that we need to think about strategy as the curation of these kinds of horizontal structure, where things like business definition and even industry definition are actually the outcomes of strategy, not something that the strategy presupposes. It means, for example, we need to work out how to accommodate collaboration and competition simultaneously. Think about the genome. We need to accommodate the very large and the very small simultaneously. And we need industry structures that will accommodate very, very different motivations, from the amateur motivations of people in communities to maybe the social motivations of infrastructure built by governments, or, for that matter, cooperative institutions built by companies that are otherwise competing, because that is the only way that they can get to scale.
总之,我们极力 想要达到的就是这种产业的水平结构 这暗示了我们所认为的 战略的根本变化 这意味着 我们需要将策略认为是 这一类水平结构的管理者 因为商业定义 甚至行业定义 是战略的成果 而不是战略的预先假定 因此,我们需要制定出 如何同时满足 合作与竞争 思考一下基因普绘制 我们需要同时绘制 大基因组和小基因组 因此,我们需要行业结构 可以同时满足不同的动机 从社区中人们的业余动机 到政府修建基础设施的 社会动机 或者,就此而言,公司 以其他方式建立的竞争合作机构 因为这是他们唯一可以进行规模化的方式
These kinds of transformations render the traditional premises of business strategy obsolete. They drive us into a completely new world. They require us, whether we are in the public sector or the private sector, to think very fundamentally differently about the structure of business, and, at last, it makes strategy interesting again.
这些类型的转变 得商业战略的传统前提变得过时 他们使我们进入一个全新的世界 他们要求我们 不论是在公共部分,还是在私有部分 都以一种完全不同的方式 来思考商业结构 并且,使战略再一次变得有趣生动
Thank you.
谢谢大家
(Applause)
鼓掌