The Agile Executive

Readers of the posts Customer Intimacy and Enterprise Software Innovator’s Dilemma might recall two observations made in this blog:

• The dissatisfactory state of affairs in enterprise software as characterized by Crawford and Mathews in their description of Consumer Underworld relationship between vendor and customer:

Ignore my needs… Be inconsistent, unclear, or  misleading in your pricing… Offer me poor quality merchandise and services that I can’t use… Give me a reason to tell my friends and relatives to stay away…

• The potential of Open Source Software to become a disruptive technology in the sense articulated by Christensen:

Open Source Software is becoming ”good enough”. It has already met or will soon be meeting the minimum requirements of the enterprise customer. By  so doing, Open Source Software will steadily gain ground from traditional enterprise software vendors

In a Viewpoint published in the July 2 issue of BusinessWeek,  former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff cites the following statistics:

…  only 10% of Americans now saying they trust large corporations, according to the Apr. 8 edition of the Financial Trust Index. Some 77% of Americans say they refuse to buy products or services from a company they distrust, according to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer. [Highlights by IG].

The statistics given by Zuboff link the two observations cited above. One might argue that Crawford, Mathews and Zuboff deal primarily with consumer behavior, not with procurement of enterprise software. True that this argument might be, I sincerely doubt that the two worlds can be kept apart. At least some of  the folks who license and use enterprise software must be represented in the data given by Zuboff and are likely to act accordingly in their corporate roles. Moreover, her statistics seem to be quite consistent with the recent warning to high-tech issued by Christensen:

If you’re curious to know what lies in store for Seattle and Silicon Valley, spend a day walking around Detroit with the Ghost of Christmas Future.