The Business of One era requires new business planning and management practices

A new generation of incredibly powerful, flexible and responsive businesses is reshaping markets. Their ability to serve single customers at scale is what TBR terms the “Business of One.” The environmental forces triggering this shift are vast. Information velocity accelerates globally; digital information expands exponentially; competitive advantage windows compress rapidly; task work automates; acute labor shortages persist in new skill work; and new business risks pressure public policy. In the aggregate this confluence of technology-enabled business factors disrupts traditional business, education and public policy best practices. Technology vendor and enterprise business models must evolve, as evidenced by the market capitalizations of relatively new businesses such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (FAANG) while more established firms have languished. In the Business of One era, success will rest upon rapid iterations rather than deliberate cadences, ecosystem participation for assembling complementary assets rather than amassing scale advantage, subscription monetization cycles rather than transactional product sales, and highly automated processes and customer access points rather than labor-intensive task work and repetitive, overlapping paper trails to establish commercial trust.