extracting value and exploiting it

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“Not adding value is the same as taking it away.”

Seth Godin

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“Truth has two main problems. Truth tends to be complicated and truth tends to be painful.”

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• Opening note/warning: let me be clear that what I am suggesting today is simply representative of business as it exists today, not how business should exist. Soe part may be maddening to those who, like me, who believe in fostering emergent, dynamic, generalist-skewed, organizational behavior. Just imagine how maddening parts of this were just in typing.

Value-extracting creates nothing new: it simply moves money around. It does not grow the economy, it does not lead to innovation, and it contributes to greater inequality. Well. That is certainly one vein of wisdom. But let’s talk about an uncomfortable version of value extraction. Yeah. We talk in business about value creation all the time. Maybe we should talk about value extraction just a bit more. Why? Because a lot of business is extracting value and ideas and thoughts from semi-formed value, ideas and thoughts in the people around you. Oh. And to exploit those extractions. Yeah. I just said that. That sounds bad, doesn’t it”? Let me explain. The business world is, and has been, a specialized world for a while. Decades and decades of ‘specialize to optimize your career’ has wrought a world of, well, specialists. And because business is business, they have tripled down on that specialization encouraging people to invest their outside energy honing that specialization and honing their ‘productivity skills’ surrounding that specialization. As a consequence, that means the business world is strewn with specialists who really aren’t adept at offering value, and value creation, ideas beyond their constrained specialist zone. I am not suggesting that zone cannot be deep and valuable, just that it isn’t particularly broad and valuable in a larger scope. Given what I just said, a minority of good business people are good at plucking out the ideas, thoughts, skills from the people around them. Uhm. Extracting and exploiting.

Which leads me to best practices.

Best practices extract value. Yeah. I just said that. Let me slice this two ways. It extracts value potential in a creation standpoint (bad) and it extracts value from those involved in the process (semi-good). The latter is actually the real reason leaders love process. It extracts replicable value, not optimal value, from the organization. But let’s be clear, management loves to use best practices to extract value and exploit worker “time”. Once again, a significant portion of this comes back to that specialization thing. Business has this weird belief that if you reduce everything it will expand, well, something (I am unclear what). Anyway. I am not anti-process, but using process TO extract is wrongheaded. Process should be a baseline ‘way to work’ so that workers have an opportunity to think and create the shit that an ‘extractor’ will be scanning for.

Which leads me to technology.

Here is the weird thing. Much of what technology offers business, at least as implemented, extracts from value. Its weird because we should be seeking, relentlessly I may add, to use business as a value creator. Anyway. Technology gets you both coming and going. Coming in it extracts effectiveness because for the most part people are asked to fit to technology rather than technology augmenting people. Going technology gets you with technical debt which inevitably clogs up any chance of increasing value. That said. Let’s get back to the uncomfortable part. Technology, used well, can extract the value from the minds of people. Some people may suggest this is augmenting people. Shit. I am a proponent of technology crafted to augment people. But for today I am discussing pure and simple extraction. While much of digital transformation is useless in terms of expenditures and effectiveness, there are many technological tools available to isolate individual’s who have the knowledge, wisdom, skills and thoughts that can be extracted from the organizational machine and incorporated into the larger value creation machine. It may sound creepy to say that but, what the hell, if I am going to infringe n people’s privacy I may as well figure out how to do so in a way that permits the individual to contribute beyond their specific skill cage.

Which leads me to how technology could augment positive extraction.

Within the next decade we ought to develop tools that would allow us to interact not only with information, but also with simulations and predicted futures, concepts, that might emerge depending on the dynamic marketplace and the choices we might make to exploit the market opportunities. It would be silly to ignore the fact technology offers the best opportunity to do this. knowledge graphs, AI which analyzes computer usage, LLMs which pluck out individuals for the extractors to go seek out. There are a number of semi-creepy ways to extract and exploit – in the interest of generating business value.

Which leads me to ‘culture fit’.

Oddly, or maybe paradoxically, hiring for culture is counter to value extraction. Yeah. Culture fit extracts value potential from the organization which means if you are scanning about seeking to extract dormant value you will see less and less to extract. It becomes a reductionary universe in which ideas and thoughts inevitably get smaller and smaller and incremental value creation gets smaller and smaller. Circling back to the thought that part of today’s business world is actually figuring out how to extract valuable thoughts and ideas from an organization, culture fit makes that more difficult. Culture fit will tend to emphasize not only similar thinking but emphasize specialization. Uhm. Both reduce the possibilities for larger value creation thinking, thoughts and ideas.

In the end.

I know it sounds horrible to speak about extract and exploit in some semi-positive way, but it is kinda true in today’s business world. In order to maximize the potential in an organization you almost are forced to put people in a room that on the surface seem more a pain in the ass than a valuable contributor and, well, set out to extract from their strengths in order to exploit the knowledge to the benefit of the business. Ponder.