The Business Big Picture Course™
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A sound 'big picture' understanding of the world, one that brings together the key practical factors and dimensions of everyday life, is essentially important to the average person. It determines how both individual and collective resources are allocated. And in a business-centric society, that 'big picture' should provide systemic perspectives on humans, companies, and economies.
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BizBigPic™ — a course providing young learners with a unified 'business big picture' understanding to power their future — aims to do just that.
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Evolving from its latest derivations as Cristian Mitreanu's recent Stanford Continuing Studies courses BUS 93 Corporate Strategy at Scale: Emerging Thinking on How Companies and Economies Evolve and BUS 284 Create Better Product Stories Using Deep Customer Insights, "the business big picture course" is currently in development and will be available soon.
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The course will feature a free tier for personal use and for families with young learners. Paid licenses for high schools, colleges, and training organizations will be made available later. And a certification program for trainers will be subsequently developed. [We are also looking for partners and investors.]
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The course BizBigPic™ — along with the game OFMOS®, the character and book Spointra™, and the strategy toolkit RedefiningStrategy.com™ — is one of the key experiences of the Ofmos Universe, all revolving around the ofmos theory of business and the one-need theory of behavior. [Recently separated into individual properties for more clarity, all associated websites are currently live but under construction. Thank you for your understanding!]
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BizBigPic™ — A Foundational Course
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About 1 in 5 (or 20%) of all Bachelors degree issued annually in the United States have their primary focus on Business. This share has been fairly consistent and significantly higher than any other discipline over the past 40 years, translating into 386,201 college graduates in 2018 alone. So even an alien, seeing these numbers for the first time, would easily conclude that we are most likely to be a business-driven society.
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Yet, most high schools don't teach Business. And many programs offering MBA degrees, the pinnacle of business education, have started to definitively close their doors or entirely migrate online (simply delaying their impending demise). While we should keep in mind the more generalized lack of innovation in the filed since the nineties, the main culprit here has been the lack of a 'big picture' theory that would have provided interdisciplinary "glue" and meaning.
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The course BizBigPic™ puts forth a unified behavioral explanation of humans as well as companies and economies, laying the foundation for a sound holistic understanding of our everyday reality. Its 'big picture' offers both scaffolding and umbrella for all of a learner's business-related knowledge and experiences. And with that, it creates a must-have building block for any robust education journey.
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1. Ofmos is a language of the business big picture, providing an understanding and a vocabulary for explaining how companies and economies behave at large scales. Just like a surfer understands the waves without the need for understanding that same phenomenon at the molecular level, so is the ofmos theory useful in explaining companies and economies at large scale.
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2. An ofmos (noun, plural: ofmos), or offering-market cosmos, is an abstract business world defined by an offering and a set of customers with the same behavior relative to that particular offering. It is the simplest kind of business world, and a basic building block in describing the behavior of companies and economies. Age-old concepts such as market segments and personas are basically attempts of framing such an entity in a top-down manner.
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3. All business activity can be seen as a collection of ofmos, each defined by an offering and a set of customers with the same behavior relative to that particular offering. As knowledge about the offering accumulates in the marketplace, the behavior of the participants changes. Viewed through the ‘ofmos lens,’ that accumulation of knowledge translates into two (and only two) fundamental forces that act upon an ofmos: Commoditization and Innovation.
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4. An economy can be seen as a collection of commoditizing ofmos. As a visual metaphor, think of a storm on a doppler radar. Specifically, imagine that every transaction in the economy is represented on a map as a dot that disappears after one hour. Over time, these dots will form small clusters, which are basically ofmos that are now defined in a bottom-up manner. They will all stay grouped in a larger, dynamic shape that —through its position, spread, density, and change rate — describes the overall state of the economy and society.
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5. The term ofmos can be used to refer to two slightly different types of entities. At the economy level, the offering that defines an ofmos refers to the entire product category and all transactions from all competitors in that business space. That type of ofmos could be referred to as tofmos (total offering-market cosmos). At the company level, the offering that defines an ofmos refers only to the company's offering. Ofmos have less predictability than the broader tofmos.
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6. The company "rides" inside the economy. Every company is basically a collection of "slices" of some of the broader ofmos (a.k.a. tofmos) that define the economy. Given that the evolution of these "slices" is less predictable than the evolution of the broader ofmos, the behavior of a company is inherently harder to predict than the behavior of the economy.
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7. The ofmos lens, or the ofmos language of the big picture, allows us to look at the business world like a physicist and see the company as a complex system of particle-like entities inside a larger system of particle-like entities.
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8. As a visual metaphor, a company's footprint or signature throughout its entire life span can be viewed as a storm in a planet's atmosphere, itself a metaphor for the longer-lasting and more predictable economy.
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9. Managing a system of particle-like entities is inherently difficult. The Strategizing Pyramid for Enduring Companies framework offers guidance for a structured and systematic approach that any company of any size can use. With its four levels of activities and goals (Customer-Need Centricity, Focus-center Alignment, Portfolio-Level Synergies, and Ofmos-Level Strategies), the Strategizing Pyramid answers the three essential questions every top executive should be clear about: What needs are we addressing?, What ofmos (offering-market cosmos) are we in?, and What approaches are we taking?
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"This structured approach to the customer needs and the corresponding product functionalities reveals where all major efficiencies (i.e., higher speed, shorter time) can be created. And it also reveals where the opportunities for creating economic lock-ins (i.e., monopolies) across and along the data/information flows are (see image below). As a result, it provides a clearer way of thinking about platforms in the product context: a basic unified set of functionalities that addresses all needs within a clearly-defined domain, allowing for further customer augmentation and offering economic lock-in to the provider." — from Generic Platforms in the Product Context
This framework will soon be available under a Creative Commons license for general use by business professionals, as part of the strategy toolkit RedefiningStrategy.com, one of the key pillars of the Ofmos Universe. |
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Play OFMOS® Classic abstractly, like you play chess or other similar games. Better yet, play it to make business learning more accessible and meaningful.
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