What does your platform look like?

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Last year the Economist review of Marc Levinson's book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger wrote

"A far greater stir had been caused some 50 years earlier when the Ideal-X, an oil tanker left over from the second world war, berthed at Newark, New Jersey. Cranes loaded 58 large metal boxes which, five days later, were unloaded in Houston, Texas, onto lorries which hauled them to their destinations. It was this event, argues Marc Levinson, that marked the birth of the shipping container........

Consider the economics. Loading loose cargo, a back-breaking, laborious business, onto a medium-sized ship cost $5.83 a ton in 1956. McLean calculated that loading the Ideal-X cost less than $0.16 a ton. All of a sudden, the cost of shipping products to another destination was no longer prohibitively expensive.

This opened up all sorts of possibilities. Instead of manufacturing goods locally, a company could afford to replace its overcrowded multi-storey factory in Brooklyn with one in Pennsylvania, where taxes, electricity and other costs were lower, and then ship its goods to New York in a container. Later the factory might move to Mexico; it is now probably in China."

The Economist recently wrote on the new generation of containerships in Maxing Out

"WITH world merchandise trade growing by around 15% a year and China's exports at nearly twice that rate, the boom in container shipping is set to run and run. Trade between China, India, America and Europe accounts for 65% of the 250m-plus containers moved around the world each year."

The first ship of a new generation is described

"The mightiest of the new leviathans is the Emma Maersk, which started ferrying boxes of toys from China to Europe in time for Christmas last year. It can carry 11,000 20-foot containers (TEUs), or the equivalent in the 40-foot size that now prevails, in its 397-metre hull. A train carrying that load would be 71 kilometres (44 miles) long. The Emma Maersk's huge diesel engine has the power of 1,200 cars and its anchor weighs as much as five African elephants (about 30 tonnes). "

When Emma Maersk docked at Felixstowe before Christmas it made all the national papers and TV as it marked another step in the evolution of the platform: the container.

Containers can be seen everywhere and the box is used in many ways not envisaged 50 years ago. Like the railway wagons of a previous generation they make handy places for humans. I visited a garden in the NGS scheme a week or two back that had a wagon in the back garden

to support all the activities necessary for a productive pursuit. Caterina Fake discovered a container building. But whereas the container is the platform I'm not sure the wagon is. I suspect that it was the steam engine.

Marc Levinson wrote

“Containerization is a remarkable achievement. No one foresaw how the box would transform everything it touched—from ships and ports to patterns of global trade. Containerization is a monument to the most powerful law in economics, that of unanticipated consequences. … This history ought to be humbling to fans of modern management methods. Careful planning and thorough analysis, those business school basics, may have their place, but they provide little guidance in the face of disruptive changes that alter an industry’s very fundamentals.”

The point here is that realising what is THE platform on which to build a robust organisation is key to success. I wrote before about the importance of growth platforms. They don't have to be as incredible as a box that changed the world but it could be the box that changed your world! A well chosen platform acts as a foundation underpinning the organisation's projects. As Isaac Newton wrote in a letter to Robert Hooke, Feb. 5, 1676

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

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The challenge is whose shoulders?.... which in turn means having the foresight to think hard about what you already have that is a platform to stand on . If you can identify that platform it means you don't have to start from scratch everytime, reusing the knowledge and artifacts from the previous iteration. So Apple doesn't reinvent iTunes everytime it creates a new product but evolves its utility to allow new products to be created; these have an interesting impact on how we experience our everyday lives.  Rolls-Royce creates and demonstrates new compressor technologies and then uses the demonstrator as the basis for a generation of uprated or new variants of its entire range. But the platform for Rolls-Royce's success is in continuous health monitoring, building on all its competence's to ensure airlines keep flying their planes. It may be that understanding how a packing line "feels" the packaging is a platform to increase scope to design packs that are a different experience for the customer but the same from the line's point of view... adaptability as a platform! Which means developing Edge as well as Core competencies(free but sign-up required). As the article Mathematical Laws of Biology shows, Edge competencies often come from non-core competent people so a firm of Phd chemists might find out it is the manufacturing line engineer that recognises useful edge knowledge.

So what does our box look like? And will we stand on it?