What are the “Hilbert Problems” of business?
Reasonable counter-question: “What’s a ‘Hilbert Problem’?”
Everyone say hello to Professor Hilbert.
In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert — one of the world’s most eminent mathematicians at the time — gave a famous lecture to the International Congress of Mathematicians. In his talk and in a related article, he laid out 23 problems that he took to be fundamental for his discipline to address in the 20th Century.
What will be the ends toward which the spirit of future generations of mathematicians will tend? What methods, what new facts will the new century reveal in the vast and rich field of mathematical thought?
These problems, Hilbert thought, were some of the the biggest, most central challenges facing mathematicians. Cracking any of them would constitute a major achievement for any mathematician, and indeed for the world of mathematics as a whole. Hilbert’s grouping of the problems fixed them firmly on the agenda of the mathematical world, and in the hundred-plus years since then, many of the problems have indeed been resolved. (You can see a full table of them here.)
Now, I don’t know about you, but I confess that I am not lying awake nights trying to pierce the veil of the Riemann hypothesis. My mathematical endeavors played out after I finished freshman-level calculus (and please don’t ask me to perform any differential equations now). But I do wonder what the equivalent of Hilbert’s 23 problems are for the business world.
So, all that to ask this:
What are the fundamental problems
that business needs to crack
in the 21st Century?
I’m fascinated to know what you think the best brains of the business world — or even me and my little brain — should be working on.
~
(Image via Wikipedia.)
Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship6 Comments so far
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1. Getting the white-collar business world to change their metrics for success.
Showing up to the office from 9-5 and putting in your 40 hours a week is a relic. Being in the office doesn’t mean you’re productive, just that you’re there.
Most professional work is becoming task or project based. Companies should determine how much output they need from an employee to justify their cost and structure their workload accordingly.
Professional workers should be developing their own time management skills so they can (with some accuracy) forecast how long certain tasks and projects will take.
Office hours, and resources, should be made available on flexible schedules so that work can get done in a timely manner while integrating into the natural flow of life.
(Caveat: Jobs that are known for pushing people past 40-hours could be considered to already be task-based. But, often times it’s either a competitive culture or poor management that requires more ‘face time’ without necessarily more work getting done.)
John — This is an EXCELLENT point. It’s one that’s being addressed six ways from Sunday by Cali & Jody with their ROWE method and with their forthcoming book, Why Work Sucks. I’ll be posting my review of this book soon.
Basically what we see are many, many instances where companies are keeping old, industrial-age metrics for work (esp. hours in the office) instead of thinking deeper about what the metrics SHOULD be in the post-industrial age.
How much time do we have?
*Fear* Fear of change, fear of difference, fear of failure, fear to be ourselves.
*Freedom* Freedom allows innovation. Innovation creates solutions.
*Potable, safe drinking water* Hard to be free and freely innovating without it. Water’s set to be the next ‘oil’ for the next generation.
*Sustainable energy supplies* Once we burn through sources of oil…
*Food distribution* There’s enough food. It’s distributed poorly, though.
Three of these items would be categorized as outside the ‘core’ consumer goods that economists, etal, use to discuss inflation and changes for interest rates. But then you could argue these days that ‘war is peace’ and ‘fear makes us more secure’. I disagree. Solve these 5 problems and we got ourselves us a sustainable species and civilization.
Zane — Thanks for that list of biggies. The key, to me, is figuring out how to link up some of the humanitarian concerns (e.g. food distribution) with the profit motive. Yes, in theory maybe people *should* want to end hunger out of feelings of goodwill for humanity, but my bet is it will happen much sooner if there’s money to be made off the process.
Breakthrough water technology is a big wave now forming in high-tech-land. Alternative forms of energy are now much better funded than just a few years ago, and will continue to be in the face of high petroleum prices.
Of all of the issues you list, I’m prone to say that fear really does come at the top of the list. We know for certain (I mean, the neuroscientists tell us so) that people are more creative and happier when they are free from fear. My hope is that more companies will figure out more ways to remove fear from the workplace.
A loverly and and fascinating question indeed. Just for the record I used something similar in presenting to the post-doc symposium at the nat’l logistics conference by listing out the major problems with turning logistics and SCM into useful strategic capabilities to change business performance. That was sometime in the mid-90s. Nothing happened then, soon after or in the decade since.
If you just sample the front-page of the WSJ,et.al. for stories of corporate mis-performance it strikes me that the common symptom is failure to execute combined with failure to innovate and adapt. And the underlying reason is most organizations suffer near-terminally from what I like to call organosclerosis - that is they can’t make effective decisions because they’re so focused on internal battles and politics over who gets what that they neglect focusing on a) delivering value and b) measuring performance, allocating resources and compensating people on those actions with the best return.
We’re used to seeing consultants trot out the next Big Idea but the two things that’re neglected are that each idea has to be executed in the context of the whole enterprise, i.e. as part of the whole. And b) ideas need to become embedded in that whole as part of the DNA instead of trialed and abandoned. Consider the 70% of Lean initiatives that’ve died off and contrast that with the tribulations of the Auto Industry.
By way of illustration of these points you might find a couple of posts useful…or not.
Auto Industry Performance: http://tinyurl.com/5fql4y
Citigroup as Performance Poster-child:
http://tinyurl.com/5zy8tb
FWIW
Dave — “Organosclerosis” = priceless. I’m gonna be riffing on that, you can be sure. Thanks for these thoughts.