Platformit — Part Two: Unleash Your Imagination
Welcome back, I hope you enjoyed the beautiful sightseeing on Part One’s journey. The train will be heading toward our second destination within three minutes, so you can grab a coffee and have a quick recap of what we covered so far.
The objective of part II is to take the precious seed, from part I and plant it in a healthy brain, water it with imagination, polish it with transformed data, grow it with information, nurture it with knowledge. In a nutshell, planting the seed into the gravitational cosmic constellation. You laughed again! I will revenge on you for that. For those who don’t know what we are talking about, I recommend reading “Narrative Backed Thinking.”
Why must we use our imagination? If your dream is to build a conventional business, an ancient idea, such as a barbershop or a falafel restaurant, you might survive without having a wild imagination. But if you are entering the platform arena these days, you must have the wildest imaginations.
I am sorry to disappoint some of you who are eager to dive into the platform universe, with its fancy terminologies, but are still not getting there, not in part I and not even in this part. I promise you; we will get there. But first, we need to build a strong foundation. We need to understand that the success of all great businesses; such as Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, etc. were at their core, an extension of their founders. So, if you are looking for an easy recipe from La La Land for your unicorn startup, you are at the wrong place, and I honestly must tell you good luck. You are going to need a lot of it.
In this post, I want to convince you that you can unleash your imagination, stretch it to its maximum frontier.
To unlock your imagination, you must repeat after me; Aaabb, khaatt, maaiiirr, senootya, baaakh.
Seriously! You said that; it’s a joke. Revenge feels good ;) But at the same time, I wanted to get you out of the life’s seriousness. You cannot use your imagination effectively if you are burying yourself underneath life’s pressures. You need to chill out a little bit.
Before revealing my imagination, we need some mental stretching.
I would like to take you back to the year 1990. We need to visualize an old episode of how things were done in the past and compare them to how they are achieved with today’s technological development.
Imagine that you are living in the Kingdom of Bahrain almost three decades ago, and you want to buy a bestselling book on investment banking which is only available in the United States of America. Can you imagine how you could obtain that book back then in comparison to the ease of today process? Most probably, you will go through a costly and lengthy process:
1) You will call several libraries. Maybe this process will take one or two days. A sizable cost will be added to the phone bill.
2) The library will request you to transfer them the money so that they start shipping the book.
3) You must visit your local bank to instruct a wire transfer (Add a few days to a week if some public holidays fall in between). Again, you will be paying the wire transfer fees to your Bank.
4) Once the money is received, the library will ship the book to your address (adding three weeks to a month).
5) Once arrived you must go to pick it up from the customs or the post office (adding at least one more day) along with paying some more fees.
You will get the book, within approximately 45 days, and most probably at a cost double or triple its original worth. Now, let’s visualize how you can buy the same book in the year 2018.
- Unlock your smartphone screen
- Click on Amazon app
- Search the book
- One Click
- And the book is yours! You can download it via Amazon Kindle, or even as an audiobook.
In less than a minute, you can buy the book you want. With no intermediary, no agent, no third-party, etc. On top of that, you get feedback, reviews, live comparison to other similar topics and even a discount on your purchase.
Ok, let’s add few more pounds to our warm-up exercise. Let us explore a more relevant example to our seed, “investment.” For example, what if the above scenario was about buying stock in the capital market? Let’s say that you wanted to buy shares in GE in the year 1990:
1) You will try to call your broker. If it happened that you are in a bull market, then forget about getting him from the first ring. Add to that a hefty international call bill.
2) You will place your order with him, with no control over your trade, except to some limit orders.
3) It might take a day to receive a confirmation from your broker on the status of your order.
4) You probably will be paying him around 50 dollars fees for that trade only.
You can see that you are basically at his mercy (i.e., arbitrary behavior). This is how things were happening back then. What about now? Things changed a bit. Let’s see how.
- Unlock your smartphone screen
- Click on (e.g., TD Ameritrade app)
- Log-in via your fingerprint
- Type the stock ticker
- Click buy, click submit an order. And you are done!
Again, in less than a minute you can place your wealth where you want, with absolute control. What about the cost? Can you imagine that with some brokers such as Interactive Brokers, the cost can reach as low as US$ 1 for that trade? Besides, you can get customized reports, analysis, comparison, live feeds and social interaction with other investors, etc.
I think the picture is getting more apparent to you. My imagination is suggesting that we can do the same in the investment world. Yes, even with the alternative assets classes. You know, the complex ones. Or you can say that my imagination is suggesting liberating the investment world. Democratize it. You can think of investing, as ordering food on Uber Eats platform.
Do you think that it is possible to shrink the timeframe as well as the cost in a similar way as discussed in the above examples? At first glance, it might be an overwhelming and unrealistic imagination.
Frequently when people say that my imaginations are unrealistic, they only realize it is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, I am not just imagining changing the value proposition, which is in our case, is the seed (i.e., the investment). My imagination is aspiring to change the Investment Banking industry’s business models. Not the business model of a single bank, instead, the business models of the entire industry. Now we are talking big.
So, the unrealistic part of the imagination is the easy one (i.e., imagine an app that can bring investment decisions within our fingertips as a resemble of the one-minute investment journey). We can prototype a simple picture to stand as an MVP, as Eric Ries once said; Anything can be an MVP. So, let’s have a sneak peek at how the investment world can be resting in the palm of our hand. Let’s see how we can navigate our investment decisions with our fingertips in less than a minute.
This story-telling white paper is designed to shrink the gap between what might appear impossible (i.e., wild imagination) and how it can be possible. A script to get what is in your head into the real world.
The crazy part of the imagination is an attempt to ecosystem the whole investment banking industry (i.e., the Wholesale Banking Industry). To do that, we need to revisit the “Look framework” from part one and combine it with the gravitational cosmic constellation. Somewhere at the beginning of this post, I recommended you read my previous post “Narrative Backed Thinking.” I presumed you ignored it, so I am gently reminding you so that you can see the full picture.
You can see under the Around dimension of the above Look framework, that we have a horizontal look around and vertical look around.
The horizontal look around pushes you to look within your industry. The vertical look around invites you to look at other industries. And this is what we are going to do here (i.e., nurturing our imagination with knowledge from another industry).
Example from the Shipping Industry — CONTAINER.
Would anyone imagine that a crucial factor to globalization was the change in one building block of the business model of the shipping industry? It was the “Channel” building block. It has been said that “The CONTAINER has been more of a driver of globalization than all trade agreements in the past 50 years taken together”.
Using the Business Model Canvas can help to visually grasp how a creative change in the delivery channel had a ripple effect that surrounded the globe almost in every single aspect.
So, is it possible to introduce a holistic change into the Investment Banking Industry by focusing on one building block (i.e., the Channel)? You will find the answer to this question in the upcoming parts of this story-telling white paper. We will, together push the linear and traditional organizational thinking to be re-thought from the ground up, and will suggest replacing it with an exponential and collaborative industry-wide platform and ecosystem thinking.
We are preparing to depart from part II. A few claps will help us to move faster. See you at our next destination. Part III.
You are most welcome to connect via https://twitter.com/KhalidiAlmadani or https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalid-al-madani-2009a1160/
