Networks and whatnot

As part of the remaining school work, I've been reading a bunch of articles on a rather broad scope, but basically everything has been related to management theories, etc. An interesting thing is that all of the different facets seem to be the "most important point of view" while other parts are obviously subordinate. Tonight I was reading about how marketing may be impacted by the increasingly networked economy, and without going into it in too much detail, one conclusion was that marketing as a field will evolve and change and is a lot more central to companies than it was before. That everything should be viewed through the lenses of the marketing world. I guess Kotler & Keller have at least discussed about this as "strategic marketing" (and that is actually another funny aspect; just add "strategic" to anything and it's automagically really cool).

Amusingly enough, at the same time elsewhere some other people are advocating that in the modern world it's technology that drives most of the disruptions in the world. And that we should actually focus on managing technologies and so on. Marketing is one part of the set. A tool for cultivating and growing new technological innovations. And then there's the logistics crowd. Logistics is incredibly important and a central to the success of a company and that sometimes it can even be a really core competitive advantage and that logistics should be supported by other fields.

And then there is the strategy crowd. In the corporate world I guess there are essentially two types. The guys from BCG/McK/Bain axis and then the guys who previously belonged to this first group but are now employed by their former clients directly. And of course they do the Strategy stuff, and everything is subordinate to them. Or something like that.

Interestingly enough, however, it would appear that all this is pointless. Everything's networked and hierarchies are falling. And I would even go so far as to argue that for the people with slightly failing eyesight (like me), the whole network looks like one big lump. Sometimes I don't even really make a distinction anymore. Everything, in the end, aims at competitive advantage. They just approach the same goal from different angles, but they're not necessarily competitors. More like complementors. Now, what was the point that I was trying to make? I don't really know; at this point I'm just finding this very amusing as the marketing crowd has been writing really nice papers with really big and fancy words which I don't even understand and all the while advocating that they're in the center. But according to contemporary understanding about network economies, the center is dumb and the magic happens at the edges of the networks. So yes, feel free to be in the center, for all I care...