jueves, agosto 23, 2007

Asking the Right Questions

Jim: Thanks for your insight about the right questions.

My reservations with Len are that for more than a year he keeps shifting from dialogue to debate. I learned from a highly respected advisor that putting the right market concepts into practice is indeed very complicated. So before the concepts are developed, “asking the right questions” is a great target to hidden agendas.

Most the essential market architecture and design elements of EWPC have been discussed at length earlier. Reading the comments under the articles Playing with Fire I and II, should be sufficient to be convinced that EWPC is the winning market of the first phase of competition. However, I don’t dismiss a better market from appearance. So that is why I asked to learn of the new IMEUC proposition without contradictory elements, without success.

My approach has been to avoid debate, which is based on learning from the past, introducing a generative dialogue, which is about learning from the emerging future. I will recall one of the essential elements of the dialogue in search for the emergent structure from generation to customer.

IMEUC articles have a business model with a retailer between generation and customers, which I identified with as a switchboard. The problem is the switchboard had to be monopoly retailer switchboard. On the contrary, EWPC is open to any kind of competing retailers, which should develop business design innovations and compete. In a sense, this structure is less restrictive than the switchboard business model.

This is what Playing With Fire and Collapse Part 19 says in more details:

Thanks Len for considering the generative dialogue. In a generative dialogue what is important is "listening" in sychronicity with other interest parties to the larger whole that is emerging. For example, a common understanding of what EWPC means as a third way not considered in the decade old debate.

I presume that large customers could be allowed to go directly to generators for their deals in the wholesale market. Then, what you are suggesting is a monopoly retailer innovation under a Market Manager. I suggest to have retail competition, so that other potential innovations are also allowed to emerge. Go to any marketing book and you will find why intermediaries are needed.


What you are proposing is to impose on everyone the Swithboard Profit Model “innovation,” which Adrian Slywosky describes on page 59 of his book “The Profit Zone:” Some markets are characterized by multiple sellers communicating with multiple buyers, with high costs incurred by both. In many case, there is an opportunity to create a high-value intermediary that concentrates these multiple communicating pathways through one point, one channel, by creating a switchboard. The switchboard reduces the cost to both buyers and sellers. A powerful component of the switchboard model is that it builds on itself; the more buyers and sellers that join, the more valuable it becomes.

Such middleman model is perfectly allowed under the EWPC market architecture and design. That is why I said earlier "good luck!" Please say so if there are other things that still bother you.

Len Gould Promissed a 3rd IMEUC Article on 12.26.06

Hi Todd and interested readers,

This year I wrote in EnergyPulse and said at Carnegie Mellon University that EWPC was the winning market (architecture and design) of the first phase of competition. I came to that conclusion after a very lengthy generative dialogue under the 2 Playing With Fire EnergyPulse articles.

At some point in the dialogue (it was dialogue, no debate), under playing with Fire Part I (I could include the link, but you don't like it), Len wrote on 12.26.06: "Jose Antonio: Your cogent discussion raises some issues with IMEUC which I hope to clarify in a third article in the series here on EnergyPulse in perhaps a couple of weeks, provided I can submit it up to the high standards of the editorial staff. Thank you."


Response to Todd on Market vs Market Competition

Reference: Finding Opportunity in the Global Warming Challenge

Hi Todd,

Thanks for caring.

On 7.5.07 I wrote: EWPC is not a particular solution; it is an emerging market design and architecture aiming to set up mechanisms…I have followed Geoffrey Moore's advice to perform market vs. market cooperation - through an ongoing generative dialogue - as the first stage of competition to come up with the winning market architecture and design. If there is an element [of EWPC] that does not satisfy such aim, I like to learn about it to upgrade EWPC. The second stage of competition, company vs. company competition, initiates when the mechanisms are implemented and particular solutions can then arrive. The whole point is to enable a generative dialogue to reach the End-State of the power industry.

A generative dialogue (GD) is not about debating positions. After going over some of the following prerequisites, on later posts I will come back to explain that we will be learning from an emergent future, because of three kinds of complexities we are experiencing.

However, as I understand, with the post after yours, Len has made your request obsolete. In addition to your statement “I finally found your standpoint, but was too weary to respond by then,” Len says: “no other system [than IMEUC], including Jose Antonio's, [EWPC] can claim anything close.” So What I like to do is to concentrate on collaboration with you and any one else – including Len’s IMEUC – and any other “system” candidates to complete the first phase. His statement is right on the first phase of competition, even if IMEUC has many unnecessary details of the 2nd phase of competition.

So, ask Len to do exactly what you are asking me on his IMEUC first – concentrate on the essentials for the first phase of competition, so that I will have a benchmark to express not my claims on EWPC, but what insights are emerging if any from IMEUC that might make it the winner. By your own standards, the paragraph he added to his 2 links is not clear enough. He needs also to resolve all contradictions of IMEUC, including that related to LMPs. I promise you to respond in kind as soon his system is clearly understood.

For the back on topic, I will wait for the author to reply first.