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.