Transforming Business: Big Data, Mobility, and Globalization

The Venture Capitalists

The Boston Consulting group found that 22% of senior finance leaders say they are the driving force of innovation at their company. Only 3% of non-CFO executives agree.¹

When Norman Macrae died at the age of 89 in 2010, the world lost a visionary. Although The Economist journalist was hardly a household name, he was oracle to some of the most sweeping trends of the last century. It was Macrae who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union when Westerners feared the growing superpower, who prophesied the rise of Japan as an industrial powerhouse when others dismissed it as a purveyor of tchotchkes, and who imagined a world of “terminals” connecting users to giant databases (a primitive foretelling of what would become the Internet). And, long before today's progressive technology darlings entered the scene, it was Macrae who envisaged a world in which innovation, not bureaucratic management, would become the primary driver of sustained growth.²

In 1976, big business was in fashion. Spurred by the boom of the manufacturing age, companies relied on increasing layers of management to extract as much productivity from line workers as possible. Hence, when Macrae published his seminal article, “The Coming Entrepreneurial Revolution,” it was undoubtedly met with ...