Today, the world is experiencing the advent of artificial intelligence, surprised by the creative possibilities of generative neural networks. The success of AI at the present time actually demonstrates how little true ingenuity and quick wits are involved in our lives. This book is just about what is still a human prerogative.

First of all, I want to express my gratitude to Kirill Vladimirovich Zbykovskiy, corporate manager, associate professor of the university and my old friend. Thanks to him, there was an opportunity to put my thoughts in order, summarize them with personal experience and jointly hone the result in the form of a course «Transformation of business models» for the university master’s degree.

My first book was called «The ultimate problems solving. Non-standard thinking and behavior», was published in a limited edition back in 1994. As it turned out, her material was widely distributed in the bases of student abstracts, as a rule, without indicating the source.

Terribly long ago, in the memorable nineties of the last century, it seemed to me that I was forever closing the page of life connected with scientific interests. There is a huge gap between the first book and the one that you see in front of you, almost 30 years. During these years, the author seemed to have had to go far from the scientific questions that interested him at that time. But it turned out that not so far. Business, entrepreneurial activity, in which I had to immerse myself with my head, gave many reasons again and again to return my thoughts to theories, it would seem, left forever – apparently, there are no former physicists. Thirty years were devoted to the development of a modest regional computer firm. Now it is one of the largest players in the market of IT solutions for business in the country. During this time, I managed to fruitfully work out almost all business functions: the development of wholesale and retail trade, the development of a partner and branch network, the creation and promotion of software products, economics and budgeting, work as a director of a company and participation in the board of directors of a corporation.

I hope that my experience, supported by a scientific view, will be interesting.

Who will be interested? Difficult question. I’m afraid entrepreneurs who ride the wave of success don’t need advice. And usually business people are not at all inclined to theorizing. And the language of the old school is unlikely to be close to them. I think, definitely, this is a book, as they say, for an amateur. And I hope she gets one.

Readers from the category of managers and entrepreneurs will be able, with the help of the material in this book, to systematize much that their own experience has taught, as well as to supplement the knowledge that they have gathered in the system of business education. As a maximum, discover new approaches to solving your problems.

Alexander Blinkov

Introduction

What is business? This is work, life, drive, struggle at the same time… And it is not always a struggle with a victorious outcome. This is a lot of everyday issues, big and small problems that need to be overcome. Race against competitors. Finding solutions under pressure, lack of resources and uncertainty. The world, including the business world, is full of surprises.

Everyone will agree that business is not an easy task, it is a difficult task. It’s a minefield path from survival to prosperity. It’s worse if it’s the other way around.

Business is a game. Which has its own rules, and its unforeseen twists and turns. Someone in this game is lucky, but someone is bad if we are not.

How do we play this «game»?

Experience is «the son of difficult mistakes.» Its result is a certain «correct» course of action. Debugged, proven, calculated – protecting against failures. A routine, a habit of doing just that, a generally accepted state of affairs. As a rule, we act (sorry for the pun) according to some rules, patterns, or, as patterns of behavior are also called, patterns. Whether or not we are aware of their presence. Many patterns of behavior we absorb subconsciously in childhood from adults, others we receive during training, others we adopt from colleagues, partners or competitors. Mastering thus the experience accumulated by society. Education is precisely the development of our past experience, the development of standard reactions and skills. Including – based on such collections of templates as textbooks, information bases, reference books, encyclopedias, etc.

– It’s accepted.

– That’s what everyone does.

– Historically, it happened.

These turns of speech are pattern markers.

A pattern is a concentrated experience, the result of bumps stuffed with predecessors. Undoubtedly, experience is good: making something with a predetermined quality is a technology, a strict order, a pattern. Deviation from technology, violation of the pattern – will give a marriage in the end. A well-established business model, ready for alienation and transfer, is already a commodity. A franchise is a successful pattern that costs some money.

By itself, a pattern does not mean a guaranteed result. Problems arise, and within the framework of the established patterns, a person is also constantly making efforts to achieve the maximum result. And to eliminate unwanted results. The essence of our actions within the framework of existing processes is to search for some optimal conditions – parameters, modes, schedules, volumes of resources, financial flows, and so on, which, in turn, will provide the maximum positive result.

Sometimes our efforts produce something different from the previous result – a new offer for the market, new ways of working.

There is a new quality, a breakthrough – there is a change of old patterns with new approaches. As a rule, the most significant breakthroughs have proper names. These are their authors – well-known reformers and visionaries, such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs. It is no longer optimization, but special, innovative solutions and actions that provide their authors with serious success, a breakthrough in creation, and a competitive advantage in business. The innovative path generates new designs and technologies, opens up other ways to achieve results, creates other innovative business models. Which, in turn, in the future can become and become new patterns – the generally accepted course of action.

A modern entrepreneur, like never before, must be able to constantly analyze the adequacy of his business model, notice and use new opportunities in time. Since the present is characterized precisely by the fact that new technical solutions have become permanent accelerators, drivers of a continuous revolution in technology, and therefore in business.

We hope this book will help you understand the secrets of creativity in general and in business in particular. It contains over 100 drawings.

Those who are primarily interested in practical recipes, decision-making technologies, and not scientific theories, can start reading right from the «Creation act. Manual» chapter. Everyone else, welcome in order.

What are these decisions that lead to a change in paradigms and patterns? Are there rules and methods? Is it possible to acquire this knowledge? Or is it just the innate creative abilities of individuals, naturally talented people, visionaries and innovators?

Experience is undoubtedly important in any business. Modern technologies of Artificial Intelligence have mastered the history of almost all the facts of human activity. Is that enough? Or are rules and patterns also important?

We suggest looking in the direction of Physics to find answers.

Physics? What’s the deal with physics? How can she help in business?

Existing and Emerging

Finding answers to questions

Science is a tool for finding answers to questions: what is happening, why and what will happen next.

At the same time, at an early stage of its development, the dominant role was played by a worldview formed by faith – religion.

Various religions offered people their own pictures of the origin of the world, which, however, are close in one thing – the whole world was once created by a certain deity or higher powers. In many sacred texts there is a certain act of creation, the moment of the origin of the world. And then the world moves under the influence of that initial impulse from the Creator, following, whether it is bad or good, its laws.

Within the framework of this concept, natural science arose. And its part Dynamics. Not just dynamics, as a separate section of Mechanics. And Dynamics in a broad sense – as a method of searching for answers to the question about the causes of the motion of matter in the form of «driving forces».

The purpose of science is to describe what happens and why, and especially what will happen if… And the opposite question is how can I do something to get the desired result? – is the main customer for any scientist. How to hit the target with a cannon? How to build a house so that it does not fall apart?

The key feature of this approach is the confidence that we control all the parameters we need. That we have all the data for substitution in the equation.

And for such answers, indeed, science had to discover the laws of nature, which, when specific parameters of the problem were substituted into them, began to give reliable results.

«Physics, by definition, is a field of natural science: the science of the most general laws of nature, of matter, its structure, movement, and rules of transformation. It is an exact science. The concepts of physics and its laws underlie all natural science.»

How will this help the entrepreneur?

Traditionally, the scheme of science is presented in the form of a diverging beam, the tip of which is somewhere at the lower end of the axis along which you can line up all the objects of our world according to their complexity – from the smallest particles to galaxies, wildlife, consciousness… and somewhere further.

By complication we mean complexity, combination, when objects are combined into new objects-systems with new qualities. At the tip of such a beam of knowledge are the physical theories of microworld objects and fundamental interactions. The structure of objects of any kind is explained on the basis of the laws of behavior of its constituent elements: an atom as a system of elementary particles, a molecule as a system of atoms… the operation of a mechanism as the interaction of parts… society as a system of individuals.

Fig. 1. Ray of combinational complexity of nature

As you move along the beam and move away from its tip, objects of nature are combined into more and more complex systems – atoms, molecules, substances, bodies, living nature, society, etc. In accordance with this, the branches of science are splitting up, if the universal theories of the united building blocks of the universe are at the forefront, now private areas of knowledge appear: chemistry, mechanics, electricity, radio engineering, materials science, hydraulics and other technical sciences…

The drawn picture is quite familiar. We always, if we ask ourselves how something works, or why it happens, we first of all try to look inside and see the reason inside the object of our attention. Since childhood, when we broke the toy, trying to see what was buzzing there and how it worked.

The laws that describe the behavior of objects through their device and interaction with other objects will be united by a common name – «Dynamics».

Accordingly, the branches of science that bud within this ray of Dynamics give rise to Special Knowledge. And people who have been trained in these industries are called Specialists! Chemists, mechanics, metallurgists, electricians, radio engineers, etc. – these are all of them.

And what do we have higher along the axis of systems? Biological objects of wildlife. And then there are human societies. It would seem that physics has nothing to do with it? It is unlikely that we will be able to explain the behavior of our dog or our project team using basic physical interactions. Sociology, psychology, politics – these are the humanities. Which are clearly opposed to the «exact sciences» – natural science:

«The humanities are disciplines that study a person in the sphere of his spiritual, mental, moral, cultural and social activities. If specificity is important in other sciences, then in the humanities, if such accuracy is important, for example, descriptions of a historical event, then the versatility and even infinity of such a work (description) is important, so that, if possible, each person finds something of his own in it, while receiving a certain aesthetic satisfaction.»

So. Fixing a car, figuring out how a fireplace or ventilation works, installing electrical wiring – some of the physics can be useful to any of us. At least in order to understand when your employee is trying to fool you, talking about the need for alcohol to wipe the optical axes. What about business concerns? Business is a complex object that, in addition to technology, includes human relations, motivation, financial movements, and work with markets. The humanities are certainly connected with the daily problems of business, and «exact», natural science – quite, it would seem, far, far away.

Big systems

So, Dynamics implies control over all task variables. Then her laws work. But systems, even simple in content – just air, gas in a room, consisting of countless molecules – show us the opposite, we never control the movement of all elements of such an object.

In this case, apply the laws and principles that are of a general nature and belong to the section Thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is characterized by an extremely general view of objects – the specific nature of systems does not matter, it is only important that they have some system-wide state parameters, for example, energy, entropy, temperature, pressure, which can be measured. So, the accuracy of physics has already taken a step back? Science no longer calculates the state of each element, but only undertakes to make predictions about the state of their entire set.

A section of thermodynamics familiar from school is the doctrine of heat. This is the study of systems striving for a position of equilibrium both within themselves and with the outside world. The water in the glass cools down, the gas fills the entire available volume, the dust is scattered around the room in an even layer. This is a very sad world – a world of increasing entropy, an inevitable increase in chaos. Even if there are some inhomogeneities – heating, concentration or charge, thermodynamics draws one end – «everything will pass», resolve, level out over time. Everything will come into balance. In a state of equilibrium, when all differences should disappear.

To imagine the opposite, James Clerk Maxwell (1831—1879) – a British physicist, mathematician and mechanic, at one time came up with a hypothetical demon living inside a gas at the molecular level, which could estimate the speed of each molecule, for fast ones – open the door, but not for slow ones. Then one part of the body would spontaneously cool down, while the other would heat up. The impossibility of such a miracle in nature has been called the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The act of creation is to be studied

But wait! The world is not so dull around! And he is not at all balanced. In it, something is constantly born, something new arises! Stars and planets are born from clouds of scattered gas in space. Stars form and form galaxies. On the planet, a calm atmosphere gives rise to a cyclonic whirlwind or tornado. And that’s just inanimate nature. Living is simply an inexhaustible fountain of origins, origins and occurrences. Including – its highest manifestation as human society and the most important part of human activity – business, its history with the change of technological eras, the generation of new products and industries.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the German thinker, one of the founders of all Western philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, drew attention to the fact that the Act of Creation had not ended at all. The world continues to change and develop! There is always something new in the world. Something that didn’t exist before. Quantity turns into a new quality. The new order denies the old constructions. The laws of the emergence of the new were formulated by him in the form of the laws of dialectics in the book Science of Logic.

And what does Thermodynamics say about Arising? After all, this is all a direct and obvious violation of the Second Law: a new order is emerging, chaos is decreasing, disequilibrium is increasing, entropy is clearly decreasing! In fact, not quite so: physicists say that the emergence of new forms of complexity, orderliness is also an increase in entropy. What does it mean? A gas cloud in interstellar space, condensing under the influence of gravitational forces, «seems to be more ordered than scattered. But this is not the case, because in a scattered cloud the velocities of the molecules are all orderly small, while when compressed, the velocities of the molecules increase. The cloud compresses in physical space, but scatters in phase – and this is more significant,» explains Carlo Rovelli, one of the authors of the Theory of loop gravity.

We are not going to dive into the subtleties of physical theories. Let the rise of order be the increase of disorder. Let, according to physics, the emergence of vortices in a gas and liquid, the appearance of living nature, the development of social forms – this is all" self-structured disordering.» We are interested in the very fact of the Emergence of the New.

The most common phenomena of self-organization – the spontaneous emergence of a new order – boiling water, the emergence of atmospheric vortices. From the point of view of Dynamics, which explains the behavior of an object on the basis of the interaction of its parts, it is impossible to find a reason that would force the molecules of a liquid or gas to change their behavior abruptly. At the particle level, nothing new happened, no new force was added, no one interfered with the atmosphere with a giant ladle, and a typhoon vortex appeared in the system. Or does Maxwell’s demon still exist? But this is unlikely.

Does this mean that some more physics is needed? Or is it no longer physics?

So far, physics is modern thermodynamics, which studies the processes occurring in open, complex, non-linear systems – active or passive, located far from the equilibrium position. A new, far from complete physical doctrine, called non-equilibrium thermodynamics, describes the processes of spontaneous appearance of ordered structures in various highly non-equilibrium open systems, i.e., self-organization processes.

A great contribution was made by Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (1917 – 2003), a Belgian scientist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his work in the field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. His works are widely known: «From Being To Becoming» and with Isabelle Stengers «Order out of Chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature».

It is the categories of Emerging, Arising, Becoming, New Quality that will be the central point for us, entrepreneurs, because the conditions of constant competition make us be very attentive to innovations. Whether in technology, or in the organization of affairs – how and why does something original appear that did not exist before?

The wisdom we need

For us, such terms of non-equilibrium thermodynamics as a qualitative transition, state bifurcations, self-organization are important. Because both technological revolutions and the birth of new business models are just examples of these phenomena.

«BIFURCATION (from Latin bifurcus „forked“) is all kinds of qualitative rearrangements or metamorphoses of various objects when the parameters on which they depend change.»

This word will be our most commonly used term. So, let’s dwell on understanding it. The main content of the term bifurcation lies in two important points:

First. These are phenomena when something qualitative happens, fundamentally different from what has been so far – up to the point of bifurcation. Separation of the state of an object into before and after.

The water was calm, but now boiled and seething.

The microphone was silent and suddenly «beeped» so that everyone clutched their ears.

Mobile phones in a short period «buried» landline communications.

Second. When further development can take place in fundamentally different ways, when at a certain point – the same bifurcation point, there is a separation of possible trajectories. For example, the phenomenon of bifurcation in hydrology: in Russia in the Far East there is the river Delkyu, from which several channels depart about 180 km from the source, gathering into a river that flows through the rivers Kuidusun and Indigirka into the Arctic Ocean. The other part of the river below the bifurcation zone flows into the Okhota, that is, it carries its waters to the Pacific Ocean. This means that two particles of one drop of water from a glacier may end up, for reasons beyond their control, in two different oceans of the planet! (The author of these lines, by the way, visited this interesting point on a hike along the Suntar- Khayat ridge.)

The guiding star of our entire future path will be the question: water molecules, okay, nothing depends on them. For them, it’s a coincidence. What about people in their business? We are «thinking molecules» in the social fluid. Can we act consciously and independently determine what route the fate of our cause will draw? Will our project end up in an arctic ocean without hopes, or in a warm one, full of life and prospects?

Is this exactly what promises us to reveal the secrets of a qualitative transformation in our affairs? Maybe!

The modern view of the structure of science is to recognize the equal complementary position of Dynamics and Thermodynamics.

The ray of the laws of Thermodynamics is directed from the higher systems of nature towards the ray of the laws of Dynamics.

In the area of systems, which man has been looking at since time immemorial as objects of his influences, there are three main postulates, which physicists called the Beginnings of thermodynamics. Closer to the tip of the beam, that is, where there are systems over which a person no longer has power as over a gas or liquid in a vessel, at least because he himself is a particle of them – these are biological or social objects, there are patterns of non-equilibrium systems. And in the very tip of the second ray, one can assume the existence of still undiscovered fundamental laws of the balance conservation, which should unite all nested systems – both galaxies, and cyclones, and life forms. However, the laws of the highest level could be discerned only by one who is at the very tip of the beam – who can look down on everything in any of its complexity, who is above everything – that is, the Almighty. Science is still very far from such heights. Even the existence of alien life forms is still only a hypothesis.

Fig. 2. Two rays of the laws of nature

Let’s not anger the gods and make serious scientists laugh, let’s descend from metaphysical heights to our sinful Earth. What is important for our mundane concerns, we could learn? It seems that we have groped for a part of physics that deals with the emergence of the New in any of its incarnations! We hope that innovations in business that are of interest to us may also be in the area of attention of this physics.

To summarize: the behavior and structure of any object of nature is thus determined not only by the laws of Dynamics, that is, from below the axis of complexity – from the inside, but also by the laws of Thermodynamics, from the opposite end of the axis, if you like – from above.

Theories belonging to the first ray – Dynamics, as we have already noted, constitute Special Knowledge. A person who understands the intricacies of phenomena, in their nature is called Specialist. Knowledge of the laws of the second ray – Thermodynamics, allows a person to see the important reasons for the behavior of any systems, regardless of their nature. This is exactly the very knowledge that from time immemorial has been called Wisdom. And wisdom in any business can be very useful. Especially if she is ready not only to explain why it happened that way, but also to suggest innovative solutions – such that something new happens, and in the right way and when we need it.

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Reinvention of businesses. Natural Intelligence technology

Author’s foreword