Rob Wolcott on proximity and the end of the standardized playbook

What this conversation is about

Rob Wolcott and Glenn Llopis have known each other more than a decade, since Wolcott read Glenn’s book on serendipity and decided, in keeping with his own motto of never leaving serendipity to chance, that he had to meet him. Wolcott co-founded the World Innovation Network, teaches at Chicago Booth and Kellogg, and wrote the book Proximity.

The idea began in frustration. Sitting through a tech conference in 2014, he listened to speaker after speaker show the same slide about how many devices would be connected by some future year, and thought the audience deserved better foresight. So he asked what makes digital technologies different from industrial ones. The answer: digital compresses capability into smaller packages and distributes them everywhere, which pushes the production and provision of value ever closer to the moment of actual demand.

He is emphatic that this is not a plea to serve customers faster. It means building business models that deliberately wait until there is a specific customer with a specific need, which is the point of the line at the top of this page.

What proximity looks like

His simplest example is video. We already have near-total proximity of provision: anything, anytime, anywhere. What we are only beginning to see is proximity of production, where the content itself is generated in the moment for one person, through generative AI that is early today and will not stay early.

The physical example is more startling. He describes equipment roughly the size of a refrigerator, developed with defense research funding, that sits idle holding basic elements until a doctor orders a generic drug, then produces it within hours. Where a conventional plant makes medicine months ahead and discards it as it expires, this system waits. As Wolcott points out, the shelf life of carbon is forever.

Healthcare is where he thinks the shift lands hardest, because proximity moves medicine from curing to preventing. With continuous monitoring and analysis of ordinary signals, the warning arrives before the crisis does:

"This is where technology will actually be an extraordinary boon to us in our quality of life because it will give us indications before we have a problem." — Rob Wolcott · 00:19:04

Peripheries, customer value and data

Asked what leaders need, Wolcott gave three words. Peripheries: the threats and opportunities never appear in the center of your market, where you and your competitors already know everything about each other, but at the edges, where experiments mostly fail and occasionally grow into something that changes your industry. Customer value: never assume you know why people buy from you, because what they want and what others can now give them keeps moving. And data: make the long list of what you would love to know about a customer, sort it into what you already have, what someone else has, and what nobody knows yet, and keep that third list in view.

Why organizations cannot follow

The obstacle, he says, is almost never technology. It is the model in our heads. His example is electric vehicles: people who do not own one worry about charging, while owners plug in at home, and the companies that built charging stations everywhere misread the problem by copying the gas station. His other example is early television, which began as radio read aloud on camera, sound-effects man visible at the edge of the frame, until someone realized it was not radio at all.

"it was not a technology constraint, it was a paradigmatic constraint. We had the old model in our head and we kept cramming the new thing into the old paradigm." — Rob Wolcott · 00:33:50

Glenn pressed on the human side of the same problem, because an organization cannot seize proximity with people it has flattened:

"Because we've put so many people in boxes for so long, we actually don't know who anybody is anymore." — Glenn Llopis · 00:24:32

"And yet we're limited to enter the world of proximity because we have followed everybody's playbook except our own as individuals." — Glenn Llopis · 00:24:32

And what people are actually asking their leaders for:

"people want leaders to let go, stop throwing more things that I have to do and memorize much like I did in school, and let me be what I'm capable of, and I will create more opportunity and proximity." — Glenn Llopis · 00:24:32

Two sides of one equation

Wolcott’s answer has a side for the enterprise and a side for the individual. The old approach was to lock the system down and optimize it, which worked when industries changed slowly. In a volatile world, the enterprise instead has to bring the right people and systems to each problem as the problems change. And individuals should stop pouring everything into one role at one organization:

"You don't want to get stuck pouring all of your energy and passion into one entity in one role." — Rob Wolcott · 00:27:24

He calls it a portfolio career, and he argues the two sides only pay off together: an organization that moves people to the work, and people who have built more than one path. Glenn put the standardization question plainly:

"we have to stop practicing standardization in ways that don't matter to the individual." — Glenn Llopis · 00:35:27

Wolcott agreed, and named the trap: standardization optimizes the thing you have been doing for twenty years, and the customer does not care.