StacksEatWorld

Stacks are eating the world

business used to be easiest to comprehend via a) market-based logic of horizontal vs. vertical STRUCTURE, b) professionalization/specialization based FUNCTION c) core competencies based BEHAVIORS

this has pretty much collapsed in the last decade

• Structure = sclerosis
• Functional specialization = bureaucracy
• competencies = inertial habits

"Stack" thinking instead lets technology structure (rather than market structure) drive business org logic Companies seem to do well when they identify an entire stack of technologies they are good at (not just point bits) and organize to conform to its logic. There is a "full-stack" dimension of technical specialization that is the spine of the org

It feels buzzwordy, but it really is getting to be that way. AI stack, decarbonization stack, mobility stack, electrification stack... some end-to-end pathway of turning physics into economics via layers of tech artistically baked together like a cake

If you haven't seen enough examples to instinctively pattern-match what I'm talking about, think of a stack as somewhere between an industry sector like "aerospace" and a functional specialization like "marketing."

Is the drone industry part of aerospace? Yes and no... there's an aerospace renaissance on to be sure, and some of it overlaps with the old kind and with lots of FAA regulations and such, but really what we have is a "new aerospace stack" covers the tech needed to build useful end-to-end capabilities for everything from delivery drones to surveillance to disaster relief search-and-rescue to even indoor toys/games/robotic assistance... yes, bits of it look like boeing, but lots of it do not...

Here there is a 1:1 correspondence. Old aerospace is retreating to high-end/high-cost "platform" organization. In other cases, it's entirely new. There's a "sidewalk stack" for example (scooters, bike rentals, hoverboards, delivery robots, inspection robots)

I'd probably call that the "smart sidewalk" stack or "low-power urban mobility stack" ... currently a half-baked cake of technologies that impact many current and potential markets and businesses/orgs

For tech people the challenge is to go from functional expertise (I'm a statistician) to stack expertise (I'm good at the SEO web analytics stack or PyTorch ML stack), which means gaining somewhat amateurish full-stack capabilities that threaten your professional identity.

Anywhere you see 2 similar kinds of tech people having a pissing contest ("data science is just statistics") you can be sure a functional expert domain is being eaten by a stackified domain. Whichever side you're coming from you're going to have to integrate 2 identities

For managers, challenge is taking the stack narrative seriously. Your entire business might succeed/fail depending on whether your mental model is "EV stack" or "battery stack" or "decarbonization stack." Depending on the specifics, any of those could be winning or losing frames

When you get the stack narrative and full-stack expertise right, you get to draw the map that reshapes the territory. This is a very different way of doing business than thinking in terms of existing sectors that you "enter" by passing "barriers" (all that 5 forces stuff)

"Disruption" is one well-understood playbook for riding a stack to dominance in a market you help (re)define, but the idea of stacks eating the world is that there are many more unnamed playbooks that seem to be emerging.