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Can McLaren's software keep a business off the crash barriers?

• Paul Mason
• 29 Sep 06, 02:49 PM

We had a fascinating day at the futuristic bond-like HQ of McLaren, the Woking-based Formula One team. They're about to spin off the software that runs race strategy into a commercial business tool aimed at chief executives. The software analyses about 8 million possible scenarios per race, and recalibrates the possibility of them happening every two seconds: the idea is that the same methodology - for geeks it is based on Bayesian probability - can be used to speed up and make rigorous the kind of strategic decisions you have to take if you are a chief executive...

To me it speaks to a wider set of developments that are going on in business: globalisation has broadened the number of variables in each business decision: if you're Shell you are juggling the oil price, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the state of the revolt in the Niger Delta, Vladimir Putin's moods over environmental issues in Sakhalin, and the possibility of nuclear war with Iran, even the propensities of uppity investigative journalists. And that's just on a good day.

What that requires, say the business boffins, is "strategic agility" - which sounds good on paper but has for many people been a contradiction in terms. Strategy is something that, before internet+globalisation changed our world, could be set in stone for years: and there was a sequence that went "set the strategy then execute it". Now what they're saying is you have to do both at the same time: and the sheer number of new entrants to your market, disruptive technologies, geo-political factors mean that if one variable shifts, the whole direction of the company might have to change. So, as Professor Donald Sull of London Busines School tells me tonight, a CEO has to have a heads up display, like a fighter pilot, because he just can't be situationally aware enought to win without it: of course if he was flying a Spitfire in 1940, the human brain and a radio would be enough.

I wonder where it will all end up: everybody else - including journalists - has seen bits of their so called skill and even genius usurped by machines and computers. Could that happen to the masters of the universe, the chief execs? And more imminently, could software take the place of expensive strategy consultants? The backers of this new technology are prepare to venture the answer "probably" - at least except for the really clever stuff.

Going to McLaren also made me realise how advanced and tecchie modern engineering can get: the whole campus is like something out of the Matrix and the food in the canteen is restaurant standard (and you have to take a lunch hour, food being banned frmo the pristine workbenches the black-clad PhDs work at).

See it all on Newsnight tonight. Vroom.