Francis McInerney

Francis McInerney (born 1950 in United Kingdom) is Director of New York-based North River Ventures LLC, a consultancy that advises CEOs on his own method of using working capital data to optimize operations, maximize operating free cash flow, and grading management performance.
The origins of this management system date to 1967 when McInerney determined that the survivability of any organization depends on the speed with which it processes information on its environment. His main influence was the work of scholar Marshall McLuhan and later the work of economist Harold Innis's communications theories.
In 1976, with fellow University of Toronto student Sean White, Francis McInerney co-founded Northern Business Information, a telecommunications industry market research company. They moved the company to New York in 1979, and in 1988, McGraw-Hill Inc. purchased Northern Business Information.
Doing research on the information-intense telecom business in the mid 1980s at the height of its growth following the breakup of the Bell System, Sean White observed that fast information is also cheap information and that relative information cost advantages are the flip side relative information velocity advantages.
From this, McInerney and White observed that since the cost of information is always falling, business organizations risk being rendered serially obsolete along the falling information cost curve as their internal information velocities slow relatively and they lose competitive advantage. This curve is today the Moore Curve, also known as Moore's law. McInerney determined that time on the Moore Curve, or Moore Time, significantly alters management's ability to make decisions at speed.
Survivability, McInerney and White contend, depends on the rate of information substitution for other resources like land, labor and capital. The laws of economics don't change but the factor inputs do, rendering results not understood using traditional assumptions. Indeed, the McInerney and White theory is that wealth can only be created when ever-cheaper information is substituted for other factor inputs. Equally, higher cost information destroys wealth as it did in the Dark Ages. It can also, as the Soviet Union discovered, destroy entire countries.
When information must be substituted in Moore Time, management can be rapidly stressed beyond its design tolerance and the company fail as a result.
Since company rates of information substitution is easily measurable from reported company cash efficiency data, diagnosis is usually simple. And, since these efficiency data are common to all businesses everywhere, companies can learn from others in unlike businesses in unlike markets and geographies.
Form this observation, Francis McInerney developed a new management system based on cash and capital efficiencies that is now used by many companies around the world. The largest corporate reorganization in history, that of Matsushita Electric Industrial (now known as Panasonic), used his Management System.
Biographic Detail
Born in Sunningdale, Berkshire in 1950, Francis McInerney moved to Canada in 1953. From 1964-1967 he lived in Paris. In 1967, he co-founded Canada's first alternate high school newspaper, Lolly-Pop. In 1968, he was instrumental in the founding of Canada's first alternative high school, the SEED School in Toronto, which he designed on an early version of his information velocity theory. In 1969, he founded and chaired the city's first Intercollegiate Student Council.
Francis has written four books on the impact of falling information costs on business organizations, the first three of which he co-authored with Sean White:
Beating Japan, E.P. Dutton, 1993.
The Total Quality Corporation, E.P. Dutton, 1995.
FutureWealth, St. Martins, 2000.
Panasonic: The Largest Corporate Restructuring in History, St. Martins, 2007.

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