For years now, everybody has been talking about disruptive innovation. It’s not enough just to play the game anymore, the aim is alter it completely.
That’s a lot easier said than done. If you are a thriving business, you will have to change a lot of what made you that way. There will be no guarantee of success and the road forward will be uncertain, with no previous model to emulate. It’s not just products of process that will have to change, but the entire business model.
Where do you start? In a brilliant HBR post Whitney Johnson, who runs a fund dedicated to disruptive investment, makes the salient point that we must first disrupt ourselves. To create a disruptive future, we must often walk away from a comfortable present. I agree and have some ideas about how firms can go about it.
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We like to think that the value of an idea is unlimited. From Watt’s steam engine to Darwin’s natural selection to Einstein’s relativity, ideas have changed the world.
But that’s not the whole story. Watt, Darwin and even, to a certain extent, Einstein came from a privileged class and that matters. Most ideas go unnoticed because they require investment capital and distribution to make their way into the physical world. That’s beginning to change.
While your ability to start a successful business still depends greatly on the place and situation of your birth (if you live in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, you’re probably out of luck), many of the barriers to getting ideas to market are disappearing. We’re in the midst of a new industrial revolution, which is cleaner, more efficient and more inclusive.
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Last February, when I wrote that Windows 8 will put Microsoft back on top, a lot of people thought I was nuts. Nobody could touch Apple and Google’s Android had too big of a head start. Microsoft was toast and anybody who denied it was just ignoring the obvious.
Well, Microsoft launched Windows 8 last week to mixed reviews. None were glowing, a few were negative and almost all expressed some kind of reservation. So how do I feel now? I’m doubling down.
Given that Windows 8 is an almost completely reimagined product, from the interface to the basic technology, the reviews are surprisingly positive. Combined with the rest of Microsoft’s assets, is strategically brilliant (and amazingly interoperable). From a business perspective this is one of the most important products in history. Here’s why:
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Our data driven society requires hard numbers. We take those numbers, plug them into models to create solid plans and execute those plans with ruthless efficiency. If we do it right, things are supposed to go well.
The problem is that our numbers are fantasies, our models are broken and our budgets are farces. We all know it, try to make allowances for it and the game goes on because, quite frankly, it is the only one we know how to play.
Somewhere along the way we became enamoured by certainty and obsessed with precision in the hopes that, if we only built better tools, we could conquer complexity. That effort has failed miserably. There is, however, another way that was abandoned long ago. It has a rich history of solving the thorniest, most uncertain problems. It’s time we returned to it.
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Every manager would like to be Steve Jobs, but very few ever even come close. Many seek out advice, read case studies and go to workshops to help guide them. Yet still, very few companies are able to innovate effectively. Why is that?
Surely there is no lack of desire. Ask any top executive and he will tell you that innovation is a top priority. It’s not a lack of commitment either. Businesses invest billions in R&D every year, yet all to little avail.
One big reason is a the lack of innovative culture, especially at successful operational firms. Competing for the future is different than competing for the present. If you try to innovate the same way you operate, you probably won’t get very far. To break the cycle, you’ll need to build a culture that promotes innovation as well as operational excellence.
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The mathematician G.H. Hardy once wrote that “for any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.” As someone who intimately knew some of the greatest minds in history, he would know.
What he meant was there many things other than intelligence that are required to succeed at an intellectual task. Persistence and luck surely play a role and, as Einstein famously noted, imagination is supremely important.
Nevertheless, intelligence is something we admire, both in ourselves and in others. It has been considered for most of history, to be a uniquely human virtue. So it is unnerving, even terrifying, when we encounter other types of intelligence. From crowdsourcing to computers performing human tasks, we’re going to have to learn to make our peace.
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Shakespeare once wrote that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Digital marketing sometimes seems a lot like that.
It certainly has its share of idiots, no lack of sound and fury and, while not exactly signifying nothing, does have an unhealthy tendency toward hyperbole. Technology changes much more quickly than people’s habits do.
In reality, consumers largely buy the same products they always did and use them in the same way. We still eat food off of plates, put socks on our feet and get behind the wheels of cars. Just because technology is evolving is no reason to abandon common sense and, perhaps not surprisingly, the clearest path to good strategy is still asking good questions.
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Last week, Paul Broun, a US Congressman on the Science, Space and Technology Committee, asserted that evolution, embryology and big bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell.” A recent Gallup survey suggests that 46% of Americans agree with him.
Many would tend to give the Congressmen some slack. After all, what we can not observe is a matter of faith. However, while we tend to consider beliefs personal and beyond reproach, denial of observable facts is not faith, but ideology run amok.
In the modern world, the visceral abstract plays a central role. Without Darwin’s theory, there can be no modern medicine. No big bang, no iPhone either. Nearly every facet of our lives is governed by some strange notion that is far removed from everyday experience. Ideas matter. Those who deny science are, in fact, denying the modern world itself.
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In the United States, with the political season in full swing, we hear a lot about outsourcing. Good jobs, the kind where people wear hardhats and safety glasses, are moving south and east, supposedly leaving a nation of hamburger flippers in their wake.
Politicians of all stripes say they will bring the jobs back. Some promise to batter China, while others pledge to create new industries that will provide honest work for millions of Rosie the Riveters and Bob the Builders.
But what if those jobs are replaced by robots? As The Economist reports, we are in the midst of a third industrial revolution. Whereas, before a factory could hire thousands of people, today most employ a small fraction of that number. When billions of dollars of output can be generated by just a few employees, the nature of work changes drastically.
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I learned most of what I know about innovation during the 15 years I spent living and working in the former Eastern Bloc. People are surprised when I tell them that and I admit, it’s a strange thing to say.
After all, the Soviet Union failed miserably. It was a drab place, filled with heavy tractors and people with gray clothes and dour looks on their faces. Innovation isn’t the first word that comes to mind.
However, while the system was crumbling, people still had to get things done. They needed housing, food, electricity and means to entertain themselves. Officially, these things weren’t a priority and the power structure put forth little effort to provide them. When leadership fails, innovation goes underground and people learn to hack to get by.
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