Too much of our planning for growth these days is predicated on incremental improvements, brand extensions, product re-sizing, territorial expansions and the like. These are attempts to capture market share available in readily-apparent adjacencies rather than through undertaking new journeys and adventures and they’re generally safe and sound bets for big companies. One problem with this approach is that these are paths and choices that are demonstrably evolutionary rather than revolutionary – they’re great add-ons, but rarely will they generate needle-moving numbers. Sure bets guarantee small margins. The standard “no one ever got fired” process is all about taking carefully-qualified steps forward instead of making quantum leaps.
But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this heads-down, “grind it out” approach (which might have been entirely prudent and reasonable in less flush or chaotic times) keeps many of us from seeing and seizing certain kinds of disruptive and game-changing opportunities which are being enabled today primarily by the rapid spread and availability of new low-cost technologies and by the dual explosion of ubiquitous mobility and connectivity. If we are principally focused on getting as close as possible to achieving our currently defined goals and objectives (and our operating numbers for the quarter or the year), it’s just not very likely that we’re going to look beyond those targets and over the horizon in order to see the less obvious and more extraordinary areas of possible change.
The truth is that we just don’t have to do things in the same calculated and mechanical ways that we always have in the past and we especially don’t have to construct the kinds of capital-intensive, costly and time-consuming foundations (including, but not limited to, every kind of bricks and mortar solution that is out there today) which were required and essential supports in the past, but which today simply constrain us and slow us down. This isn’t simply that old familiar conversation to the effect that “we didn’t need better buggy whips or faster horses, we needed cars”; it’s an even broader commentary than that. We don’t need the horses, we don’t need the stables, and, frankly, any day now, we may not need the drivers themselves.
What we need is new inspiration and new approaches that are disruptive and discontinuous – not linear extensions – but true experiments with admittedly unknown outcomes and results, but which also represent the prospect of exponential potential gains. And the very good news today is that these types of new solutions can be implemented in less costly ways than ever before so that the real risks and downsides of continued experimentation can be constrained and largely mitigated.
It’s also encouraging to see that these innovative approaches aren’t limited to new businesses, but are being incorporated in the strategies of plenty of large and old line companies as well. Admittedly, in some cases, they are acting belatedly and defensively rather than leading the charge, but at least they are moving in the right direction. But whatever the age and size of your business, you need to be thinking about the steps you should be taking to distance and differentiate your products and services from both the competition you can see today and the much more threatening and extensive competition still to come. And, even more importantly, you need to ask yourself what – if anything – is the sustainable competitive advantage that you are hoping to create for your business so that it can compete in the future on anything other than price which is always a race to the bottom for any business.
No one can tell you the specific steps you will need to take to make these jumps, but here are two interesting and instructive cases which are worth continuing to watch in order to see how they might be applicable to your own situation. One is a done deal and one is an open question.
(1) The Book Biz is About Anything But Books
Please don’t call anyone in the book biz a “publisher” these days just because – if you twist their arms – they might sell you a book. The “P” word is definitely out and the new industry buzzwords are all about adaptive learning and learning management systems, etc. Why is this seemingly semantic change so interesting? Because – for all intents and purposes – it reflects the decisions made by all of the biggest book publishers in the land to just throw in the towel and pretty much leapfrog right over the digital book business without even trying to explore those kinds of content offerings. It would appear that they’re leaving the field wide open for Amazon and Apple, but maybe they know something that isn’t obvious to the rest of us. There may not be any there there any longer.
If you ask them why they didn’t aggressively pursue the protected digital distribution of their content, it turns out that their decisions weren’t really based on the usual considerations which continue to plague the music and film industries – theft by pirates, cheap low-quality duplication, peer-to-peer sharing, etc. It turns out that they concluded that the intrinsic value of the content itself which they had to offer was being slowly ground down to nothing by: (a) the actions of the content creators themselves (rather than the actions of others as was the case in music and movies); (b) highly-efficient used book marketers; (c) the advent of MOOCs; and (d) free webcasting of lectures and classes by universities and professors all over the world - so they just decided to jump right over the challenging and unprofitable distribution game and move to building proprietary and protectable learning systems which they could market and sell to their same customers and which would assist in teaching whatever the content might be and, more importantly, measuring the results of those efforts.
(2) A New Lease on Life for Libraries?
Libraries aren’t much better off than books these days and cities and schools of every size and shape are trying to figure out what the library of the future will look like and – very frankly – what real functions it will provide which justify its continued existence and provide some kind of differentiation from so many other public and private spaces. There are about 120,000 libraries in the U.S. these days and the vast majority (pretty close to 100,000) are in schools and universities. And you can be sure that in almost every instance, there are other users, groups, departments and facility management professionals who are coveting those large (and largely empty) spaces in their institutions for a million other uses. The one thing that we know for sure is that relying on “tradition” in order to support the old ways of doing things won’t do the trick much longer. Tradition these days is just a delusion of permanence and - most often – it’s just an easy excuse for those who don’t want to change.
So the challenge that I would leave you with is to think creatively and disruptively about what will we do with our libraries now that books are increasingly a thing of the past? Should they simply be community spaces? Safe harbors for kids after school? Coaching and supplementary education places? Or just rows and rows of recycled desktops for accessing digital everything. Right now, this is a very open question. You should regard it - not as a closed book - but as a very large volume full of empty pages.
PS: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
