Paranoia Will Keep Your Business Alive!
An article in Entrepreneur Magazine (Oct/Nov 2020) recently caught my eye (How NOT to get disrupted by Hamza Mudassir). The analogy is that while you are busy looking out the front windshield, trying to figure out how to disrupt the industry or market or competition as part of your own go to market strategy, don’t fall asleep at the wheel or you will be run over from behind. The point he makes immediately in his opening paragraph is how much time do you actually spend thinking about “How likely are we to get disrupted?”
For nearly two decades as a retained search firm, we have selected our client targets based on just that premise. Instead of focusing or even specializing in a particular industry – we have sought out companies or industries who are either the cause of major disruption or are the target of same. Either way, they all need exceptional talent in order to steer the company either out of danger or, in more dynamic moments, help them achieve audacious new goals that, in turn, end up disrupting someone else. This makes us inherently good at addressing the gap in talent before it becomes a fatal flaw.
The author, a strategy fellow at Cambridge and founder of his own company, goes on to share some patterns of disruption (I would call them pot holes in the road to success) you want to steer clear of. These include:
Owning the standard or get owned
Whether it’s a software standard, interface standard, or a distribution model or process – you want to be the first to introduce such, lead such and steer it. Others will often adopt these standards as best practice, which typically plays in favor of consumer/user – but it does lead to challenges for the business. I recall conversations in my earlier career around mobile phones and whether they needed to have a camera embedded. We opted to not support that at my company. We all know what happened since. However, your chosen standard should give you leverage against others. So choose your standard wisely. Or – if late to the dance – find a way to create another standard/benchmark that puts your competition out in the cold. Today, in our search practice, we have set the standard for search firms by offering a candidate performance-based guarantee vs. the traditional time-based guarantee only – which is a hurdle that others may not wish to adopt.
Don’t let someone come between you and your customer
Having a direct connection to how your customers really feel about your company products and services is absolutely necessary. This seems intuitive in today’s social media driven world. However, the critical success of D2C (direct to consumer) models/companies – has served notice on traditional distribution model and brand companies who have relied on an indirect feedback loop. Alternatively, if you have a direct consumer point of sale/interaction point, make sure you have the digital technology and mechanisms in place to capture client usage/shopping habits. I have a client in the entertainment industry who saw immediate win/win when they introduced a club membership program that incentivized their customers to belong, to interact and to be tracked. I have another client who is a star in the D2C clothing/consumer goods category and their immediate feedback loop from consumers – coupled with their in-house ability to respond with new designs and products quickly – keeps them in the forefront of innovation – while disrupting others around them with a traditional business model.
Killing your clients slowly with never-ending upgrades
So you think that you are being responsive by incrementally improving your ever-growing list of features and functionality? Maybe. But sometimes customers are screaming out for something simpler and new – so why not do that or at least consider that? We all know the DVD and Blu-ray story – disrupted or eclipsed by something simpler and more convenient – the streaming service. Having had several clients in the video conferencing space – the client base was clamoring for simpler, easier to use and with some features that made it applicable for consumer and business use. Zoom had the perfect storm happen at the right time we can argue – but they were able to offer something simple and easy to deploy, engage with, monitor and coupled with a freemium pricing model – made us all add “zooming” to the Webster dictionary almost overnight. Other competitors retrenched, lost market share, were acquired vs. accelerating in triumph.
Net, net – there is wisdom in hindsight. We all know of instances in our careers and companies where we “could have” done something different. Did we know better? Do you know better now? How do you know you are not about to be disrupted? So stay vigilant – and paranoid, and keep disrupting in all directions.
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