Skating across the melting ice rink

I love reading Benedict Evan’s blog post each week. He’s an expert on the mobile ecosystem. Plus, he’s British (that’s a plus around here). Writing about the rise of Google & Apple, and the demise of Nokia & RIM, Evans writes of their respective strategies c. 2007:

“Nokia and Blackberry were skating to where the puck was going to be, and felt nice and fast and in control, while Apple and Google were melting the ice rink and switching the game to water-skiing.”

It might be easy for us to sit back with glee, and think how silly those folks at RIM must have been. But the truth is, most of us are only focused on optimizing what’s working today — doing it faster and better than any of our competitors. That feels like progress and feels like we’re winning. But that should be only a part of our overall strategy; not the whole thing.

What is much harder to do, I think, is to zoom back and admit that — like was true of RIM in 2007 — you may simply be winning a game that fewer people are playing (and that even fewer are paying to watch). It’s so hard to embrace the truth that, in effect, the ice is being melted and that the game is being changed.

It got me thinking a little of where else the “ice is being melted” and where else the game is being completely changed in business. You know the stories well, of course.

For starter, Transportation is being completely changed by the likes of Uber & Lyft. This, in turn, will transform logistics (look out UPS, FedEx and our beloved USPS), and of course the traditional auto-makers. Changes in transportation will also likely transform real estate and cities — if car ownership plummets in the next 20 years, what will be do with all of that unused space? Home garages and downtown parking lots won’t be as necessary any more. We see the ice melting in education, finance, productivity, and computing, to name just a few. Indeed, if we take Marc Andreessen’s oft-quoted statement, “software is eating the world”, to it’s logical conclusion, there won’t be many traditional ice-rinks left in the coming years. Everyone’s business is being disrupted and forever changed.

So, what is a business to do, to stay competitive and relevant going forward?

In StratOp, we talk a lot about the importance of getting in full perspective, before creating your strategic plan for the future. Indeed, we say “when you have clear perspective, the plan almost writes itself”. This includes getting clear on your market, your products/services, your industry, your competitors, and your customers. To win both today and in the future, you must have a healthy relationship with both reality and opportunity. You have to be open to the truth — especially if truth is really telling you that the ice-rink is melting. And you have to be open to the opportunities that these realities create — maybe today is the day to buy water skis :)

For me, I love all of the change and transformation that’s happening. But it makes it more vital than ever to have a plan and a process to navigate that change. No companies are immune. As Richard Foster reported a few years back, when looking at how long companies stayed at their peak (in this case, on the Fortune 500 list):

“What Foster found is that the rate at which companies get bumped off the S&P 500 has been accelerating. Back in 1958, a company could expect to stay on the list for 61 years. These days, the average is just 18 years.”

So, wherever we’re at in business and life, the ice is melting. Yet on the plus side, maybe we can all agree that water skiing is more fun…