Making The Case For Constant Business Re-Imagination
Right now, someone else is re-imagining your business. And that’s precisely why you should be re-imagining it yourself.
Someone is out to disrupt your business literally as I write. They’ve identified a problem and they’ve set out to solve for it. They’re improving your customer experience, building a more useful product, and creating more enjoyable ways to experience your service. The clock is ticking and you can’t keep up with the pace of innovation. It’s a simple function of time — and increasingly less of it is required to turn an insight into the better version of you.
It’s more likely than not that many people are trying to disrupt your business — literally as I write.
But the reality is even more stark and is perfectly summed up by Mark Twain. “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget all the others…” Mark Twain couldn’t have known how the world would look today, but thanks to the democratization of technology, access to data, and massive amounts of available capital, it’s more likely than not that many people are attempting to disrupt your business, just as I write. ‘Multiple Discovery’ is a phenomenon whereby different inventors make the same discovery at the same time. With all our access to information and near-equal availability to immense computing power, instances of multiple discovery phenomenon are likely to accelerate over time. Your new competition is a thousand little armies.
Startups have the advantage of speed and can afford to fail often, learn on the fly, and implement solutions in real time.
Just because you’re a category leader, or have a deep IP portfolio, or confidence in the barriers to entry — or for whatever your specific reasons — young companies have built-in advantages that should keep you up at night. For starters, there are vast amounts of capital available to good ideas. Important metrics aren’t necessarily revenue or profit driven, so startups, particularly early stage, are experimenting with their product formulations, pricing strategies, messaging, and everything else, in real time. Their primary objective is customer acquisition and their customers are currently yours. Startups have the advantage of speed and can afford to fail often, learn on the fly, and implement solutions in real time. And startups aren’t just smart kids in garages anymore: your new competition is more likely than ever to be an expert in your field with deep understanding of the market, and they’re armed with lots of relationships.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. By embracing a philosophy of constant business re-imagination, your mindset and focus will become increasingly forward-looking. When you embrace some of what gives your disrupters their competitive advantage, you’ll better position yourself for growth while mitigating the downsides of having just been disrupted.
One thing I can guarantee is that someone’s on your flank and you don’t realize it.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting a blind-sided attack to your business will push you to extinction, a la Blockbuster (well, Blockbuster wasn’t exactly blindsided but that’s a story best elaborated in another post). But when profit margins are being squeezed, or when customer habits are changing, or when the regulatory environment is shifting, one thing I can guarantee is that someone’s on your flank and you don’t realize it. And that’s where developing an always-on process for business re-imagination can be so valuable.
Here are some of the high-level traits intrinsic to the process of successful Constant Business Re-Imagination:
- Awareness of your own weaknesses, customer behaviors, and how it’s all being addressed by technologies and new thinking.
- Curiosity as a tool that drives deeper thinking, discovery, and problem solving.
- Empathy for your customers and what drives their behaviors.
- Experimentation as a means to bring new ideas to life, test and measure in real time.
Accepting the fact that you do not currently know the answer is paramount. But once you do, you’ll begin discovering all kinds of opportunities and innovative solutions to your business challenges by asking good, insightful questions that uncover the hidden ideas that may have been there all along. The word discover literally means “dis-cover”, or to uncover something already there, or to reveal a fact. Good innovation practitioners make discovery a veritable sport, in large part, because they’re acutely aware of where their understanding of something ends and how to go farther.
By implementing a dedicated process for re-imagining your business, you’ll find yourself thinking differently, with a deeper understanding of your customers and how they make decisions about your product or service. You’ll be equipping yourself with a pipeline of insights and ideas that serve as the fuel for growth and opportunity. Your strategic posture will shift forward and outward, resulting in speed-to-solution, while mitigating (or eliminating) the downside of being externally disrupted. And you’ll begin creating immense value in real time.
Let’s start thinking differently about your business. Learn more about how Salt Flats enables re-imagination by clicking here. And if you enjoyed what you read, please repeatedly hit the clap button to encourage me to write more!
