It does not matter that you are a market leader and showing constant growth. Be sure that someday, and probably sooner than you can even imagine, another company WILL come to put you out of business. It might as well be you. Or in short - disrupt, or be disrupted.
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Companies, communities, and individuals fail for many reasons. One of the common and maybe the trickiest to avoid is the failure to reinvent. Those who feel the most secure, when tacked safely in the blanket of their past success, are the most vulnerable.
These days, more than ever, for every leader of any market you can find a long list of challengers with one goal in mind - disrupting that market, and running the leader out of business. You can find disruption everywhere. iPod disrupted the music industry, Kindle disrupted traditional publishing, Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry, and the list goes on and on.
The constant pressure of disruption will eventually fail any organization, unless they: re-invent, disrupt their own business model, and cannibalize their own market.
It does not matter that you are a market leader and showing constant growth. Be sure that someday, and probably sooner than you can even imagine, another company WILL come with an aim to put you out of business.
It might as well be you. Or in short: disrupt or be disrupted.
Many times, re-invention or disruption is thought of as product innovation. However, it takes many other forms, not less effective. It can also come in the form of process changes, user experience modifications, re-alignment of your brand, and more.
"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be" - Lau Tzu
In his book "The Road to Re-Invention: How to Drive Disruption and Accelerate Transformation" Josh Linkner, lays out a systematic approach for continually challenging and reinventing organizations and individuals.
As Linkner points out, a leader's responsibility is to prioritize re-invention. When an organization's success has made it "sleepy" the leader's job is to infuse back that same creative hunger that launched it.
The most important takeaway from this book is that reinvention isn't a single event, it's a way of life. A constant process of discovery and imagination. As Linker wonderfully puts it, creativity is the new most effective sustainable competitive advantage. It's the one thing that no company can outsource.
In the 1920s, a journalist asked Thomas Edison how it felt to fail 1,000 times in his attempt to invent the lightbulb. He replied: “I didn't fail 1,000 times. The lightbulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
The manifestation of this exact spirit can be seen when looking at organizations that are constantly re-inventing, and are ruthless about it. They understand that in this day and age, no one can guarantee that what worked in the past is sustainable. Actually - chances are that it isn't. And yes, it will also include some new failures to hang on the wall, but this is exactly what it takes to win. As the saying goes "the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried" — Stephen McCranie
"the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried"
The main five ideas in the book include [....watch out... spoiler alert :)]
To stay successful, you have to reinvent yourself, as a person and as a company. There's no way around it.
Embrace a ruthless re-examining mindset.
Re-invention is not only about the product. Redefining the "how" is as important as the "what".
Do steps 1 to 3 above with a customer-centric point of view. After all, your customers are why you do what you do. But also, don't be afraid to ask yourself, is it time to re-invent who your customers are?
Re-invention, is, more than anything else, a culture. Make sure you get this component right.
Happy reading.
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