By Haydn Shaugnessy.
Photo by Diz Play
New ways to think about customer segmentation and innovation leadership.
Disruption is by nature triggered by events you cannot foresee or plan for. With hindsight we can all see why Kodak filled or why Nokia lost the mobile market. But what we can do in the present is to become adaptive enough that we can ride out disruptive storms. In a study of the Finnish software industry I found this is exactly what characterises companies that stay in business and continue to grow. The key characteristics are being able to spot new market opportunities and being able to reorganise resources internally to address them, often within an experimental, let's try it, kind of mindset.
But there are other disruptive clouds on the horizon. We are leaving the American dominated global economy and entering the Chinese dominated world. Old ideas about market entry and growth are going to have to change as Chinese companies pitch extraordinary resources at new business opportunities, restructuring markets as they go. Case in point Alipay is targeting 2 billion customers by 2026! Facebook ash 1.5 billion monthly users and that's an opportunity for advertisers. Chinese companies like China mobile have 850 million paying subscribers and Alipay, well - 2 billion coming soon.
In this situation we have to redefine what we understand by adaptability and in the book I've just co-authored with Aviva CIO Fin Goulding, we say it is all about creating the conditions where people co-create the right process for the job in hand. We need to find new ways to create the kinds of good, strong social interaction at work that allows people to make swift decisions on new processes, new tools and techniques and on what produces value - what is the right work to be done.
That's in the context of new software architectures like microservices that, anyway, allow us to work within smaller projects and at greater speed. The infrastructure for firms to be adaptive is coming. What's now needed is the mindset, The painful adjustment has to be made from leaders who have a sense of entitlement and employees who often hide behind leadership weaknesses to one where all decisions become more transparent, more visible and more subject to intelligent discourse. This is the real meaning of collective intelligence and in Flow we've set out how we think it works best.
At The Congregation I'd like to talk you through some of those ideas and get your feedback. I hoe they will also stimulate you to think of ways to improve co-creation at your workplace. Fin and I would also love to find opportunities to help people develop this transparent interactive culture.
