This Thursday Thought highlights the imperative for growth imposed on organisations that have become slaves to stock analysts. When an incumbent, established organisation has enjoyed growth, they experience a challenge similar to the bodybuilder. They do not want to invest in the foundations but would instead focus on the visible growth, the vanity exercises. Investing in and developing disruptive innovation markets is akin to maintaining the ligament, tendon and muscle sheath work. By its very nature, the market size of a new opportunity is small, so the returns also look small. To make matters worse, they are slow, and when compared to the might and muscle of maturity, they look puny.
“I Don’t Have an Opinion, the Theory Has an Opinion” – Clayton Christensen, inoculating value attribution bias by using the lens of theory.
Apoptosis provides a fitting metaphor for what must happen in organisations to survive continuous cycles of change. Rather than letting the entire organisation die, the corporate body’s sectors, departments, and business units must regularly renew, just like a human body. Like any healthy process, the end of one cycle is the beginning of another, and it is better to embrace this law than to resist it. Easier said than done.
Using the rational, analytical investment processes that most well-managed companies have developed, it is nearly impossible to build a logical case for diverting resources from known customer needs in established markets to markets and customers that seem insignificant or do not yet exist.
As Clayton Christensen reiterated throughout his work, capable managers do not become incapable overnight; they act in what they believe is in the best interests of the organisation they serve. For the executives in Western Union, there was simply no way they could have anticipated that the telephone would ever get good enough to be a competitive threat. As the great innovator Buckminster Fuller said, “There is nothing in the caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.”
How do you maintain the message of your company vision across generations?
“Many of us are living a very narrow life; we have self-inflicted blinkers on. Widen your view, widen your mind, widen your life.” — Marcus Aurelius
The information we absorb dramatically impacts how we perceive the world.
When you change your perspective of time and see it as non-linear, it helps you realise that a step backwards is a natural part of renewal. When you perceive time as non-linear, it enables you to reinvent, renew and regenerate safely in the knowledge that your old bloom and your new bud co-exist, each supporting your magnificent present.
The beginning of a new career is the end of an old one. For anyone struggling with change, remember that Winter always precedes Spring.
An organisation must address people and processes, mental models and business models, what they do and how their people think. Forcing mechanical change is a fool’s errand. There is always a struggle in any change process, but struggle is a precursor to growth.