Disruption – Knowledge, Flexibility, and Revolutionaries 

The Unexpected Challenge.

The ability to shift, change and adapt is an essential part of what organizations need to do to survive and manage change in today’s world. Understanding this must be part of marketing and business operations. If your customers are not paying attention or they’ve totally changed, you need to know this. 

Disruption opens up opportunities to new ways of doing things and gives the innovators and connectors the ability to create and shape new markets

The Fixed Mindset.

The Blackberry. Great name, great concept; it became the best selling business phone in the early 2000’s and then came the first iPhone in 2006. It changed everything, yet Research in Motion, the Canadian company making the Blackberry, did not respond to this change in reality.  Do you know anyone who has a Blackberry now?

Top-Down Thinking.

The largest businesses and institutions have a very hard time seeing trends and responding to them since they build their companies on a highly structured process with well-defined roles and accountability that they’ve built over time. They hone their process, structure, and teams to make sure everything works well.  But it can also be like the Titanic, a state-of-the-art passenger ship of the time, unsinkable, they thought, running into an iceberg. How can this happen? You don’t see what you don’t know.

The Disruption Mindset

• Know your changing market
• Be clear about your purpose 
• Keep your structure flexible 
• Listen to the outliers 
• Experiment, adapt and implement 

The key is always seeing the big picture while you manage the process, keeping your goals uppermost and, ideally, having someone in your organization who, well, doesn’t always follow the rules…someone who is allowed to see what’s not part of the plan and sees threats and opportunities that challenge a company. This is a role that needs to be supported to get that outsider’s point of view. This is where great ideas can develop that allow marketing and business strategies to adapt to the new environment.

You’re viability as a company counts on understanding impacts that are not in the business plan

Build a Change-Agent Mentality.

By building marketing and business strategies that include alternative perspectives and testing the current practices you can create a more agile organization that can quickly adapt to what’s next in this highly dynamic world.