By Abhijit Bhaduri & Bill Fischer
In the nineteen-eighties, Michael Porter argued that more thoughtful approaches to strategies could help make organizations succeed. Two decades later, Porter’s Five Forces was disrupted by Clayton Christensen’s argument that what makes companies fail is often a reluctance to give-up the choices made in such thoughtful approaches. In both arguments, managerial decisions play a key role: for Porter, setting-up an awareness of the competitive environment in order to make better choices; for Christensen, recognizing that that competitive environment is now in such flux that most choices don’t remain “better” for very long.
The irony is that many organizations fail precisely because their leaders made good decisions for one particular point in time -- the very same kind of good decisions that had made those companies successful for decades—and then they failed to recognize that times change, and past choices fade in appropriateness. These companies failed to reinvent themselves in the process, and were replaced by newer competitors unburdened by the legacy of success.
Blackberry – once called “crackberry” by the media to describe the addictive behavior that its owners displayed -- is fast on its way to becoming a metaphor for being “out of date”. Simply because Blackberry continued to do exactly the same things – the “right” things -- that had once made them successful. In the face of profound change, they did more of the same.
At first, the iPhone was merely the blackberry disrupter. Then, it became the way to listen to music, and to take photos, to surf the web, to store e-books and a variety of other things that had been unthought of prior to its introduction. The list of what it could do expanded exponentially as more minds got involved and as the app store grew large enough to claim, “We have an app for that”, no matter what “that” was. With the spread of apps, our habits changed as well. We started consuming news on the mobile, learning languages, getting traveling directions, recipes, etc.; each one a tiny disruption of an established industry in its own right, and in the process the notion of organizational sustainability became a fundamentally different concept than in the past.
Today, in Africa, mobile phones have disrupted the normal banking experience, well beyond what has happened in the more advanced economies. M-Pesa a mobile money transferring service now handles one third of Kenya’s GDP. The traditionally unbanked have bypassed the long-admired “big-branded” banks to meet their banking needs. That means – these traditional banks have lost this huge customer base forever, and banking has been, in a sense, democratized; altering the entire banking value-chain.
Make no mistake: disruption is a human phenomenon. People – managers – make choices, or they don’t. Engineers don’t suddenly go dumb overnight; rather, when disruption occurs, it is typically “Management” that loses its way and fails to make the necessary readjustments. And, as a result, not only are technologies disrupted, but technologists as well. When one corporate behemoth leaves the scene, so do the employees who manned that now-deceased organization.
Along the way, a lot of routine tasks that once employed thousands suddenly disappear because some new way of working can create the same outcomes faster and tirelessly. Makeup Genius, an app that has been downloaded 1.7 million times, allows you to try on 100 eye shadows in the time it takes to try one in real life. The app suddenly makes the makeup artists employed by departmental stores inefficient and unnecessary. Translators could be next! So, too, bookkeepers, even medical diagnosticians.
White collar employees are not immune to disruption. Most people’s careers are built upon the skills and degrees they had acquired in college. Today, some estimates of the half-life of such professional skills are as short as three years. If we wish for sustainable careers, over an ever-increasing lifespan, then each one of us will inevitably have to reinvent ourselves by adding new skills to our existing repertoire of capabilities.
Will you be able to reinvent yourself? “Personal Reinvention” is hard; it's more than merely "rebranding". As with organizations, avoiding personal disruption means being able to give up skills or points of view that may have made you successful in the past. Being curious and tinkering with ideas continuously is an important personal trait to begin with, but only if pursued in a conscious, thoughtful and, yes, strategic fashion. However, if you think reinvention is difficult, skills obsolescence is ever more so.
Abhijit Bhaduri is Chief Learning Officer of Wipro, Ltd, author and a top influencer on social media
