When Clayton Christensen examines the impact of disruptive innovation on established companies, he notes that by the time a new threat to a company is recognized, it is too late. The new competitor gains a substantial foothold, and because of existing mindset, past success, and sunk costs, the established leader is caught unaware. For example, for the newspaper and magazine industry, the process of disruption has been described as being gripped by a digital riptide. The ferocity of this riptide includes Newsweek being sold for $1 in 2011, and the sales of the Washington Post for $250 million and the Boston Globe for $70 million, when just a few years earlier these newspapers were valued in the billions.
When caught in a riptide, one survives by swimming across the current, not against it. One escapes the riptide by not fighting it, and by learning how to avoid the middle of it. As Business Insider founder, Henry Blodget noted in RIPTIDE: What Really Happened to the News Business, “In the old world through 1995, media organizations were the equivalent of a hydrant in the desert. They controlled the vital information flow. They had tremendous power because they were the gateway. Now, we are a hydrant in the ocean. Media organizations are often still coming at it from the point of view of ‘Wait, we get to choose what’s important. People should consume it because we say it’s important.’ The point I’m making here is there is so much out there to consume right now that you actually have to build something that people like.”
For newspapers, the internet was the “ocean” and the resulting riptide forced the need to develop new strategies, primarily digital strategies. For those interested, the best resource, to understand the current state, success, and variety of these strategies for the news business is the Nieman Journalism Lab, and its 2014 predictions for the news business.
For corporate learning departments there is little in the literature to indicate “rough seas” in 2014. However, like newspapers, corporate education departments can be viewed as bobbing “hydrants” in the internet ocean. Should we learn from the experience of the riptide in the news industry?
Newspapers missed the impact of the internet on their business. Have corporate learning organizations? Like newspapers, corporate education departments must compete for customers. This may seem obvious, but very few learning departments view themselves as having internal or external competition. However, when we look at how people actually learn, it is clear that they use social media, MeetUps, search engines like
Additionally, as with newspapers, as companies align with, build, and support open-sourced platforms, content, and roles, they face new external competition for “open curricula” in new digital learning marketplaces, such as Balloon. In this new world of learning, learners view corporate education departments as just another option for learning—often a last stop. External learners who previously might have had only one choice for product training increasingly find themselves with the ability to shop around. In this new world, the consumer is king and their preference is for on-demand consumption.
This underlies the business case for Education Transformation. Corporate education departments must learn how to compete for internal and external business. They must be able to offer competitive, easy-to-consume, and on-demand learning services accessed from any device. They need to be relevant to digital natives. This new model requires a significant change in the way we think about and develop learning, organizational roles, skills, business models, measurement, systems, tools and value. In an earlier blog, I explained that an effective way to compete is through the Third Platform and a digital strategy.
As they attempt to master the new skill of internet-based learning, most corporate organizations focus on the lower end of the value continuum: informal learning, social discussion, video, and PowerPoint-based slide ware. These products are typically available on the Internet for free and are commodity oriented. However, corporate education departments can differentiate and compete beyond these free information and discussion offerings by providing high-value, integrated services and solutions that positively impact skills, innovation, and competitive advantage. By doing so with a cloud-based, on-demand approach; they can provide potentially superior alternatives to the current model of blended learning. In my next post I will discuss ways that corporate education departments should prepare for the Third Platform as part of a Digital Business Model strategy, in order to more effectively compete and avoid the “grip of the rip.”
