Are you learning faster than your competition? Several years ago, the leaders of the Gates Foundation embarked on a journey to improve their culture. Their goal was “to improve their learning culture, in which people have the humility to know what they don’t know and the curiosity to rethink the way they’ve always done things.”
Have you lost control over how you spend your time? Talk to anyone working today whether in a startup or a well-established Fortune 500 company, and they will tell you the same thing – “I’m working so hard but there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do my job.”
Is your competition learning faster than you are? The main theme of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo DaVinci is “the ability to make connections across disciplines – arts and sciences, humanities and technology – is a key to innovation, imagination and genius.”
In the July IDG survey, 53% of CIO respondents said that their top digital business objective was to “maintain overall revenue, given market shifts.” 53% also sited the need to “drive new revenue” up from 48% in 2018. CEOs and Boards are increasingly looking to digital technology as the primary source of new business growth and profitability.
What if everything you were taught about creating and sustaining competitive advantage is no longer true? Most leaders of well-established businesses were taught that the key to creating sustainable competitive advantage was erecting large barriers to entry into their markets by scaling the size and reach of their companies.
Most senior leaders find comfort in believing that in times of severe market downturns cutting costs and hunkering down is a prudent course of action. The trouble is the data supports the totally opposite course of action.
Historically companies believed they could create sustainable competitive advantage by owning and controlling the assets needed to build high barriers to entry into their markets.
Last year, a McKinsey study documented that companies spent more than $1.3 trillion on digital transformations 70% of which failed to reach their desired outcomes which means that over $900 billion went to waste.
For businesses of any size to be successful today, they need to think and act like a software company. Whether they are actually developing software or just deploying and leveraging it, they need to configure their business model to operate like one.
The frequency and pace of change from digital disruption necessitates that companies can no longer rely on traditional planning and decision-making models. Simply put, they are too slow, too rigid and too process-driven to adapt to the new speed of business.
