Readers in industries where the pace of change has slowed and ambiguity has decreased, please stop reading. This post isn’t for you.
Everyone still here? Thought so. An interconnected world where technology advances at a dizzying pace and new companies emerge, scale, and decline in the blink of an eye means never a dull moment for corporate leaders.
Despite conceptually understanding that this change mandates fresh strategic approaches, Roger Martin (among others) has highlighted the mistakes companies continue to make by relying on processes and tools honed in a differently paced era.
One of the most frequent challenges we observe in the field is that companies tend to radically underestimate the threat that disruptive change poses to their business.
For example, back in early 2005, I and my colleague Clark Gilbert (now the CEO of Deseret News and Deseret Digital) ran a workshop for 100 top executives in the U.S. newspaper industry. The sentiment in the room was clearly triumphant. Pundits had proclaimed that the newspaper industry was a shuffling dinosaur as the commercial Internet took off in the late 1990s, yet most companies still had healthy financial statements and stable balance sheets.
Read the rest at Harvard Business Review
Scott D. Anthony is a senior partner at Innosight.