DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION AS A CORE COMPETENCE
What must your CEO be thinking while browsing the major headlines over his/her morning bowl of cheerios? In his Hot Topic presentation, Geoff Vuleta, debates corporate wisdom…
Disruptive Innovation as a Core Incompetence is as much a pro-company idea as it is a blunt reality check for many. Companies are not geared for disruptive change in large part because they have never had to be. Over most of the last fifty years there was a tidy order to the world where small changes came quickly and big ones slowly.
So what must your CEO, whose confidence has returned again after dot com’s fleeting moment of madness, be thinking while browsing the headlines over his/her morning bowl of cheerios? With young companies growing exponentially accruing billions in a short period of time, while seasoned companies shrink seemingly overnight and mocked deals like myspace/Murdoch that leaves Murdoch with the last laugh – one thing is for sure. Six Sigma and Kaizen’s return to core competence and all the other pearls of corporate wisdom ain’t gonna be your CEO’s formula to solving this weird convergence of stuff.
For the good ones though, it is far from all bad news. Great companies have strong culture. It’s something that is in their DNA that is shared and developed over time, whether you are a Proctoid, a GE’er or from Big Blue. But, when the need is different and disruptive change necessary… a brand owner of unhealthy foods as the world lurches into an obesity epidemic… companies find they have people that are neither the right skill set or have the right training, nor the bandwidth to simply be ‘reassigned’.
Great companies today accept that dealing with disruptive needs is antithetical to running big business efficiently and well. In knowing core competence from Core Incompetence they purposefully, as in America’s Cup, parlance turns to running a two boat program - the need to drive up the business as it is today and take some big bets on the future. Big bets abetted by going to outside specialists to provide them the pieces, skill sets and resources they don’t have.
“Not invented here” has been pragmatically switched with “reapplied with pride”.
The ones who are gridlocked by fear of damaging what they have will be the Pan Ams and Wangs we will all read about while laughing at their blindness come the next decade.
Speaker: Geoff Vuleta
PDMA Conference