Unsettling Thoughts...

This walk in the nippy, blustery New York weather was making me use every single muscle in my body, when they were virtually numb. Perhaps this majestic city was teaching me the skill to raft against the flow. Apparently, this was no more a 15 minute walk from the subway station; the only thing that kept me moving was the sight of my friend’s apartment from some distance.

Finally I reached the place with the hope to keep myself warm, but it was equally cold inside, Freddy had lost his software job a couple of days back in the recession. After spending some time with him, I left for my home, but with a thought for analyzing possible mitigations to this all-pervading catastrophe for smaller companies like the one Freddy used to work for. How do these companies stand the storm?

This somewhere reminds me of the early web boom and the subsequent bubble burst. Companies mushroomed up from nowhere, to get their share of the pie and some of them really sailed with the tide, but temporarily. Only companies who resorted to disruptive innovation could stand the downturn. Web based businesses like Amazon and Google not only sustained but thrived to become business leaders.

What companies really need to evaluate is that, if their innovation is really disruptive?

Recently, I was having a discussion with one of my fellow colleagues regarding how performing out of your comfort zone is a true test of one’s character, the same concept applies to businesses. This downturn is a test of the character of your business. This tremor though has shaken many Red Oceans but has surely created some new Blue oceans. Now it’s all about spotting and capturing those blue oceans.

InsideView is a good example both for disruptive innovation and identifying new blue oceans. It is a crawler for pulling business contacts from social networks and other web based resources thereby making the existing sales teams in companies more efficient, as the chances of recruiting new people are thin in the dipping economy. Innovative…isn’t it? This start-up could raise a $6.5 Million dollar funding on their innovation.

To my mind this is a new beginning, entrepreneurs surely need to think of new ways of doing business, new ways of strategizing, finding new markets. Now is the time to give up on orthodox business thinking, now is the time to think of value creation, don’t let the opportunity slip through your fingers because of your institutional blindness.

If we look at Gartner’s technology predictions for 2009, it again emanates from the shift in business outlook. With things like social software, virtualization, WOA and cloud computing making it to the Top10 does corroborate the perception of changing face of business.

I was reading through an article from Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School, where she had pointed out the non-value-addition culture in organizations today. Employees are always busy checking emails, taking phone calls, making some presentations, which if you step back and see do not really add any value to your company's disruptive strategizing. Going forward, companies need to reconsider these non-value chunks.

Companies also need to rethink their strategies for this difficult time. Strategy is always relative to the market-frame-of-reference, what was a great strategy yesterday might not even work today. Today, your clients need solutions which help them reduce the costs but at the same time offer the same value as before. This surely is a challenge, but challenges create opportunities, true… isn’t it?

Considering the paradigm shift that is reverberating across the global markets, to me, it’s time for companies to bring new thought leaders and at the same time making use of the conventional leaders by putting them in support roles.

Conclusively, I see this turbulence as a true growth opportunity for companies if they play it right. Think of the recent news article about Google dropping 100 recruiters, which might suggest that recruitment as an industry is going to face slow growth ahead but then we have LinkedIn growing as a career site at a faster rate than SimplyHired, and Monster.

Doesn’t this signal that disruptive innovation works…even in the bad times?

:- Muktesh Kandpal