Business is ultimately about People and Leadership which is grounded in Anthropology. It’s not just about brands, brains, and buildings. Brands and buildings, touch on dealership, whereas Leadership is hinged on Anthropology and how it creates real sustainable value and a big win for everyone in the long run.
It directs talent, jobs, and resources to its most valuable use. As such, businesses that are not relevant would be disrupted giving way to businesses that more useful and valuable in designing and delivering goods, services, and products. With the emergence of Autonomous Vehicles, the drivers would no longer be needed and would be displaced. The extra workforce needs to find work elsewhere they can create value in a new field and arenas, filling gaps in the market for new services and new value provision.
What then exactly is a disruption?
A disruption happens when a new product or service helps create a new market and significantly weakens, transforms, or destroys an existing product, market category and industry. For example, the typewriter is an antiquated product. I still can recall how everything was done on a Typewriter in the 80’s when we started our careers. Today what required the skill and savvy of a secretary can be done with just one back space button. Disruptions happen fast and some secretaries found it difficult to adapt and were made redundant. In the same way when smart phones were not in vogue or normal part of our lives yet, and now imagine being without your smart phone for a day –it can drive you up bonkers -but just two decades ago we were perfectly fine using our conventional phones or fixed lines. To see how market disruptions have changed the way work is done, read the story of the invention of Liquid Paper (Blanco) in the 50’s where an almost insurmountable challenge is done just with a click using “backspace “on your computer.
In the early 1950s, a secretary by the name of Bette Nesmith Graham was struggling in her job as a single mother. Although she was dependable, she found that making unnecessary mistakes on the typewriter could jeopardise her job. She had to find a solution to this problem. She began to ask questions and realised that when artists and painters — working at the same bank as her — made a mistake, they simply painted over their mistakes. Why couldn’t she do the same?
She took home some wall paint and with the use of her kitchen blender, mixed it into the right tone, texture and colour and began painting over her mistakes. Then, liquid paper was born. She used this to correct her typing mistakes. Her boss never noticed it. Soon, another secretary saw the invention and asked for some of the correcting fluid. Soon all the secretaries in the building were asking for some, too. This is considered a market disruption in secretarial services.
Graham is one example of someone who carved a name in history as an inventor from a humble secretarial position. With humble beginnings and a desire to make a difference, she is an inspiring example to anyone today. Graham believed money to be a tool, not a solution to a problem. She set up two foundations to help women find new ways to earn a living. In 1979, she sold her corporation for USD47.5mil (RM189mil) to Gillette Corporation.
This was in the 50’s. But today this can be a norm rather than an exception where almost every day a new and unconventional disruption is initiated even by little kids such as Disney Kids Clothes
To do that you will need to have a Game Changer Mind set.
Good Leaders inspire people to take an Anthropological perspective and embrace new ways of thinking and working for the business because they see the world from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. They bring it to realization and influence us with the benefits. They are prepared to make commitments and sacrifices, to let go of the old to embrace the new. From Alibaba to Zynga, Azuri to Zidisha, Airbnb and Zipcars, a new whole generation of businesses are arising out of the turbulence of economic and technological changes across the world. These are companies that are shaking up our world with new approaches to business and brands. These Game changers are disruptive in every sector and region, reshaping our world and the jobs that go with it. Today we are living in a shared and collaborative economy –where metaphorically speaking what is yours is mine. Due to connectivity – excess capacities can be put to full use –like Airbnb, Uber etc.
It’s not just a story of technology, but also of a new business model but also in line with changing trends and tastes Tony Seba, re-known futurist, speaking at the American Renewable Energy conference quite recently made the finding that the mainstream forecasts have often missed market-disrupting technologies and business models in the mid-1980s, AT&T hired McKinsey and Co. to forecast cell-phone adoption by the year 2000. McKinsey predicted 900,000 subscribers. The real number was 109 million. They were off by a factor of 120 times. This is common in terms predicting the future. AT&T’s landline telephone market was disrupted. It missed out on a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.
In view that Disruptions are happening at an unprecedented pace, leaders must continuously connect with external reality align and link with the internal, so that what we do is still relevant.
To the Business Organisation, Leaders need to align internal work carefully and continuously with external changes and disruptions so that they are not caught with their pants down.
Disruptions are game changers, and they will change the way we do business and the way we work.
A famous strategist said that it’s no use doing efficiently what need not be done at all.
Below are some game changing businesses:
Disruptions And Anthro Work Trends
Market and Business Disruptions will affect the way we work, live, communicate, and socialise. With the enablement of IT and AI –there will be a dramatic change in the way work is distributed and carried out. Ideas, Information, Innovation, and Intelligence are the key drivers of value. Change and disruptions riding on IT Enablement and Digitalization is key driver.
There is an emergence in a newly coined term known as “Thought Leadership” in the context of personal Branding, Idea and Innovation fuelled by the Internet. Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime can birth an idea, innovation, improvement or offering and become a sensation or brand almost overnight through viral media sharing.
People and jobs need to be more ambitious and out stretching to encompass what isn’t in the market and prepare proactively for it. They can find their own space, then shape it through their own vision and in their own pace possibly brace themselves correctly and without being a rat in the rat race. Companies and Individuals can outthink their competition and move from the competitive to the creative plane by offering new solutions by thinking bigger, bolder, and totally differently. Goods and services need not be cheaper or slightly better. People and Companies can make mini shifts and change the game entirely and tirelessly by Thinking in New Boxes. They can fuse digital, physical, global, and local ideas and networks to offer new value propositions on a shared, owned, co-owned or rented platforms. They can win by being smart, fast, and connected – rather than through scale and efficiency. They can capture their target audiences at the right time and place, enabled by data and technology and through empathetic design and rich human experiences such as in “Long tail marketing” where novel and small number of buyers will pay high prices for limited or proprietary items.
Social networks will drive reach and richness with strong collaboration with customers supported by strategic partnerships – connecting ideas and capabilities, looking beyond the sale and scales to enable customers to achieve more. They will empathically care more about the impact on people and the world around and ultimately create a better world which is foundationally Anthrophillic in nature and bias. Fundamental values and modes of thinking, working, and managing organisations and business must change. The old ways are destructive, stressful, and wasteful.
A new day is reckoning – Are we embracing it!
…it is management’s public responsibility to make whatever is genuinely in the public good become enterprise own self-interest…
…the proper social responsibility of business is to tame the dragon, that is to turn a social problem: –
Into Economic Benefit
Into Productive Capacity
Into Human Competence
Into Well Paid Jobs
Into Wealth
“Peter Drucker”.
This post is written by our Senior Advisor, Alan Teo from his book titled: “Creating Winning Culture and Building Supertalent”.
