Disruptive Strategy
Friday, July 30, 2010 at 10:31AM
Lately disruption, albeit the good kind, has been on my mind. Strategy has been defined in a number of ways and I am sure you have your own definition too. But let me share mine with you and see if we are still seeing each other “eye to eye”.
So I started this post with “disruption” and then veered off to “strategy”. What’s going on here, Uday? The reason is that the two share a tight relationship. I am reasonably convinced that disruption is a key ingredient of any and every strategy, and its relative weight in the equation is on the rise. In order to be at a place where you (i.e. the company) have never been before, you will need to displace or disturb something that is already there (i.e. the incumbent or competition). You may think that your product or service is unique, niche, never-thought-before, etc. but think harder because in every case, you will come up with some mechanism, widget, process, etc. that is already in place and is already satisfying the targeted “need”. However how you are different or trying to be different is probably by helping your target segment(s) derive or consume a better, faster, cheaper, or closer experience. What you are offering is an improvement over how the “need” was satisfied by other, existing firms. What you have just done is that you have disrupted an established norm by crashing into somebody’s party. That is the difference which is central to how I believe strategy is manifesting itself in current times.
When thinking of strategy, it is imperative to understand the current state of affairs. There are a number of tools that can help you understand the macro level dynamics of the market when formulating strategy – Porter 5 analysis, PEST analysis, VRIN analysis, Quadrant Crunching, etc. But you must dive deeper and get closer to the ground to understand what is it that is worthy of disruption in that specific context. Which feather can be ruffled, which rule can be bent, which idea can be twisted, which shortcut can be carved, which myth can be shattered, which 2 birds can be killed with 1 stone. OK, I will stop; you get the idea, hopefully. Thinking this way will give you everything that you need to formulate and articulate you specific firm’s or BU’s or product’s strategy statement. It will help you come up with the problem statement, because without that you are nothing but an imitator or emulator.
Everything that we have gotten to see lately and what we will see in the future will be a result of healthy, unconventional, transformational, creative disruption. I think we are at a point where we (i.e. the consumers) expect this disruption to happen around us at a steady clip and when it does not arrive in a timely manner, we start to get impatient. In the past we hated or resisted change but now we can hardly wait to change. We expect change! Name it – clothes, hairstyles, cars, accessories, music, food, appliances – we want to be presented with new things and new consumptions mechanisms all the time. We are expecting the Apples, Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks of the world to keep changing on us, keep breaking, twisting, turning, tweaking things that they have already built – so that we can be presented with new experiences.
Bottom line, your strategy must have a “disruptive” component else the odds of it being profitable are going to be slim to none. As always, feel free to disrupt my ideas.




