Thriving on Disruption

As part of Strathclyde Business School's Leading Forward lecture series, our second speaker Mary Jo Jacobi gave a talk on disruption. Taking the lecture as the basis for this blog, Mary Jo looks at how to thrive despite disruption.

What is disruption?

It’s an act of delaying or interrupting the continuity; a disturbance that interrupts an event, activity or process.

The current business obsession with disruption began with the 1997 book by Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma. His premise was that successful companies not only meet customers’ needs, they anticipate their future needs and innovate as those needs change. Disruptive businesses start by either satisfying less-demanding customers or creating a market where none existed before.

Uber is a good illustration of this. Taxi passengers don’t have high expectations – they want to ride from point A to point B in relative comfort and safety at a reasonable price. Uber met the expectations of these ‘less demanding’ customers by creating a new, unregulated market to compete with taxis.

Since March 2009 it has grown to more than 3 million drivers carrying over 75 million riders in 600 cities around the world - more than 10 billion rides in 10 years.

Uber didn’t create a new market – it served the less-demanding customers of an existing one. Customers flocked to it. Disruption occurred.

I’m a television and motion picture junkie and more disruption can be found in this industry. What started with home VCRs and movie rentals from Blockbuster gave rise to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and more.

As he was about so many things, Bill Gates was prescient in 1996 when he wrote the essay “Content is King” – that the real opportunities of the Internet would lie in supplying information and entertainment.

From the NBC-Microsoft venture that is today MSNBC to online games where today huge audiences fill stadia to watch competitions where young gamers become millionaires to  expensive original content programming by cable companies and streaming services.

Today such original content is grabbing the awards formerly earned by traditional movies and terrestrial television series, and the developers are now even offering made-for-cinema content. A Netflix production was awarded Best Picture at this year’s Oscars ceremony. Disruption has occurred.

We are experiencing dramatic changes every day. Changes in the way we work and in our expectations of work. Changes in what customers expect from their experiences with us. And there are myriad ways to interrupt the continuity, to disrupt.

We in business must keep a watchful eye on the competitors and technology that could – no, will – change our companies.

No matter what our business area, whether it’s heavy industry or consulting services, what we’re really offering our customers and clients is experiences, hopefully consistently positive ones.

We must always meet or exceed our customers’ expectations, finding ways to do more for them than anyone else does or could.

For as our product and service offerings change based on technological innovation and evolving customer expectations, the one thing that must not change is our desire to delight our customers. That’s how we keep their business, how we keep them coming back for more. That’s how we counter disruption and thrive.

Who would have thought that a lab-created diamond would have as much value as a million-year-old mined diamond? Diamonds cost a lot, not because they’re rare, but because they’re so hard to get out of the ground. A lab diamond has all the sparkle but none of the dirt or hard labour or blood. Diamond buyers’ expectations are changing and the market is being disrupted by new entrants to meet those changing expectations.

No industry is immune to disruptive influences. 

To thrive in a disrupted world business must identify and understand potentially disruptive competitors and beat them at customer satisfaction and social responsibility.

The potential for disruption is all around but we can thrive in this chronically-disruptive environment if:

· We seek and serve new audiences and anticipate and meet their expectations

· We are agile

· We invent and reinvent our companies and ourselves by rethinking and repairing our    assets

· We learn to look beyond the obvious and develop foresight.

· We listen and respond to demands for change from our shareholders and our society

· We become resilient to maintain focus despite setbacks.

You can either be disrupted or disrupt – you can be diminished, or you can thrive!

The next lecture in the Leading Forward series is "Technology in our Changing world" by Jacqui Ferguson on September 25. Please click here to book. 

About Mary Jo Jacobi

Mary Jo Jacobi is an internationally-renowned expert in reputation, brand and crisis management. She has held senior roles in the banking and financial services industry at HSBC, Lehman Brothers and Drexel Burnham Lambert. She has also worked in the global oil and gas industry, notably as Vice President, Group External Affairs at Royal Dutch Shell and as Executive Vice President at BP America following the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.