Is your Business Model Killing your Competitive Advantage?
Are you at risk of becoming extinct?
If you were at risk of losing your business, would you be willing to do whatever it took to save it? Would you be able to step away from “the way things have always been done” and stand in a new space to test and innovate, try something different, uncertain of knowing the outcome?
Clay Shirky’s post about “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” has me thinking about the distinction between businesses too beaurocratic to change, and those lithe enough to adapt.
Digital Darwinism.
It’s become common to hear commentary about how print media is dying. Shirky comments on how “Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full.” Shirky goes on to paraphrase the media moguls as basically stating, “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
Lots of business leaders like Diller, Brill and Murdoch are standing in the space of “we don’t know how to do that” with their heads in the sand and/or their feet feeling like cement shoes.
The world we are living in is changing more rapidly than any other time in the history of mankind. How and how fast is the internet altering your industry? Your business?
As entire industries and individual business owners struggle with how to adapt communications, delivery, customer service, marketing, sales etc. to meet the demands and expectations of consumers on the social web, their future success lies in their ability to move beyond “the way we’ve always done things” and begin exploration and testing of “the way we are going to be doing things now and in the future.”
Shirky summarizes his thesis on the collapse of complex business models by stating, “When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”
Position yourself to be the one who gets to say what happens in the future.
To survive and thrive you need a digital strategy to adapt your business model and communications to work in today’s world. The internet continues to influence and impact consumer expectations. How fast is your business responding?
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