13. THE JOBS TO BE DONE
ARE NOW SATISFIED MORE AND MORE BY NON-TRADITIONAL
PLAYERS
They change the games, the frameworks, they break
borders
They don’t respect the world order!
THEY’RE BARBARIANS!!!
-- The Greek historian and military, Thucydides, as with his contemporary fellow citizens, distinguished Greek-speaking people from the non-Greek speaking ones, barbaros, a word that meant to suggest babbling.
-- That also separated those who were civilized, i.e. belonging to the Greek culture sphere, and non-civilized, in short, outside the cultural references.
-- To the civilized man, barbarians had nothing to teach; their manners and customs were strange, deem of lower value and status.
-- That attitude, as we know too well, has been witnessed everywhere throughout history.
-- The Roman Empire last for a thousand years, and was disintegrated by what Romans called barbarians.
-- Barbarians were “uncivilized”, at least from the Romans’ point of view. It is quite characteristic for civilizations, societies, groups, to see other as not as sophisticated, not as accomplished as they themselves are. Evidently, the hordes coming from Germany did not display the levels of social organizations the Romans had; but of course a lot depends on how we define civilization. Anthropology has taught us that all human societies contribute their own ways to the overall human heritage. As Susan Sontag said: “A person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.”
-- The same attitude was found in Ancient China and Japan
-- Amazing human accomplishments were deployed just to keep the barbarians away.
-- They feared that their world would be invaded, destroyed, annihilated.
-- Better be recluse in one’s own world than being open to different ways and customs. The Chinese even navigate as far as Saudi Arabia and Somalia, and could have conquered the world at a time when they were the most advanced technological society.
-- It is believed that they went back home instead, thinking that the rest of the world was just full of barbarians.
-- It is my belief that our world is now being invaded by hordes of Barbarians.
-- They are super innovators who don’t care about how we have been doing things, who don’t care about traditional practices in markets, who have no respect for century-old industries.
-- They want to change the world, as quickly as possible, and they want to keep changing it constantly.
-- They are coming from unsuspected places, they are unknown to you, but they may very well steal your lunch!
-- The Industrial Revolution brought spectacular changes in the countries where it emerged. It impacted human societies far beyond manufacturing: it changed the way people worked, where they lived, the family structured, education, and even people’s relationship to time.
-- Future historians will talk about the Digital Revolution in terms of the same profound changes as brought by the Industrial Revolution. It is impacting many, if not all dimensions of our lives.
-- I don’t use that comparison just to make a cute metaphor!
-- The Chinese say “May you live in interesting times”. You and I are in the middle of a real revolution that is really JUST BEGINNING.
-- We are just starting to understand what it meant for two fundamental dynamic principle to come into play (NEXT)
-- The Digital Revolution lays on two immense pillars, real foundation that needed to exist in order to even talk about all this:
-- Digitization: information had to be digitized (develop)
-- Network: that information (including people, and things) had to be networked (develop)
-- When these two principles meet, it creates more relationships between ideas, more possible connections at ever increasing speed!!
-- Very deeply, another dynamic principle that is at work here is how more and more seamlessly Demand meets Supply. The Internet is the most powerful marketplace ever!!
-- A world with less and less frictions between Demand and Supply is bound to explode in new offerings: this is the Age of Hyper Innovation
-- Disruption is a radical change, not a smooth one. It is a 90-degree turn, or even a 180-degree one, a pivot, a redirection, a change of planes, a new reality, a new playground, a new territory, a new paradigm, new practices, new modus operandi.
-- Disruption means changing rules, playbooks, instructions, laws, conventions, etc.
-- Disruption means coming from the left field, unexpected, even ridiculed
-- In markets, it means changing demand, rapidly taking market shares, taking competitors offguard
-- DISRUPTING MEANS BRINGING THE NEW ORDER, THE NEW PERMANENT… TEMPORARILY
-- In innovation terms, we must distinguish to very different things, both able to create value: disruptive innovation, and continuity (optimization) innovations
-- A disruptive innovation is often by essence a surprise, something people didn’t expect, not based on surveys, market research, feedbacks from best clients, etc. We are here **outside** the box.
-- A continuity innovation is listening again to customers, adjusting through optimizations, but **within** the frame established first by the disruptive innovation.
-- The first iPhone was a great disruption. Heck, it nearly killed one of Canada’s proudest company, RIM (Blackberry).
-- But since then we’re in continuity mode, in optimization, where we try to make it a little better so that we can feed the obsolescence principle.
-- Always innovating is VERY hard. Almost unsustainable. You need periods of rest.
-- My paternal grandfather died in 1940, and my father in 1981. My grandfather would have recognized my father’s world. Sure, there was television, but a lot of things already existed in the 1930s, or even 1920s: the telephone, the radio, cars, newspapers, classified ads, electric house appliances, etc.
-- My father, if he came back today, would not recognize our world of 2014, not only objects/products, but many aspects of our lives now: how we work, communicate, entertain ourselves, meet, etc.
-- You and I live in that unrecognizable world, a world in which the analog paradigm is more and more rapidly giving way to the digital paradigm.
-- Although being analog is still an important part of our world, of who we are as humans, the Digital Revolution is manifesting itself at the heart of our everyday lives, faster and faster.
-- Our lives are being incredibly disrupted!!
-- Just look around you, how much the way you do things in your daily life has changed in the last 10, 15 years!! Don’t make the mistake to believe that the Digital Revolution already affects your everyday life in many different ways!!
-- Über is disrupting the “taxi” industry
-- AirBnB is disrupting the hotel business
-- Expedia is disrupting travel agencies (and is itself disrupted by AirBnb”)
-- Car2Go is disrupting car rental, and even the notion of owning a car!
-- DocuSign is disrupting having to send hard copies of document to get legally binding signatures
-- Zappos is disrupting retail by proving that product categories we thought would not strive on the Web are now familiar.
-- Breather is disrupting the small meeting room rental business
-- DON’T THINK PEOPLE WILL NECESSARILY RESIST ALL THOSE CHANGES BASED ON SET OF VALUES THAT ARE MORE AND MORE CHANGING THEMSELVES!!!
-- Lots of things are also changing with us, and not only with our environment. In fact, one may probably say that our technological environment is changing us.
-- We are rethinking what we define as private.
-- We are redefining how we interact with each other: we are getting more familiar, less formal, mirroring the Web culture. Less hierarchy between us
-- We are willing to accept new modes of exchange, we’re revisiting ownership, being more open to sharing, paying for usage instead of ownership.
-- We are more willing to try out; probably stimulated by the “try for free” model so easily usable online, often in exchange of our data.
-- This is my September 7th bike ride. Google knows that I was there, evidently because I was carrying my Android cell phone. Of course, Google doesn’t make it public, but THEY know where I was. Do I mind? Should I? Do I care, as long as the company offers me great services?
-- Those new players don’t respect the rules, they write new ones
-- They change the games, the frameworks, they break borders
-- They appear from nowhere, and very quickly change everything
-- They are ruthless in their disrespect of how things have always been done
-- They’re barbarians!
-- The Lean Startup mindset
-- Fail fast to succeed early
-- Get feedbacks early
-- Look for signals through MVPs
-- Learn to pivot
-- What does “put customers at the center” mean? It means develop products and services using design (Design Thinking) as the innovation engine. Empathy. Ethnography.
-- Reorganize based on customer types, instead of product lines.
-- Customer Centricity also means extensively knowing our best clients, and especially the ones that have the highest potential to become our best clients.
-- Analytics thus become a very important element of a company’s marketing.
-- Innovating and managing without measuring is tantamount to driving with one’s eyes shut.
-- Using KPIs, we can still see the road, but we don’t know where we’re going, how to get to our final destination.
-- KPIs are a sort of language that helps us to understand each other, to create consensus on what is really important; how we will determine how successful our projects are. They guide us toward that success, informing us along the way on how well we’re doing, helping us correct the course if need be.
-- KPIs must absolutely drive actions without which they are only theoretical fantasies.
-- Change is happening faster and faster; we keep repeating that.
-- The corollary of that enormous velocity is that we must respond to it, from an organizational point of view, with great agility, here defined not only as the capability to adapt, but also the capacity to project forward the organization in answering its clients’ future, not yet imagined needs.
-- Internet revolutionized, and keeping revolutionizing the way we work, and how we can collaborate. In this hyper connected business world, it is a shame to keep the old barriers between departments, and divisions.
-- To best serve your customers, and thus your company, work across all teams, learn to make everyone’s success your success.
-- But once you have gathered your weapons of putting the customer at the center, of measuring everything you do, of being constantly agile, while learning to collaborate in new and more efficient ways, you will transform yourselves in formidable hordes, ready to take new markets.
-- -- I have only one simple request for you