Disruptive Thinking

When your boss say business as usual, the employee should be worried. When the employee stays in their comfort zone doing their business as usual, the boss should be worried.

We need to disrupt the norms, disrupt the market; and what we need is disruptive thinking.

Before 1908, consumer want faster horses. Then Ford brought T model car and revolutionised the whole transport industry. Fast forward to the future, soon we shall have electric car and driverless car on the road. 

We used to have terrestrial televisions with few channels to choose from. Then came cable TV. Just when you thought cable TV is the revolution, Iflix came in. Now people can choose what to watch, where they want to watch, and when they want to watch their favourite contents at a fraction of a cost compared to cable TV. 

The telephone had evolved so many times since 1876. Those in the 80s and early 90s would remember Nokia, great telephone company. Then come Apple with iPhone smart phone, making the previous generation of phone by default a ‘dumb phone’.  

Printed newspapers and television gave us mass media. The advent of the internet  enable the media to interact with the users and also between user and another users through social media. This will give universities with faculty of mass media something to think about.

However, changes always met with resistance. 

“Change is the only constant in life” - Heraclitus (500 BCE). Heraclitus was a philosopher and he always tried to break away from the contemporary philosophy at that time. His contemporary found that his idea was too controversial that they decided to burn his books. 

To break away from the norms is not easy. Ask any taxi driver when Uber and Grab starts to flood the market. Legal and extra legal methods are used to stop the Uber fever. Uber eventually became viral and the rest of the world catches the fever and change the landscape of public transportation forever. 

We need to differentiate between distraught thinking and disruptive thinking. 

Distraught thinking is when some one is highly disturbed and agitated. Distraught thinking leads to destruction of the company. On the other hand, disruptive thinking is thinking that change the rule of the game. Disruptive thinking lead to innovations. Most companies however, have distraught thinking  rather than disruptive thinking within their organisations

Most big companies (when I said ‘Big”, i am referring to the number of employees. Big companies is not the same as insanely great companies) found that disruptive thinking is too “disruptive” to their normal business operations. Innovations caused by disruptive thinking by “A” employee in big companies can be very slow to gain momentum. Most of the time these great ideas are shot down by the middle management due to internal politics. This will frustrate  “A” employee and it just matter of time for “A” employee to tender their resignation, leaving the companies with “C” and “D” employee. 

This may explain why most innovations that disrupts the market came from start ups. Start ups are more agile and more hungry in pursuing their innovative ideas. Big companies tried to ignite the same start up spirit within their organisation and most often than not will fail miserably. Hence, big companies end up paying mega bucks acquiring these start ups. Sometimes, start ups like Facebook end up being big companies themselves. The challenge then is to keep up the start up DNA within the company.   

Ignore innovations at your peril. Disrupt our own business before some else disrupt your business.

Change is the only constant in life…