There are no stupid questions. There are only stupid people who don’t ask questions.
Today’s post is by Gary Douglas, the founder of Access Consciousness®.
People have always told me that the way I do business is different. I may indeed have a slightly different point of view about most things in life – and I’ll change my point of view on a dime. I question everything all the time.
Innovation occurs when you are willing to be in the question and to ask a question always. Whatever conclusions we come to become the limitation of what we can actually achieve and receive. Don’t assume: “We’ve got this part of the business right,” which is what Kodak did. They assumed: “We’ve got it right. There will always be film.” They didn’t get innovative. They knew about digital and electronic imaging.
Did Kodak look at that and ask: “Which is the direction we need to go? What do we need to create here?” Or did they go to the conclusion that they would always have the answer? Once you decide that you have the answer, nothing that doesn’t match your conclusion can come into your awareness. You’ve got to be willing to see what kind of awareness you could have if you were willing to question.
The purpose of a question is to gain awareness. With increased awareness, different possibilities become available to you. When you become aware of the possibilities, you can make choices. Choice creates. With each choice, you can look at: “If I choose this, what will this create?”
The person who possesses strategic creativity is tactical, resourceful, ingenuous, and extremely attractive (perhaps I’m getting carried away). An infiltrator, influencer, and eavesdropper. Strategic creativity provides a handle on what people desire or need—even before people know they want it or need it.
For you—sitting in the C-suite, a business owner, a CEO, or a business professional—to get what you need to launch a brand, organization, or individual, to move a brand forward, to grow business, or to raise funds, you need to understand how creative professionals work their magic to conceive and construct strategically creative solutions. You also need to know what will work and why it’s well-conceived, well-designed, and well-written; and why pedestrian ideas won’t get you anywhere except overlooked. Think of me as your personal “Alfred Pennyworth”—I’m your special creative forces wingman, who will supply all you need to commission and evaluate creative solutions.
It’s Really About the Insight into the Target Audience
A consumer insight is a realization—a real eye-opener—about the target audience’s need, behavior, or the true nature of how they think, feel, or behave—a human truth no one has yet noticed brought to light.
That insight warrants a response—a change in the way you look at a behavior, situation, branded product, or service—and it should be the catalyst for strategically creative idea generation and brand storytelling.
Insights into the audience are vital to breakthrough creative solutions. What does the audience need? Desire? Why does the audience do what they do? On which media platforms do they spend their time? Which causes do they care deeply about? Will they align themselves with your organization’s or brand’s values?
It’s challenging to read the political news due to so many alarming events. If you can’t manage the political zeitgeist (though I heartily recommend being informed), at least stay abreast of the cultural climate that affects our collective critical and creative thinking. For goodness sake and your business’ sake, don’t be out of touch with what your audience (and beyond) is thinking and feeling or oblivious to the issues of a diversity of people and communities.
Once you are aware, make your organization or brand an antenna of the external zeitgeist, one that transmits relevant messages that will resonate.
Know What Drives People
Most of us in corporate leadership positions, advertising, marketing, and branding don’t hold PhDs in psychology, however we must have a handle on human behavior to best understand people. Human behavior is first and foremost a kind of investment. Individuals do what they do because of either implicit or explicit benefits. Ask: How does your idea serve the audience’s self-interest?
Respect Everyone
Commit to uplifting all members of society, including people living with disabilities, people who are unsheltered, different socioeconomic groups, races, ethnicities, gender identities, sexualities, religions, and ages.
Take up the mantra: Do No Harm. Nothing in culture happens in a vacuum.
An idea has the power to affect people; it can change the way people think about a brand, entity, cause, issue, individual, or even themselves. It can offer proof, create desire, or stir an emotion that imprints the message. An idea can reframe a conversation, do social good, taunt a competitor, empower, motivate, endear the audience, or simply entertain.
Put an end to pedestrian ideas. Because no one will take notice of uninteresting messaging.
My hope for you, dear reader, is that this knowledge will be your strategic advantage, equipping you with a secret superpower—Strategic Creativity. Please feel free to invent your own code name.
Carry on.
Robin Landa is a distinguished professor at Kean University (her Walden’s Pond) and a globally recognized ideation expert. She is a well-known “creativity guru” and a best-selling author of books on ideation, creativity, branding, advertising, and design. She has won numerous awards and The Carnegie Foundation counts her among the “Great Teachers of Our Time.” She is the author of twenty-five books including Strategic Creativity: A Business Field Guide to Advertising, Branding, and Design.
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Nurturing employees to be the voice of the brand sustains an ecosystem for innovation, bridging marketing efforts and connecting them with the stakeholders.
Today’s post is by Dhanshi Kittusamy Murthi, Regional Head of US Marketing at Vuram, a global hyperautomation services company.
Organizations across industries are exploring ways to shape a sustainable work culture that enables their people to perform at their highest levels. One way to do this is by presenting people with opportunities to be recognized for their expertise: this not only nurtures outstanding results by building confidence among employees but also boosts the visibility of the brand.
Enabling employees to be the voice of the brand sustains an ecosystem for innovation and productivity, and content is the vital piece of the puzzle to achieving this. It boosts brand awareness and acts as a means through which an organization’s employees can showcase themselves.
Generating Content that Represents the Brand:
According to a 2021 Statista survey involving business-to-business (B2B) content marketing professionals, 91% of the organizations responded that creating brand awareness was one of the goals of their content marketing activities. While chalking out the marketing plan or budget for branding campaigns, marketers should factor in an essential segment that can champion the voice of the brand in the truest sense: its own people.
Every growing, successful organization is driven by passionate people and a work culture that appreciates their efforts. When the employees love what they do, they take pride in what they learn and advocate the best practices. Encouraging them to share their expertise builds a repository of trustable knowledge and content that truly represents the brand.
Building Trust-Based Stakeholder Relations:
Showcasing people as the face of the brand allows businesses to communicate authentically while having a host of benefits. Beyond making an impact in the industry, the ripple effect drives innovation and progress in society by organizations committed to making a difference. In the B2B context, the content created by people who directly work with prospects fosters a bond between the company and its clients, when the spokesperson directly interacts with customers, potential or active. This not only boosts the brand image but also uplifts the morale of the employees and builds trust-based stakeholder relations.
For instance, let’s take an organization specializing in emerging technologies; they constantly innovate and experiment to deliver cutting-edge solutions to solve the problems the customers are facing. The technology experts within the organization can talk about the technologies they are passionate about through short knowledge-sharing videos covering technologies tied to their core work or those they are passionate about. Video being a powerful form of content as it is, reaches business audiences multifold. According to a Forbes Insight report, 75% of the surveyed C-suite executives stated they “watch work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly”. Imagine speaking to these decision makers about various technologies, in this example, how the company can help solve the crucial challenges they are facing.
The Power of Authentic Content:
People who are camera-shy or prefer writing over the visual form can write about how their core expertise can help their target audience. Coming from a valid source, such knowledge-sharing assumes more value among the audience; it helps resonate with the brand image—of innovating and experimenting—and what the company stands for. Down the line, such authentic content inspires prospects to follow the company updates and be interested in its offerings and, not to mention, form a personal brand for the spokespeople. At a company level, it attracts fresh graduates on the lookout for a learning environment and inspires new employees to conquer the steep knowledge curve and explore ways to innovate as they pursue their careers.
Representing the Brand in Their Own Way:
As organizations embrace the new normal and transition into hybrid working, content generated by experts expands into meaningful branding and visibility opportunities for employees and the organization. Within the organization, the activity instills a learning culture that nurtures future spokespeople. Hence giving people the freedom with responsibility to represent the brand and share ideas and knowledge that matter strengthens the social and professional well-being of employees in an organization.
Creating opportunities that give people exposure and recognition is vital to increase job satisfaction and happiness at work. With remote working, similar initiatives help employees to showcase their potential, initiate internal conversations, and strengthen their visibility among their colleagues. These initiatives will deepen the foundations of open communication and transparency in the workplace, motivating people to share new ideas and focus on ways to innovate.
At a time when trust and transparency are paramount for businesses, shaping a healthy brand image driven by sincere communication from its people matters a lot. Strengthening the brand message is crucial for resilience and building confidence for all stakeholders involved in the ecosystem.
About the Spokesperson
Dhanshi Kittusamy Murthi is the Regional Head of US Marketing at Vuram, a global hyperautomation services company. Her 8-year career experience spans teaching, content writing, and marketing. In her current role at Vuram, she is responsible for strategizing and executing marketing campaigns for the US region.
About Vuram
Vuram is a global hyperautomation services company specializing in low-code enterprise automation. Since its inception in 2011, Vuram has maintained 100% customer success and 100% customer references. Powered by passionate people, Vuram has successfully driven digital transformation for several happy enterprise customers across the globe.
Vuram has received several prominent recognitions, including being featured among the Inc 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States, HFS hot vendor (2020), Rising Star- Product Challenger in Australia by ISG, Fast Company – Best Workplaces for Innovators 2022, and recognized as a finalist in the Excellence in Change Communication category in the Gartner Communications Awards 2022. Vuram has consistently ranked in India’s Best Places to Work, certified by Great Place to Work® institute.
Vuram’s hyperautomation technology stack encompasses business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), optical character recognition (OCR), document processing AI, machine learning (ML), and analytics.
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Understanding what inspires you to do your best work isone of the first steps in developing your leadership philosophy.
As you begin articulating your leadership philosophy, the first place to start is leading yourself. You need to know why you’re excited to go to work every day. Why do you get out of bed every day? Because as leaders, we’re there to inspire and motivate the members of our team. For us to do so, we should probably be motivated first and foremost.
Now, in terms of a maxim, a maxim is a trigger to remind you of a story or something that’s emotionally resonant. My maxim, in terms of why do I get out of bed every day, is light bulbs. Two words, light bulbs. That might not mean a lot to you, but it means the world to me because the type of work that I love to do, the best moments in my career, are moments where I’m teaching, where I’m doing something like I’m doing right now. When I teach and I see a participant struggling with an idea, but then I’m able to explain it in a manner that I see that light bulb go off—I see their face light up—that’s so exciting for me, and so fulfilling. That’s the type of work that I love to do. There’s huge emotional resonance in the notion of light bulbs for me.
Maxims should drive behavior. Let me show you how maxims can drive my behavior when I think about light bulbs. Imagine a situation where a client comes to me and they say, “Mike, we’ve got two pieces of work for you. You can only do one. One is going off into a cubicle and working by yourself on an Excel model. The other piece of work is writing a new leadership training course for us and delivering it to our high-potential associates.” As I think about light bulbs, it becomes very clear to me that I should walk away from the Excel course and instead go teach leadership to people because that’s where I’m going to have those light bulb moments.
Now, that’s an easy example. Not many of us like to sit in a cubicle by ourselves and do Excel. Let’s imagine a more difficult choice for me where my maxim can drive the right behavior. What if instead the client came to me and said, “Well, we have a project for you, and it’s going off in a cubicle by yourself and building an Excel model, and that’s the only piece of work that we’re going to offer you.” Now, as an entrepreneur, it’s very hard to walk away from money. When money is put on the table in front of you, that’s a very easy choice to make. But as I look at my maxims, my maxim of light bulbs would say, “You know what? I shouldn’t do that work, and I should go find new work that’s much more aligned with teaching and coaching and turning light bulbs on for people.”
As you think about articulating your maxim for why you get out of bed every day, think back to times where you’ve been extremely satisfied or excited by the work that you’re doing. What are those days that have just been so fulfilling? When you come home, you’re still energized even though you left a lot of that energy at work? Think about those situations you’ve been in that have been meaningful to you—they’ve been fun, and you’re very proud of those accomplishments.
Now, in that story, in those situations, think about a trigger. Think about something that can very quickly get you back to that spot where you remember what those feelings were like. That trigger, that small reminder that brings you back to the story, ends up being your personal maxim for why you get out of bed every day.
Want to learn more about developing your leadership philosophy? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to develop your leadership philosophy. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Innovation is the buzzword of buzzwords. Job descriptions seek “innovative leadership.” Organizations tout their “innovative culture.” Grants support “innovative solutions.”
But what exactly does this mean? And how are you most apt to achieve it?
Like many terms, innovation carries baggage. It means different things to different people, and common assumptions mislead. To better grasp its implications, consider what innovation is not.
Innovation is not technology.
Innovation is regularly confused as a codeword for technology. For example, cities aspiring to become innovation hubs may focus predominantly on recruiting this sector. Yet not all technology innovates. And only a fraction of creative thought emerges from this field.
While some of the biggest societal disruptions have undoubtedly been catalyzed by tech, the vast majority of this industry is hardly cutting edge. In fact, as the rate of change accelerates, the period during which even revolutionary products can claim innovation diminishes. (First generation iPhones may have rocked the world in 2007, yet a two-year old device today feels grossly inadequate and antiquated.)
Innovation does not describe the majority of activities pursued by even the most radical technology firms. Bookkeeping, logistics, customer service, HR, advertising, and tech support provide essential maintenance. Yet these tasks hardly require continuous reimagination. Existing solutions may already be adequate to outstanding.
Furthermore, technology is hardly the only field known for extraordinary problem-solving capacity. Visionary artists, scientists, marketers, educators, architects, social workers, entrepreneurs, and other creatives are just as likely to fit the bill. Communities concerned with bold thinking will be well-served by facilitating conversation and collaboration incorporating a diversity of perspectives. Doing so is not merely politically correct. It is essential to progress.
Innovation is not imitation.
Many organizations recognize the need to innovate. Despite historic success, unprecedented challenges necessitate feature tweaking or even deep, fundamental change.
For clues on success, a common practice involves studying direct competition. Bars, banks, and beauticians look to parallel entities, considering which principles might be adopted, adapted, or stolen. Doing so provides more than inspiration. It offers permission. “They do this and it seems to work. Maybe we should too!” This kind of idea appropriation may well solve your challenge, at least temporarily.
But innovation is contextual and a far cry from mimicking. In fact, the act of copying success often achieves the opposite. What was once a novel idea quickly becomes the trite, average state of affairs.
True, innovators are known for studying their competition. Much of the time, however, they look for pointers on what NOT to do. While the masses chase trends like lemmings, these leaders seek a path less travelled.
Innovation is not magic.
To the outsider, breakthrough proposals can feel like sorcery. Poof. Inexplicably, a spellbinding revelation appears. Challenging the status quo, some jaw-dropping vision achieves profound success in ways previously inconceivable. The wizard behind the curtain is heralded for brilliance and supernatural ability.
In truth, innovation—like magic—is not actually magic. It is a skill, akin to any other, that can and must be cultivated. Over time, creative communities compile a toolbox of tricks, protocols, and strategies that amplify their chance for success. Said another way, innovators have chops.
Innovation is not anarchy.
People often come to believe that innovation is a free-for-all. They suppose creative solutions are most likely to emerge when thinking is unburdened by constraints. The key is taking off the shackles, allowing imaginations to roam freely (like my kids after bedtime. . .).
While well intentioned, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The road to everywhere leads to surprisingly few destinations. Imagine ordering from a restaurant with a 96-page menu. At first, it feels exhilarating. You could order literally anything. But most of us quickly start experiencing anxiety, even paralysis. With so many options, which one is best? A likely outcome? “Uh, I guess I’ll have the cheeseburger.”
When seeking innovation, it is essential to establish clear, nonnegotiable limiters. The best constraints force problem-solvers to think differently, actively igniting creative impulses. For example, suppose I asked your company to brainstorm strategies for making more money next year. Without restrictions, proposals will likely resemble what you’ve always done. Or they might point to obvious, low-hanging fruit. But if I require that solutions must somehow involve surfing, or fashion trends, or farm animals. . . Now you have an intriguing framework to build around or push against.
Innovation is not anarchy. It requires clear rules, guidelines, and constraints.
Innovation is not everything.
The quantity of mission statements incorporating “innovation” is staggering. It often feels like a federally mandated term. Yet if this word implies everything and everyone, it is reduced to a meaningless piece of fluff.
If you and your organization claim innovation as a goal, resist the temptation of embracing an empty promise. Instead, substantiate this value by pinpointing specific examples of breakthrough achievement.
Innovation is not a big idea.
“Innovation” often references big, juicy, uncommon proposals. And while bold solutions are clearly important, they tell only part of the story.
Innovation requires implementation. Teams must have the discipline and commitment not only to dream, but also to execute. Otherwise you’re stuck with shiny overtures that make no tangible impact whatsoever.
If you and your team desire a better future or different outcome, the time to act is now.
Innovation is extraordinary problem-solving, and bringing the vision to life.
Speaker, consultant, and facilitator David Cutler, author of THE GAME OF INNOVATION: Conquer Challenges | Level Up Your Team | Play to Win, is known for leading immersive “innovation GAMEs.” Cutler is a Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches innovation and entrepreneurship.
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Understanding the concept of opportunity cost will help you prioritize your team’s most important tasks. Learn to say no to low-value work.
Do you know what your team’s time is worth? Lack of focus consumes time. That’s the one resource you can never get back. When you look at activities in terms of their time cost, it becomes easier to say no to distractions.
Don’t just ask, “What task am I going to do next?” Instead, ask, “What task am I not going to do so I can work on the new request?” When requests come in to your team, assess what other work isn’t going to get done by the team if you take on the new request. If you can explain the tradeoff to the person who’s asking you to do the work, they’re probably going to be more open to you saying no and deprioritizing that new task if it’s not as important as other work you should be working on.
I work with one attorney at a large corporation who has a team of lawyers. People come to his team all the time and ask for legal work to be done even if his team shouldn’t be doing that work. He always says yes even though it’s not necessarily something an attorney has to look at. He was complaining one day about how much work was on his team’s plate. I asked him, “Hey, would you pay an outside attorney 400 dollars an hour to work on that new project that just came in?” His eyes got big and he said, “Absolutely not.” That’s when the lightbulb went off for him. He realized by taking on that project, it meant his team wasn’t working on higher priority work. He was sending that high-priority work to outside counsel and paying 400 dollars an hour. The thing is, taking on the low-value work was essentially costing him that 400 dollars. That’s when he started saying no to those distractions so his team could focus on the most important work.
When you understand these tradeoffs in terms of time cost, it’s easier to say no to low-priority or low-value work. This is going to make the work your team does the highest priority work that’s on their plate.
Want to learn more about strategic focus for managers? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to assess and improve your critical thinking. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Transform your business by completely rethinking how it works. Analyzing your business model, revenue, and costs can lead you to innovative solutions.
When you go to generate new ideas to run things better, you need to think critically about the way your business runs. I like to look at three things: a business model blowup, a revenue blowup, and a cost blowup.
On the business model blowup, fundamentally rethink how you go to market. And rethink what your market actually is. You’re going to challenge the entire business model for the way you deliver products and services. On the revenue blowup side, how do you dramatically expand the products, your pricing, the geography, and the reach of your business? And on the cost blowup, how do you fundamentally eliminate drag from the business to become more efficient?
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Creativity is a skill that can be built like any other. Understanding your passion and challenging the voices in your head that say “no” are a great way to start.
Maybe it’s disingenuous to say that each of us has the potential to be a creative genius. Gifts of personality are dispensed in varied measures at birth. Humans are tangled balls of social conditioning, reactions to environment, and serendipity. Life isn’t fair. Luck plays a part. We’ve all heard someone say, “I was in the right place at the right time” or “I never get lucky.”
As far as creativity is concerned, most people believe you’ve either got it or you don’t. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard someone say wistfully, “I’m not creative.” When I hear a statement like that, I think to myself, “No one has ever shown you where to begin.”
Because the fact is, creativity, like any skill, can be cultivated. It takes a healthy combination of self-knowledge and stamina.
Athletes have an advantage: prescribed methods of building stamina, because physical prowess is revered by our culture. Hire a personal trainer and you’ll start with a series of exercises done repetitively – gradually adding reps as the body gains strength. Exercise is specific, varied, and involves what’s called cross training. One day a session of running to work cardio. Next time? Yoga to maximize flexibility. A steady, balanced program of activity keeps the human machine functioning at its optimal level.
So what about the rest of us? How can we engage creatively with what we care about – whether it’s a job or an avocation? And just as important – how can we identify what works against building creative stamina in every aspect of our lives?
I teach artists how to build stamina through what I call “creativity strength training” but the fact is, the lessons apply to everyone.
Here are three aspects of thinking more creatively each of us can embrace.
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In 1938, MIT student Claude Shannon solved one of the most complex problems of circuit design. Working on an early analog computer, he realized that an idea from an undergraduate philosophy course could solve the problem. Applying Boolean Algebra he laid the foundation of all electronic digital computers. As he put it: “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both fields at the same time”.
You may think that this was one of those lucky coincidences that change the world but almost never happen. You are wrong. In his book Seeing What Others Don’t, Gary Klein studied 120 of the most important inventions and discoveries in history: 82% of them emerged when people from different disciplines started to talk to each other and exchanged ideas.
Follow some simple rules and you may see what others don’t as well.
Start talking to strangers
At the beginning of the 20th century Vienna was a hotbed for new ideas. At the centre of this explosion of thoughts was the Wiener Kreis (Vienna circle), an interdisciplinary group of philosophers and scientists that met fortnightly.
While brilliant minds like Karl Popper, Ludwig von Wittgenstein, or Albert Einstein might have flourished as individuals, the gatherings are not to be underestimated. Eccentricities, disagreements, and rivalries marked these salons, but the insights had a profound impact on computing, astrophysics, cosmology, theory of science and philosophy. Even the godfather of management, Peter Drucker, benefitted from such “Abendgesellschaften” (evening gatherings) in his parent’s home in Vienna.
One obvious conclusion is to set up regular dinners with eccentrics. But a new set of online tools also facilitates the “meeting with strangers”. Harvard Professor Karim Lakhani studied hundreds crowdsourcing contests where companies post unsolvable problems and invite people to submit solutions. “The provision of a winning solution was positively related to increasing distance between the solver’s field of technical expertise and the focal field of the problem,” he explains. When tricky problems cannot be solved by the specialists, people with other backgrounds looking through other lenses and using other heuristics may find the solution. Talk to those people more often and you will start to seeing things differently.
Don’t trust the experts
Managing disruptions is difficult. A recent BCG-study found that 35% of the surveyed companies view digital technologies as disruptive to their business models and only 1/3 of all companies steer successfully through disruption.
One of the hardest things is to see what is coming. Incumbents get it wrong most of the time.
Specialists are the main culprits. Philipp E. Tetlock studied the accuracy of over 80,000 forecasts of political and economic experts. When they were convinced that something was fully or almost impossible, that future event occurred 15 percent of the time. When they were absolutely sure about a future event, it didn’t occur in more than a quarter of cases. When given a set of three future scenarios, experts were less accurate than someone randomly picking from these scenarios.
Experts often look at a problem through the lens of a single grand idea and “squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates”. Instead of listening to specialized experts, tap into the collective wisdom of crowds.
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki demonstrates that crowds beat experts if there is sufficient cognitive diversity, status and rank play no role, decentralized knowledge can be accessed, and if knowledge is aggregated efficiently.
There are many ways to achieve this. Surround yourself with people from different backgrounds, , talk to front-line employees and use tools like social networks, wikis, or strategy jams to give everyone a voice. The UK bank Barclays, for instance, invited 30,000 employees via a two-day online strategy jam, to bring them into a strategy conversation, along with senior leaders. The outcome was one of the UK’s most popular fintech products.
Try walking a mile in your enemy’s shoes
As we have limited information processing capabilities, managers rely on simplified mental models to make sense of the world. These frameworks or explanations of how a business works influence how we process information and how we decide. Mental models can become rigid. So rigid that they inhibit change!
Take Polaroid’s downfall for example. In 1992 it was very well positioned to become a big player in digital photography. Patents, brand, even a prototype, everything was lined up. The only problem was the old business model. Polaroid’s managers loved the Razor and Blade model. When they saw the digital camera, they didn’t see its potential. There was no film. How can you make money without film? They could not overcome their mental model. 40 other brands were available, when Polaroid finally introduced a digital camera in 1996.
In military, war games are used to make decision-makers more vigilant, to broaden their range of alternatives, to spot early signals of change and recalibrate their mental frameworks accordingly, allowing for greater adaptation and nimbleness. Engage your managers in a similar exercise. Let them imagine a fictional competitor who develops a business model that totally disrupts your industry. What would such a business model be? Where are your vulnerabilities? This gives you totally new perspectives.
Seeing disruption as a threat rather than an opportunity has another benefit. Fear is a powerful motivator. Exercises like these have borne fruit for dozens of companies, such as BASF, Linde, and Lufthansa. These firms are now better prepared for disruption or have adopted entirely new business models.
Use analogies
Oliver Gassmann from Sankt Gallen University has studied more than 300 business model innovations. One of his most intriguing findings: 90% of them were mere new combinations of existing patterns, copied from other industries. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Just open up. Use analogies and ask yourself for example: What would Apple do in my industry?
Responding to disruption is not easy, but an open mindset increases the odds of success.
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