Thank You for Disrupting

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Thank You for Disrupting Page 9

by Jean-Marie Dru


  Christensen’s conclusions are open to question. For me, Uber

  is a real disruption, but one which does not fit into the profes-

  sor’s established framework. Using his definition, the majority

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  of recent well-known success stories, including Xiaomi, Alibaba,

  Big Bazaar, Tesla, and Whole Foods, are not real disruptions.

  The same goes for Apple. The greatest disruptor of the past 20

  years never entered the market at the bottom. On the contrary,

  the iMac, iPod, and iPad positioned themselves at the top of the

  market from the outset. This is the risk most theories have to

  face, however brilliant and solid they may seem. They end up

  having to force-fit the facts into a predetermined framework.

  In my view, Christensen’s theory has two notable shortcom-

  ings. First of all, it does not help to resolve the famous dilemma

  at the origin of his first book. On the one hand, companies need

  to protect existing revenue streams, which are essential to their

  short-term success but, on the other hand, they must support

  new activities that will be vital to their future. How must orga-

  nizations manage these competing priorities? How should they

  allocate resources? Christensen sheds no light on these answers

  and, yet, the decision is crucial.

  Second, and contrary to what the theory implies, disruption

  does not equal destruction—at least not systematically. It’s

  true that many business commentators tend to agree with

  Christensen that all disruptive innovations finish by upheaving

  markets, and thus definitively destabilizing the established

  order. Put otherwise, they are revealed as being resolutely

  destructive. However, for me, this point of view is restricting.

  It ignores an entire field of innovation, the one perhaps most

  relevant for legacy companies: that of non-destructive disruptive

  innovations.

  There are a great many examples of such cases, including

  Nespresso, Club Med, Ikea, Southwest Airlines, Haier, Toms,

  Starbucks, Marriott, and Visa. These and a lot of other com-

  panies have profoundly innovated without ever having been

  destructive along the way.

  Clayton Christensen

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  Many business leaders, consciously or not, may have been too

  influenced by Christensen’s work to recognize this. They have

  accepted the idea that disruption necessarily leads to destruction,

  and this impacts how they see innovation. They thus deprive

  themselves of a great number of opportunities. Disruption can

  help businesses gain sizeable market share, without destroying

  the market.

  Not all companies are obliged to be Uber or Airbnb.

  Chapter 9

  Jedidiah Yueh

  ON THE BEHAVIORS OF COMPANIES OF

  THE NEW ECONOMY

  The Wall Street Journal ran in 2016 an article entitled, “The

  Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas.”1

  How can a journalist pose such a stark assertion when we all feel

  we are living in a world full of innovation?

  The preeminence of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon;

  the breakthrough of nanotechnology and biotechnology; the

  start-up boom; and the growing power of artificial intelligence

  and virtual reality give us the impression that innovation is

  omnipresent. And yet, technology industries and others born of

  the Internet represent only a fraction of the economy. They will

  encompass much more in the future, but until then, the compa-

  nies of the new economy cannot compensate for the insufficient

  rate of innovation of the other so-called traditional companies.

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  This is the case for companies in many sectors such as food, cos-

  metics, pharmaceuticals, banking, and insurance.

  American statistics show that in the past 10 years the rhythm

  of innovation in these kinds of companies is greatly inferior

  to that of the previous 10 years. It may seem counterintuitive

  but, according to an MIT estimate, research productivity in the

  United States has dropped by an average of 5.3 percent2 per year

  over the past 10 years. The “Vitality Index,” which is the per-

  centage of total revenues generated by new products and ser-

  vices, is in net decline in the quasi-totality of sectors. The return

  on investment coming from research and development is noth-

  ing compared to what it was 20 or 30 years ago. A partner at

  Accenture concludes unambiguously that corporate innovation

  has become sterile.

  Why this decline? I see several reasons. First, when com-

  panies excel in what they do, it takes longer for them to detect

  their loss of creativity. Research investment is directed toward

  improving companies’ current strengths rather than discover-

  ing something new. The role of R&D focuses more on protect-

  ing existing market share than on expanding the market. The

  second explanation, I believe, is that companies do not work

  through the dilemma described by Christensen (see Chapter 8).

  The strategic allocation of resources between incremental and

  disruptive innovations has not been clearly defined. Currently,

  incremental innovation is more prevalent than disruptive

  innovation. Third, the decline in creativity happens in many

  companies that have prioritized cost cutting. The all-powerful

  purchasing department is hardly a guarantee of openness to new

  ideas. Finally, many companies find themselves locked into old

  habits, methods, and procedures, trapping themselves in a con-

  ventional way of doing things. They do not innovate in the way

  they innovate.

  Jedidiah Yueh

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  In 2015, these observations led me to write a book encour-

  aging companies to look for new sources of inspiration, to open

  themselves up, and to not be satisfied with incremental innova-

  tion alone. Titled The Ways to New 3 , the book described differ-

  ent types of innovation such as asset-based innovation, reverse

  innovation, revival-based innovation, data-driven innovation,

  usage-based innovation, and price-led innovation, to mention

  just a few . Fifteen different paths to innovation were proposed.

  Of the many companies I’ve known, very few ever follow more

  than two or three.

  Then, I also turned my attention to start-ups. A great many

  traditional companies have partnered with or acquired some of

  them, hoping to increase their own capacity to innovate. Specialist

  investment funds, incubators, technopoles, and accelerators

  are appearing everywhere but cultural differences make these

  partnerships difficult, sometimes even hazardous. Not many new

  ideas are emerging from these innovation platforms, think tanks,

  and labs. If they were, the statistics on R&D productivity would

  be different.

  I looked more closely at start-ups to see how they could inspire

  established companies and I ran up against a well-known fact. For

  each successful start-up, there are hundr
eds that fail. This tiny

  percentage is explained by the fact that success depends on so

  many different external factors that are difficult to foresee. Luck

  is a very random element of success, so it appeared perilous to try

  to establish serious conclusions on the way start-ups function—

  until I read Jedidiah Yueh’s book Disrupt or Die: What the World

  Needs to Learn from Silicon Valley to Survive the Digital Era.

  Founding CEO of Avamar, which pioneered the data dedu-

  plication market, Yueh is now the chief executive officer of

  Delphix, a dynamic data platform provider. In his book, Yueh

  describes operating systems and Internet protocols, and explains

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  how, today, “products are designed for software as the end user.”4

  And over and above these purely technical aspects, he also gives

  real insights into how start-ups work.

  I have combined Yueh’s thoughts with those of Peter Thiel,

  author of Zero to One, and Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup. My

  conversations with other founders of start-ups have also influenced

  my thinking. Getting such diverse opinions has allowed me to

  develop a list of lessons about the new-economy operators that I

  believe could be interesting for old-economy businesses too.

  I have pooled these thoughts together under seven different

  themes. They are very diverse, even disparate, and each should be

  looked at on its own. There is no particular connection between

  them, except my belief that they can be helpful to all kinds of

  companies.

  Lessons from an entrepreneur

  1. “Don’t be dispirited by the magnitude of complexity ahead,”5

  counsels Yueh.

  He demystifies, at least in part, the fantastic innovations

  coming out of Silicon Valley. The ideas behind Instagram,

  LinkedIn, Uber, or Airbnb are not that far from being some-

  what “mundane,” to use his own word. Even Google, as he

  explains, was created from a simple observation:

  In the world of academia, published papers are often

  judged by their citations, how often they are cited, and the

  importance of each citation. Two PhD students decided

  to apply that concept to counting and weighing the value

  of links on websites (instead of citations)—an automated

  way to rank search results. Google is born.6

  Jedidiah Yueh

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  Of course, this has required highly qualified engineers to

  conceive and constantly upgrade the algorithms that make

  Google the leader of Internet search. In the past, Internet

  companies had to develop their own proprietary informa-

  tion technologies, but today anybody can buy limitless in-

  frastructure and software to scale across a huge number of

  servers. The core infrastructures that allowed Amazon and

  Google to come into existence are now mere commodities,

  often available as a service, or even for free.

  I would say that the essential point lies elsewhere. I have

  distinguished what I believe are four major sources of inspi-

  ration for starting a new business. An entrepreneur needs to

  discover one of the following:

  • Anunansweredneed

  • Aresidualpointoffriction

  • Amarketgapnotfilled

  • Aninsightnotyetidentified

  It can be very productive to clearly differentiate between

  these four possible springboards. They are not simply alter-

  native ways of talking about the same thing. They are each

  really different.

  Once you have identified one of these springboards, you

  must advance step by step, stage by stage, and not allow

  yourself to become submerged by the technology.

  2. There is no start-up with a slow culture.

  For start-ups, speed is everything. They seek to develop and

  grow while knowing they have an infinitesimal chance of

  surviving. In any case, to have the slightest chance, they have

  to be faster than the competition.

  In California, many start-ups practice weekly planning.

  They separate the budget cycle from the rhythm of their

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  company’s business life. The acceleration of time frames

  makes annual planning counterproductive. They prefer to

  start each new week with three questions that each work-

  shop, department, or service asks itself:

  • Whatdidwedorightlastweek?

  • Whatistheobjectiveforthisweek?

  • Whatdoweneedtoreachthisobjective?

  Some go as far as giving themselves the day as a unit of

  time. This may be natural for developers, who are look-

  ing to build solutions in real time, but it is also the case

  in some very big Chinese enterprises—for example Haier

  and Alibaba—where workers see themselves given daily

  objectives. Objectives are defined in the morning and the

  output is evaluated against them at the end of the same

  day.

  Silicon Valley start-ups that behave this way think the

  slowness with which legacy companies operate will be their

  downfall. Whatever the sector, traditional companies would

  be well advised to speed up their rhythm to allow themselves

  to make decisions more swiftly and to accelerate their rate of

  innovation. Speed is the very first thing traditional companies

  should copy from start-ups.

  3. You cannot conceive of a disruptive strategy or action plan

  without “playing offense.”7

  Yueh cites Predix, the industrial platform of GE as a counter

  example. Jeff Immelt, the former CEO, declared that he

  wanted to build “the world’s largest industrial Internet

  of Things.”8 Four years later, success has been mixed, to

  such an extent that GE is talking of selling Predix. There

  are scientific and business reasons for this, but organiza-

  tional ones as well. Management was unable to convince

  other GE divisions to adopt the Predix platform, which is

  Jedidiah Yueh

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  obviously the worst possible message you could send to po-

  tential clients. A large, heavy division, Predix was bogged

  down in GE bureaucracy—a very different scenario from

  the nimble ways of operating of other software companies.

  Yueh sees this as the primary explanation of what ended as

  a setback for GE. However good your digital transforma-

  tion program may be, you can’t expect to move an indus-

  trial company into the top 10 software companies in just

  a few years without deeply restructuring—without being

  truly on the offensive.

  Yueh sees this as the primary explanation of what ended

  as a setback for GE. However good your digital transforma-

  tion program may be, you can’t expect to move an industrial

  company into the top 10 software companies in just a few

  years without being truly on the offensive.

  My own take on this is threefold.

  First, digital transformation is often seen as a period of

  transition: difficult and painful, but limited in time. I be-

  lieve that
the opposite is true: Companies have to accept that

  transformation will be perpetual. In order to succeed, they

  will have to follow successive, never-ending steps.

  This leads us to the second point: To consider that any

  organizational system will only be provisional. Few compa-

  nies force themselves to regularly question the way they op-

  erate. The reality is that any organization must be sufficiently

  fluid if it wants to succeed in periodic transformation. In

  Chapter 5, I discussed Zhang Ruimin, CEO of Haier, who

  has on several occasions shaken up his organization from

  top to bottom. Recently, he transformed it into a kind of

  platform, containing thousands of independently managed

  units. Every time Zhang is questioned on the reasons behind

  the success of Haier, he gives the regular transformations of

  his company’s structure as the main one.

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  Finally, I would add that evolving an organization is not

  an end in itself but rather a means, a lever to render the com-

  pany more innovative. I have already referred to the fact that

  most traditional companies have an innovation deficit and

  that, willingly or not, they tend to lean toward incremental,

  rather than disruptive, innovation. By contrast, start-ups and

  the most innovative traditional businesses demonstrate the

  point to which organizational models can be the catalysts for

  all kinds of innovation.

  To reiterate, many companies engaged in digital trans-

  formation are just looking for incremental improvement.

  And this is where Yueh’s thinking is crucial. He believes

  companies should embark upon radical change and look for

  disruptive organizational models.

  4. Whatever the product or service you’re offering, it may be

  useful to consider if part of it can or should be offered for free.

  Knowing how to distinguish between “users and buyers”9

  is a key element for Yueh. Users of Google pay nothing;

  only the advertisers, the buyers, are invoiced for the services

  they receive. The ultimate aim is to make free services even

  more valuable than those that are paid for. To expand on

  this point of view, I suggest that companies think seriously

  about what they could, or should, make free.

  Spotify is an interesting example. This company offers

  free access to the world’s biggest music catalogue; however,

  it limits this access, in the hope of turning new listeners into

 

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