You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.
David Ogilvy – Marketing Guru
Many executives I know are frankly scared these days. Competitive and business rules have been disrupted too quickly. They don’t understand their competitive landscape and its new rules of engagement. Why? There’s too much VUCA due to offshore competition, COVID work disruption, digital disruption, automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. They can’t forecast based on historical, stable, and straight-line assumptions.
Executives need to generate revenue and cut costs. In the next few years, you’ll see head-count reductions due to automation. But when the company is cutting to the bone, innovation seems to be lost as a way to generate new sources of revenue. Companies find it harder to innovate constantly and lean rapidly to sustain profitability.
Executives face the challenge that the history of recent tech and startups is full of neat ideas that just didn’t cut it. The customer had unrealistic expectations. The development team was clueless of what the customer really wanted. The tech-turkey app, product, or service simply didn’t connect with the end user.
And, there are time and cost pressures. Companies develop a new generation of products yearly or even quarterly. Competition is Darwinian. Although more than 13,000 new products hit the market each year, fewer than 40% will be around a few years later. The time-to-market math and political climate such as continuous trade wars make work decisions much more risky.
Work Lesson Earned: If you’re innovative and have experience commercializing products, then you’ll be well positioned over the next 5 years. If you’re fundamentally not innovative, then find ways to support innovation, commercialize it, or monetize it. As much as possible, you want to be on the innovation and revenue side of equation, not the expense side.