Impending Threat?
Individuals often do hard things only under two circumstances:
Hunger: doing something to feed a need
Running from a bear: existential imminent threat.
Companies are just collectives of individuals; can we really expect them to act differently?
Startups and smaller companies, hungry and running, fight to survive.
A successful company not driven by a hunger, becomes an optimization engine. They must manufacture a hunger, like market size, geographic growth, product dominance, brand equity, etc. to encourage growth, and if they are lucky, a continual evolution to stay relevant.
For the last 10 years, much of this corporate transformation stuff that we have been dealing with, has been driven by existential imminent threat. Digitization dramatically altered the barriers of entry (or moats) that the large companies protected themselves behind, allowing smaller players to turn the market upside down. You might not be running from a single big bear, but a thousand ants - either way, you are now running.
What if the threat isn’t imminent, but 15-30 yrs in the future? A successful and not hungry, company? You know in 25 years if you haven’t changed/evolved, you will be ripe for disruption.
Figuring out how, without impending threat, nor manufactured hunger to drive transformational change is a key to the future (and maybe you figured out I am not just talking about companies)
Original Linkedin Post: https://bit.ly/3F56Iws
(worth clicking on the original linkedin Post, because the comments are amazing and often the conversation is better than the original post)