Lessons from ‘Leading the revolution’

“In the Age of Revolution, it’s the incumbents against the insurgents, the old guard versus the vanguard, the hierarchy of experience clashing with the hierarchy of imagination.”

I read a book written by Gray Hamel, Leading the Revolution and I can say, the book is an eye opener

According to him, we now stand on the threshold of a new age—the age of revolution. In our minds, we know the new age has already arrived; in our bellies, we’re not sure we’re going to like it. For we know it is going to be an age of upheaval, of tumult, of fortunes made and unmade at head-snapping speed. For change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change is discontinuous, abrupt, and seditious. In a single generation, the cost of decoding a human gene has dropped from millions of dollars to around a hundred bucks. The cost of storing a megabyte of data has dropped from hundreds of dollars to essentially nothing. Global capital flows have become a raging torrent, eroding national economic sovereignty. The ubiquity of the Internet has rendered geography meaningless. Bare-knuckled capitalism has vanquished all competing ideologies and a tsunami of deregulation and privatization has swept the globe. It’s not that things never changed n the age of progress; they did. Old companies faded away—remember American Motors?—and new companies emerged. It was a world of punctuated equilibrium. Change happened by degrees and seldom shook the foundations of the industrial order. Today we live in a world that is all punctuation and no equilibrium. We are witnessing a Cambrian explosion of new competitive life forms. In this new age, a company that is evolving slowly is already on its way to extinction.

The advantages of incumbency—global distribution, respected brands, a deep pool of talent, cash flow—granted them the luxury of time. For instance, although Apple Computer got an early start in the microcomputer business, IBM quickly reversed Apple’s lead when it threw its worldwide distribution might behind the PC. But in a world of discontinuous change, a company that misses a critical bend in the road may never catch up.

If your company is more than a day old, it’s already an incumbent!

…. To be continued.