3 Questions to Disrupt Your Own Business

I was walking through a mall today – a really nice mall in an upscale suburb, run by a world-class management company. It is far from one of those “dying malls” that we are all familiar with.

I asked myself, “What would I do if I owned this mall?” I concluded that I would tear up a big part of it, eliminating half of its retail footprint. I would replace it with a mix of world-class restaurant, entertainment, office buildings and high-density residential – turning the mall into a “destination,” and filling it with a captive audience of workers during the day and young professional residents by night, all of whom would frequent the location’s remaining shops, restaurants and other venues. As this new mall generated buzz, it would attract people from farther away, many of whom would bypass malls that were closer to their homes and workplaces.  

Or, I thought, I could wait until many of the retailers were disrupted and several stores began to disappear one at a time – the next wave of Teavana, True Religion, American Apparel, Gap, Bebe, Ann Taylor stores and the like. Then, a Macy’s or another anchor leaves in reaction to the decrease in foot traffic produced by the other vacancies, causing customer visits to plummet further. Finally, rents charged on the remaining occupied spaces fall, as it becomes tougher to convince the remaining retailers to stay, and vacancies are filled with temporary tenants paying significantly less.

My point is not that retail is dead. Well managed retailers will survive, and they will certainly deploy strategies to thrive in today’s challenging landscape. Rather, my point is about the mall, and specifically about how it might stay ahead of disruption.  

I am hardly the first person to advocate turning malls into mixed use destinations. A few malls are actually beginning to do it. One way or another, malls that pivot too slowly will be outmaneuvered by malls that do evolve; and slower-to-react malls will become mere shadows of their former selves, or may not survive at all.

Whether or not my specific, hypothetical prescription to save the mall is correct, don’t let your business be like the malls that will be outflanked. Is tearing up the mall to transform half its use painful, costly and difficult? Yes, it is all of those things. However, is that better or worse than letting another nearby mall, owned by a competitor, become the destination where everyone wants to be, while you become a place where people “used to” go? 

If it’s so easy for those of us outside the mall management business to recommend strategies for them to survive disruption, why are we often so blind to how we can avoid similar disruption in our own businesses?

Consider doing a hypothetical disruption exercise on your own company, asking three questions. Specifically, if someone else were starting a competing business from scratch:

1. What are you doing now that they would not do?
2. What are you not doing that they would do? 
3. How would you compete to put yourself out of business?

 Then ask yourself, “If that’s what they would do, why aren’t I doing it?

Only by taking the outsider’s view can you answer these questions honestly, and with great courage you can act before a reaction is forced upon you.

What ideas does this provoke for your own business? What “self-disruption” have you been thinking about, or delaying for too long?

Chris Larkins is a Partner at CEO Coaching International, a long-time active member of YPO, and has led large and complex businesses in retail, consumer services and manufacturing.