Roundtables at Dreamforce: Part 1 of 3

This is Part 1 of a 3 part series. 

Okay, it wasn’t exactly the World Series of Poker, but at Dreamforce this week I hosted five roundtables at Executive Summit with a total of 68 participants, all VIP guests of Salesforce. The topic was “Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption” (not accidentally the subtitle of my new book, Zone to Win, previewed on this blog earlier this year, and made much the better for the feedback I got from a number of you). This is the first of two blog posts presenting some of my key takeaways.

The first half of each session was called “Diagnosing Disruption.” My provocation to the group was that there are currently five mega-disruptions under way in the technology sector, and that every one of them can make a legitimate claim for being the number one priority for at least a given class of company. But as Marc Benioff likes to say, if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority, and so my challenge to the participants was to put them in rank order in terms of near-term impact on their industry and their company’s strategy.

Here’s how I positioned the five claims:

• Cloud computing is causing the marginal cost of additional compute power to asymptotically approach zero. This means that as a planet we have now or shortly will have more compute power than we know how to consume. How impactful would it be to your company if you could harness this surplus power ahead of the competition? Should that be your number one priority?
• Every constituency you interact with now carries a smart phone or will shortly, and users of all stripes strongly prefer to engage via this medium. Yet the vast majority of our current interactive processes have yet to leverage this asset. How impactful would it be to your company if you were accelerate the roll-out of your mobile engagement? Should that be your number one priority?
• The combination of cloud + mobile has created a digital fabric that is reshaping both B2C marketing (especially branding and promotions) and B2B interactions (especially team-based collaboration and access to expertise), building distinct boundary lines between millennials who demand this new way of going and prior generations who have mixed emotions about it. How impactful would it be to your company to get ahead of this adoption curve? Should this be your number one priority?
• Data Science. While it is still early days with data science, everywhere it shows up it has immediate and often devastating impact on the competition (think Google, Uber, Airbnb). Specifically, because all actions in the digital fabric leave digital footprints (what Satya Nadella likes to refer to as digital exhaust), machine algorithms can detect patterns and trends that were never before visible. How impactful would such trend detection be to your business? Should this be your number one priority?
• Internet of Things. While it is even earlier days here, it has not proved too early for GE and Cisco to both stake their futures on a world of machine-to-machine interactions, whether it be for health and home, transportation, predictive maintenance, or the like. Is this an area that will shape the future of your industry? How impactful would it be for your company to get a head start? Should this be your number one priority?

Here’s how the responses came out:

There are lots of ways to interpret this data. I’ll be interested to hear yours if you comment on this thread. Here were my key takeaways:

• Data Science is top of mind while Cloud and Mobile are top of wallet. That is, Cloud and Mobile are increasingly being seen as table stakes in the game of global business, and if a company is behind in either area, job one is to catch up. Data science, by contrast, is the greenest field for pursuing differentiating competitive advantage with everyone scrambling to recruit and retain data scientists, even when they are not sure what they are going to do with them or whether they can get the data feeds necessary to teach and employ their algorithms. Like teenage sex, not too many are getting any, but everyone is talking about it.
• Social is the hardest nut to crack. It doesn’t come across either as urgent or as important as the competing disruptions, even though I personally feel the case here is quite compelling. This makes me think Social needs to subordinate itself to Mobile and Cloud rather than to try to go it alone, or if it does go for prime time, to team up with data science to amplify the power and actionability of its reach.
• Internet of Things is, as advertised, still early days. That said, it is rapidly becoming table stakes to design in a “phone home” capability into both industrial and consumer products. The gating item is going to be the data science that can convert such data streams into valuable interactions. That is going to take a long time to reach scale.

Read Part 2 Here: https://ow.ly/StZkh

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win Book | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube