Self Disrupt or Die

I first published this article on Forbes.

In the modern age, it seems that you’re either a startup or a turnaround. Time and time again, the assets that once made companies thrive, now make companies slow to adapt to change -- built on foundations of the past and finding that true innovation goes against all existing processes. 

There is an Irish joke about a tourist driving around hopelessly in the backlanes of rural Ireland, he stops in a backwater of a village to ask a local how to get to Balbriggan, several mins of thinking he wipes his brow,  "You know, sor, if I was going to Balbriggan I wouldn't start from here at all.” This is how the modern landscape feels for many businesses.

Could it be possible that many businesses are so poorly designed for today that starting again is actually easier

Remember the Millennium (Y2K) bug? It was the potential moment when we’d realize the whole world’s software was created on a foundation that wasn’t built to handle it. The virtual world would come crumbling down, planes would drop out of the sky -- and it never happened.

So we kept building.

When airlines now routinely face software crashes that ground their entire fleet of planes, it seems odd that companies with such a good apps, with iPads for pilots, flying the most advanced crafts in the world could suffer from such a fundamental flaw.

When week after week, we see large retailers hacked and data stolen, it seems remarkable that they can offer such incredible logistical marvels to keep products on shelves, predict demand based on weather patterns, serve us targeted coupons, yet be so open and vulnerable to such a basic destructive flaw.

A glitch in the NYSE causes a shutdown with increasing frequency and yet seems at odds with a world of trillions of dollars flowing via the speed of light with the fastest processing the world has ever seen.

I’d proffer the thought that this is all too common, that companies built for the past may offer glimpses into the incredible, but are mired by vulnerabilities in other places. Modern day businesses are asymmetric constructs — a legacy of patches, quick fixes, hacks, workarounds, and hope.

If IT systems and processes were visualized as engineering and companies as buildings, we’d see the tallest buildings we’ve ever known built on non-existent foundations, mixtures of prevailing engineering theorems that got fashioned together with steel and concrete wherever possible. Our buildings would be the messiest, heaviest, clumsiest buildings ever known, but we’d see it.

Hotel home pages in many cases are wonderful modern facades before a few clicks take you to the mirky booking pages created and designed for a pre-mobile world.  We have the military developing trillion-dollar fighter pilots but begging for Microsoft to keep serving Windows 7.

Airline staff on planes serve drinks and swipe cards with iPads connected via inflight wifi, while ticket agents seemingly endlessly press buttons on MSDOS like blue screens to move people onto later flights.  In over 30 attempts at trying over the last 5 years, I’ve never once been able to change a flight online myself, always suffering an illogically named “exceptional error”.

In healthcare, hand-written forms are mailed around buildings while at the same time MRI scanners and cancer treatments represent the ultimate in new technology. We celebrate the world of big data, but my bank keeps sending me customer acquisition mail- yes I'm perfectly in your target audience, but have you tried cross checking databases? 

New Companies have the ultimate advantage.

Somehow the really modern companies don’t seem to suffer the same way. I’ve never once had an Lyfft booking lost in the same way that my car rental company drops  every other booking I make from its app. When I open Uber in China it's there waiting for me within seconds, while my bank card's swallowed by ATM's.

I’ve used Hotel Tonight many times, and I’ve never seen so much as an imperfect page.

Google Now can tell me my British Airways flight is cancelled before the airline can. If I call Airbnb, they seem to know who I am immediately.From Slack to Shyp, from Blue Apron to Amazon, Zuli Smartplugs to Maple, Postmates to Handy, I’m getting increasingly spoiled by companies that seem to just work. It's these companies that set our expectations. If Shyp knows where it's people are in real time, then why does AT&T not.

Airlines are endlessly asking for passwords, passport details, frequent flier numbers, and my birthday despite me giving them access to everything always.

It’s not just technology. Legacy companies are staffed with people based on old needs, structured in the way that worked best in simpler times, and based on the management theory of the day. Virtually all companies still see customer service as a cost center, not a marketing investment, despite happy customers being the very best asset in marketing.

Our processes are based on constraints that no longer exist, our muscle memory for convention is strong. Why is the default tool for presentations still Powerpoint? Why do hotel receptionists sit behind desks and desktops rather than use tablets? Why do fax machines exist? Why do barbers and doctors work office hours and not evenings when people are free?

So what would your business look like it if was set up today?

Would you still employee drivers or outsource them to a startup? Would you create your own payment system or use the Square API? Would you buy a license for MS Office? Would you employ local IT support? Would you have a server? How would you keep customer data? If you were a retailer would you build stores on High Streets or just be a thin layer on an existing logistics provider? 

Go deeper: Would your business even do what it it does? IBM for years felt it was in the business of selling hardware, until throwing in the towel to become a smaller, far more profitable consulting business. Netflix thought it was in the business of renting movies via the mail, until it ate itself to become a distributor of digital entertainment.

Many industries today are in crisis. If you think they handle the speed of change and consumer demands of today poorly, just imagine what the faster, more demanding world of 2017 will feel like.

Maybe now is the time to wipe the slate clean and start again.

The pain is vast but the transformation of self disruption is an incredible force for change and if you think change is expensive, try irrelevance.