The walking (digital) dead – Episode 3: The industrial revolution kills the establishment

What happened previously (see episodes 1 and 2): "Digital transformation" is in fact nothing else than a full fledged industrial revolution – the storm of the century. Without acknowledging that fact, many large companies build up "good weather" digital business without having neither culture nor governance nor skill to do so. Those businesses are doomed to become digital zombies, i.e. digital products without real customer value creation nor customer demand. As they are part of the magnificent corporate innovation theatre, they are kept alive for unreasonable amounts of time until they finally get killed off.

The mother zombie

While everyone was watching the show in the magnificent corporate innovation theatre (see episode 2), some tech company meanwhile started to attack the zombie’s parent (i.e. their core business that used to make all that money in the past – see episode 1). No one took that tech company as a serious competitor at first; they had only been around for a few years and besides, they didn’t know a thing about "our industry".

But then, all of a sudden, the zombie‘s parent stumbles and goes down to its knees…

At first, the zombie’s parent’s stumbling feels strange: After all, so many smart people tried so hard to protect the parent in the course of the battle in the storm. 

But suddenly parts of the shiny skin crumble away and it turns out that the well-established parent company, that seemed so unshakable and lasting over all those years, so strong and so confident of being able to reinvent itself… was actually THE MOTHER ZOMBIE!!!

One could have assumed it earlier, though. After all, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, i.e.: A zombie child stems from a zombie mother.

The tech company and the mother zombie then continue to fight a few years of epic battle in the midst of the industrial revolution storm.

Getting killed in the storm

Finally, the tech company dries out the mother zombie’s feeding by squeezing out the remainder of its margin and profits. The dying mother zombie gets torn apart into bits and pieces, which end up being eaten by other mother zombies (competitors) or zombie sharks (private equity). That game is called "market consolidation".

Then everyone is dead.

All the managers, business analysts and journalists observing the situation come up with different interpretations of what has happened; It was quite a complex battle field after all. For instance, there were so many competitors fighting side battles shouting “industry consolidation!” or “restructuring!” and everyone else focused on the “big tech” stories in even more regrettable industries such as media or e-commerce. Plus, the economy was bad.

You can read one real life case study of such a mother zombie going down in our story about Kuoni.

Then everyone involved concludes that losing the battle was nobody’s fault.

What is totally clear, however, is that the master zombie has been killed in the storm. Or, in other words: The industrial revolution has killed the establishment.

The end.

To be continued...

The next and final episode will be published here next week, where we will provide a zombie-avoiding recipe and a few success cases.

If you don't want to wait, you can read the full season on stryber.com.

Get in touch directly if you're interested in hearing our take on "digital transformation".