What EVERY Business Needs to Learn from Fitness Transformations

As technology continues to challenge the status quo and disrupt how businesses operate, it’s important to remember that your business WILL be disrupted.

It’s not a matter of “if” but “when”.

If you don’t think this is true, or believe it won’t happen to your business; you are in grave danger of becoming the next Blockbuster.

I’m not saying this to be flippant.

I genuinely believe it to be true and worry that a staggering number of executives don’t acknowledge the very real threat.

That said, there is a HUGE difference between knowing and doing!

So what does this have to do with fitness transformations?!

Well, it comes down to biology.

The underlying methodology of a fitness transformation is going from position A (your current physiological look) to position B (your desired physiological look).

This is achieved by changing your body through fat loss and muscle gain; commonly known as ‘body building’ (although this often invokes images of 1980’s muscle men).

Of these 2 elements, fat loss is achieved by creating a calorie deficit (burning more calories than you take in). It’s a simple as that.

But to make the connection to business, I’m going to focus on the latter: muscle building.

The body makes understanding it’s mechanics incredibly simple as there are only 2 states muscles can exist: anabolic or catabolic.

Put in simple terms, you are either building muscle (anabolic) or losing muscle (catabolic).

There is no middle ground.

Equilibrium does not exist.

Therefore, to change your physique, you need to build muscle. Because for every day you don’t build muscle, you are in fact, losing muscle.

It is quite simply one or the other.

Yes, there are a plethora of other factors such as metabolism, activity rates, diet etc. but fundamentally the ability to change the body boils down to these 2 elements (fat loss and muscle building).

But why am I giving you this biology lesson?

The answer is because the similarities to business and technology are astounding.

Let’s think about it for a moment, taking London’s Black Cabs (taxis) and Blockbuster Video.

Example 1

The taxi drivers had 2 options:

1. Either adopt technology (which they didn’t do and were barely keen to take card payments!), or
2. Fight it.

It’s obvious to see which route they took with hindsight as Uber completely disrupted their market and challenged their business models to the core. Without the backing of Transport for London (TfL) the disruption to the market could have been far worse!

Example 2

Now lets consider Blockbuster Video and Netflix. Many a word has been written about the war between the 2 companies, encapsulating the established incumbent against the young upstart (do listen to the Business Wars podcast by Wondery for a great recap of the companies).

But suffice it to say, Blockbuster didn’t think they would be materially disrupted by the technology driven upstart.

So much so, they turned down an acquisition of Netflix. Twice.

Blockbuster thought they could out muscle their competition and for a while they did. But the technology Netflix utilised was ultimately a winning advantage.

There is more to the story, and I’m afraid I won’t do the battle justice so encourage you to read up if you haven’t done so.

I could easily have used Argos and eBay, or AirBnB and hotels as examples. There are many examples throughout the years as technology changes and evolves, impacting everything along the way.

However, both these examples show that incumbents need to acknowledge and adopt technology whether they like it or not.

This is not an argument by a technologist, but rather an observation of connecting 2 unseemingly irrelevant dots.

But bringing the hypothesis to a close, let’s summarise…

The reason why fitness transformation lessons are important to Businesses is that you ONLY have 2 options regarding technology:

1. Move forwards (muscle building)

i.e. acknowledge technology IS disrupting your industry (whether you know it or not) and do something about it.

2. Fall backwards (losing muscle)

i.e. because everyone is moving forwards, you are actually COMPOUNDING the issue and falling further behind than you realise.

The is no standing still.

For every day your business does not consider, adopt and / or incorporate technology, the further you are falling behind your competition.

You may disagree with my hypothesis and that’s fine.

Just don’t blame me when I use your business as an example alongside London Taxis and Blockbuster Video.

First published on Medium here: https://medium.com/@br3nnie/what-every-business-needs-to-learn-from-fitness-transformations-7fe2c0da8007