If This Is What You Have Always Done, Why Change?

Your organisation has been riding a fairly stable wave for years, you have a healthy level of turnover, your staff base is a respectable number and the future is looking fairly bright based on how the company has grown in recent years. From a product delivery point of view you would like things to move a bit quicker, it has always been a bit of a bug-bear, why do things always seem to over-run? Plus staff turnover does seem to be getting higher. But all the same, you've grown to a pretty good stature and currently leading the way in the marketplace, because you make pretty decent things and your competitors always seem to lack that vital quality.

So why change?

I call this the Blockbuster Mindset.

Blockbuster had it all back in the 80s and 90s. They had pretty much eaten up every video shop across most high streets across the globe. In the early days, walking into a Blockbuster was always a treat, you were taken on a tour of the biggest and best movies out there and there was always supply, every genre covered. It had the feel of a cinema foyer, where the anticipation of the true movie experience would grab you as you walked in. You could literally spend hours in there looking for the evening's entertainment. Videos became DVDs became Blu-Ray and the experience of bringing the cinema to your home via its 1000s of outlets had enhanced 10 fold.

And then something happened. Not overnight, but fairly quickly in corporate terms. Going to a Blockbuster to seek out the evening's movie entertainment became tiresome, almost like a chore. Spending longer than 10 minutes in there really did feel like hours with little success. Was it the movies weren't as good? had the value dropped? was something missing?

The problem was that nothing really had changed.

In fact, that isn't completely true, what had actually changed was our expectations. Technology was moving on and Blockbuster was being left behind. They had lost sight of their customer needs, felt they were perhaps too big to fail, become complacent.

Blockbuster had become old.

I remember walking around one of its megastores late on and thinking that there is no wow factor anymore. The pseudo cinema foyer experience is old fashioned now. There should be sofas and screens to watch previews, a cafe area to socialise. But even that was perhaps a stretch - what Blockbuster needed to do was to bring their shop into people's homes. We now had Love Film (a subscription service where DVDs could be posted to you and you return them for free), and very soon after that we had Netflix, you didn't even need to leave the house.

Remarkably Blockbuster tested out streaming their movies back in the late 90s, the first to do so. But did not pursue the idea.

Every single organisation across the globe, big-small-unique-popular-new and old is susceptible to being left behind. No-one is immune: Woolworths, Flybe, Debenhams - all of these companies which have been around for generations have suffered the same fate as Blockbuster and for very similar reasons:

Either too complacent or too slow to react to change in customer needs and when they do, they are simply too slow to manoeuvre.

I never believed any of these companies had poor products or a particularly bad service.

Gone are the days when big companies eat small companies for breakfast. Today, fast is eating slow - regardless of size. The ability to learn and deliver faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. Understanding customer needs and behaviour and being agile and nimble enough to adapt and respond rapidly is now more important than ever.

Sadly for Blockbuster, it was too late for them to realise.