October 3, 2007

Beware of the Ignorant Antagonist

What do the following companies have in common: IBM, Levis Strauss, Kodak, Zenith, Firestone, Timex, Nestle, US Steel, Polaroid, and Sears? Answer: they all owned or lead their industries during my generation. Take IBM, many people will say they got lazy or egocentric but the reality is that they focused their attention on the wrong enemy. The leadership assumed that their competition would come from a direct attack by someone offering a better, much improved, and faster mainframe. Yet, it was software and client-server computing that really broke the strangle hold they had on the industry. Remember, there was a day when IBM got 7 out of every 10 dollars spent on Information Technology. Talk about a monopoly; the industry was then known as IBM and the Seven Dwarfs. Dwarfs meaning the other 3 dollars spent going to the seven other competitors. How can you blame the Sears demise on the leadership, they were simply too busy focusing on Montgomery Ward to see Wal-Mart coming. The auto industry is perhaps a more current example. While they were focusing on foreign competition from Toyota and Honda, this thing called the Internet transformed the competitive landscape.

I suppose the point is that competition to AT&T’s business may not come from Verizon or Sprint. Mark Twain said it best:

The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot

How can we utilize the Enterprise 2.0 tools to ensure that our leadership sees the competition coming? How can we communicate the need to change course from a product, strategy or culture perspective? More importantly, would an Enterprise 2.0 culture saved any of these other companies or would the leadership simply ignored the internal voices?

Posted by Todd at October 3, 2007 6:12 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.rtodd.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/142

Comments

Post a comment