Kodak. Digital Equipment. Sun Microsystems. Nokia. Blackberry. These are but a small sample of once-great companies devastated by technological disruption. Even mighty Microsoft and Intel are struggling to reinvent themselves and stay relevant in a phone-first world. There are vital lessons in these stories for India’s vaunted IT services companies.
It is easy — and wrong — to assume that the companies that get disrupted were poorly managed. Disruptive changes are like big storms. They build up slowly and then break with terrifying ferocity.
So it’s quite easy to spot the brewing disruption. Take Kodak. Kodak developed the world’s first digital camera in 1975. It held all the most important patents pertaining to digital imaging. It realised the potential impact digital photography would have on its enormously lucrative film franchise. In 2005, Kodak was the leader in digital cameras. But they failed to ride the tiger and eventually failed.
The story is similar with Nokia, which launched one of the world’s first smartphones, the N Series Communicator in 1995, but understood too late that with the iPhone, the game shifted from devices to competition between ecosystems. These companies had market leadership, enormous resources, most of the technology and many smart managers. They saw the approaching disruption, yet failed to cross the chasm.
One factor why companies find it hard to navigate industry disruptions is complacence, even arrogance. When a company is sitting on billions of dollars of cash, fat margins and a good market share, it’s hard to create a sense of urgency in the organisation and with its shareholders.
Another factor is the ‘gravitational pull’ of the current or legacy business. The need to deliver quarterly earnings, serve existing customers, maintain profit margins, manage the many daily operational challenges, all consume the majority of resources and senior management attention. Too little focus goes towards embracing the brewing disruption.
A third reason is the fear of cannibalisation. The new model is, at least initially, much less profitable than the current business and so there is a big fear of margin dilution.
Microsoft’s cloud services, for instance, have nowhere near the profitability of its old Windows and Office businesses. However, some margin is much better than zero margin.
The new business model usually requires a very different mindset and new capabilities. In the IT services business, for example, success requires the ability to hold a proactive conversation with CEOs and CXOs about the digital transformation of their business, rather than simply responding to project requests for proposals (RFPs) issued by the IT department. Building these capabilities is nontrivial and time-consuming. Finally, there is governance. Though the boards of good companies are populated by accomplished leaders, few boards have independent directors with a visceral grasp of the magnitude of impending changes. It is all too easy then to remain focused on revenue growth and earnings per share until it’s too late.
One obvious sign of this is to look at how the CEO is compensated. All too often, it is based on the financial performance of the legacy business rather than the momentum of the future business model.
Until, of course, it is too late. India’s extraordinary IT services companies face just such a transition today. What can be done? First and foremost, strategic transformation must be the top priority of the boards of companies facing disruption. Strategy cannot simply be left to the CEO and management.
It has to be a collaborative endeavour. Second, make it clear that the CEO’s top priority is the strategic transformation, not merely delivering the quarter and align compensation accordingly.
Third, realise that there are two kinds of risk: the risk of omission, or doing nothing versus the risk of commission, or trying something different. The risk of commission is better than doing nothing and the urgency and consequences of failure are such that there should be no half-measures.
A significant reason why Kodak and others failed is because their responses to disruption were halfhearted or anaemic. This won’t work. To succeed, companies have to be ‘all-in’ or utterly committed to the shift.
This may mean making significant acquisitions, or bringing in very different talent, even though these moves have major risk and can blow up too. In nature, it is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change.
(Source: Article by Mr Ravi Venkatesan in ‘The Economic Times’ dated 19-05-2015. The writer is a member of the board of Infosys and former chairman, Microsoft India)
