This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at how the world is changing
I was at a conference at Warwick Business School a few years ago when I met Louise Stigant. She’s a powerful dynamic woman leading Mondelez in the UK. Mondelez, own lots of snack brands, including Cadbury’s the chocolate maker.
Starting with Chocolate
Cadbury’s was formed in 1824 by John Cadbury. He was a Quaker and determined to give his chocolate workers a better life than that of the typical factory worker at the time. The part of Birmingham where his factory was, Bournville, was turned into a model village that housed his workers and saw to their spiritual and educational uplifting. Not the sort of thing that modern companies do.
As part of his philosophy he thought that people ought to be able to swim, and so a hundred years I learnt to swim in the Factory’s swimming pool. We’d drive down on dark winter nights. It always seemed to be cold and raining. As we drove down the hill from Selly Oak the aroma of Chocolate seeped through the car windows and warmed us imperceptibly.
Chocolate and swimming. What a combination!
That was then.
Slow Pace of Change
The world that John Cadbury moved in was slow in comparison to ours. I remember the headmaster of my primary School, Raymond Hackett, telling me in the late 1970’s or early 80’s that his brother or uncle had developed a new chocolate technique in the 1960s. They used it to make the Cadbury’s Flake, but it would also work to make the Whispa as well. They apparently sat on that idea for 20+ years before commercialising it…
Back to the conference and away from this wonderfully slow moving caring chocolate company.
Louise showed us a super swishy internal video that had a very simple message.
Times are changing. They are moving fast.
If that had been all I would have yawned and soon forgotten her talk.
Remember this Quote
Then she said,
“Now, is the slowest things are going to change for the rest of your life.”
Louise Stigant, MD Mondelez UK.
Imagine that. Try and get your head round it.
Every year things are going to get faster and faster.
It’s not going to slow down
Think about all the new things that happened to you in the last decade. Now imagine the decade ahead with even more new things than the last!
There’s never going to be a pause to catch your breath.
Pace of Change
The way I think about it is to imagine sitting in the window seat of a high speed train.
If you try and see every tree along the side of the railway everything becomes a huge blur. You can focus on one as it rushes towards you but then everything else disappears into the edges of your perception. Or you can look out far beyond the railway track and enjoy the landscape moving past with woods hiding hills and then revealing them again, or some small-town snuggled into a valley.
I’ve worked with clients from dozens of industries over the last few years. In retrospect it seems as if there has been a huge explosion in complexity. SEO the art of getting Google to show your web pages to searchers has gone from something easy and profitable to being super complex and pseudo-scientific. AI has gone from a tool that I paid a Bosnian computer scientist $1,000 to do in 2010 to something that absorbs server farms and needs every more complex languages to peel aside the rind of reality.
What does this mean to you?
Chances are that you are standing in the middle of a field with half a million snowballs of change flying at you. Ducking isn’t going to help. They are still going to be flying at you. Ducking is just another way of saying lets find a defensible niche and hope the niche doesn’t disappear.
Running wildly across the field isn’t going to help. You are still going to be pelted by snowballs and get hot and sweaty at the same time.
And the snowballs will never stop…
Maybe yes. Maybe no
If You Want to Read More
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