schneiderism

Just read a terrific article on Businessweek online that is absolutely right on and intersects perfectly with The Upside by Adrian Slywotsky, which we discussed here a few weeks back. If you’ve not read this book, do. And soon. Then, let’s chat. Both expand on the whole “Innovate or Die!” theme. The article starts with the assertion that we must learn to embrace the edges of our businesses, edges being the outer limits, the danger area, the unknown. Edges are the peripheries of the global business environment, the places where innovation potential is the highest. The article asserts that comfort with operating at the edge of your business and industry is the most expedient way to identify opportunity and advantage. More:

“Edges define and describe the borders of companies, markets, industries, geographies, intellectual disciplines, and generations. They are the places where unmet customer needs find unexpected solutions, where disruptive innovations and blue oceans get birthed, and where edge capabilities transform the core competencies of the corporation.”

This is important from the perspective of Slywotsky’s concept of strategic risk assessment. First, the edges are the frontiers, the limits, of what is known and accepted, of what has worked up to this point. It is beyond these frontiers where tremendous opportunity resides. Change is self-sustaining as the business environment continues to speed up with improved technologies, communications and time-to-market. And heats up with changing customer loyalties, expectations, and need. In this intense environment we see ideas constantly delivered by companies from the frontier (and quickly), and we also see this opportunity and innovation fundamentally change companies and markets with stupefying speed. We have been inundated by game changing innovation and change, so much so that we are sometimes jaded to it. But think about how business has changed in the last ten years. This change has not only been exponential, it has been paradigmatic. This has been driven by a diversity of catalysts, the most obvious being technology, communications, the internet, and globalization. Companies that harnessed these drivers found themselves in a very different place. Those that did not, most often, disappeared. Adrian Slywotsky’s ideas in The Upside really begins with the notion of surveying the frontiers for strategic risk. Slywotsky asserts that nothing can beat robust strategic risk assessment for both identifying and mitigating potential threats to a company’s health and well-being, but also for identifying what game changing opportunities for innovation might be highlighted as a result of that assessment. Both the article’s authors and Slywotsky agree that for companies to innovate they must understand what is happening at the edges of their business, and to innovate they must bring back from the edge ideas that challenge the status quo in products, markets and practices.