TIME FOR A RE-THINK?
I’m a big fan of Sandeep Choudary’s platform thinking, but he recently wrote a very insightful piece on the nature of change more broadly. If you startups and innovation interest you, I’d recommend the full read, but here is a quick summary of his main point: CHANGE COMES IN TWO FORMS and genAI is ushering in the second and much more disruptive form of change (and it will disrupt almost every service and solution out there).
Here’s a quick overview:
1. The 1st and most common form of change is ‘operational’.
… this is the day-to-day ‘incremental’ stuff we’re all used to. The job we’re solving remains the same, but constantly search for ways to do it better / faster / cheaper. BUSINESS AS USUAL… monitor your competition and do your best to stay in the game (or take the lead)
2. The 2nd type of change is what he calls ‘Structural’ (we call it transformational)
… this is the nightmare situation where a company gets blindsided, not by a known competitor, but by a completely different approach that comes right out of left field (a substitute). In his post, Choudary demonstrates this very clearly by sharing the story of an organization that disrupted the tutoring business by hiring thousands of gig workers out of India so they could provide homework help on a vastly bigger scale than the companies they replaced. They grew like crazy because they were faster and cheaper than a private tutor… then they got completely obliterated by chatGPT. Turns out a generativeAI can provide the answer instantly and at a tiny fraction of the cost… they never saw it coming.
YOUR COMPETITION IS IRRELEVANT … structural change makes traditional solutions (ie: you & your competition) irrelevant, so you need to look for substitutes.
CONCLUSION?
As we see it, there are two big takeaways:
1. If you have products or services in market, you need to re-envision them through a genAI lens (ie: what does a ‘blindside’ substitute look like and how do you get there first)… if this is not already in your 2025 plan, it should be.
2. Before you can re-imagine through a genAI lens, you & your leadership team need to level-up on how genAI works and how it’s unfolding (otherwise, how are you going to imagine what’s possible)
full disclosure… we offer leadership briefings and strategy formation services that directly address this, but what matters most is that you commit to re-envisioning your solutions through a genAI lens (with or without our help). We’ll help you any way we’re able so if this interests you, let’s talk.
