adminZachary Aldwin Milkshake in the Boardroom
The movie iRobot is one of my favourites, so when I saw it was showing this last weekend, I hunkered down on the couch with a box of home-made popcorn and followed the storyline whose core theme is the disruption of our lives by technology. Technology is always advancing and on the back of these advances industries are rising and falling.
Once in a while a piece of technology arises that totally rewrites the way an industry performs, this is considered a disruptive technology.
Think of mp3 players and the music industry, recording companies have been forced to totally rethink the way they sell music.
Amazon and the digital book revolution will ultimately kill the bookstore. Established businesses have been disrupted by technological changes. Despite the term, disruptive technology is not all bad. Think of the changes the cellphone has brought to our lives, the jobs it has created in Africa, as it has expanded faster than the existing fixed line networks.
In this article I do not want to focus on the actual disruptive technology, rather I want to introduce you to a new concept, that of disruptive ideas. In the most part, disruptive technology refers to an actual item or clever piece of software that is a game changer.
Disruptive ideas may utilise such technology, but really they are simply a new way of doing things that becomes a radical modifier in the environment we operate in. Disruptive ideas are the new business models that help you stand out in your field and enable you to gain market share.
Let me give you an example. Mugg and Bean have just arrived in Zimbabwe. Their disruptive ideas are their expansive, creative menu and their bottomless coffee.
They didn’t need new technology to allow unlimited coffee refills, they just had the idea. A word of warning to other coffee shops here, if their filter is good enough the bottomless cup will be a big draw. It has the potential to become the norm as other establishments seek to emulate the experience.
Another example from a totally different industry. The computer gaming world has already been hit hard by the PlayStation and Xbox platforms. Traditionally, games made money in one or two ways; either by selling the actual game or through monthly subscriptions to access the games online.
Suddenly a couple of free to play online games appeared on the internet. Free, you do not have to spend a cent to play. It seems like an insane business model. How do you cover costs of the bandwidth and server hardware you need as a game provider?
In most cases you can obtain the same things over time through repeated play, but the micro-transaction cash option will appeal to a small percentage of players.
One of the largest games, League of Legends, has over 30 million users; even if only 1 percent of players spend real money that is a huge chunk of change. Guess where the game models are shifting to? It was just an idea, that it was possible to offer an experience for free and still make money. Zimbabwe is desperately in need of disruptive ideas. Your business needs disruptive ideas to survive.
We live in an environment of scarce resources (well at least perceived that way by many) and where competition crops up overnight by copycats who envy your success, or just had the same idea as you.
We need radical changes to the way we go about our day-to-day activities if we are tap into new markets and make life better for our clients.
We have some already, EcoCash is disruptive to the way banking has been done. But we need more. We need the ideas that will offer such value to people that they cannot say no, yet still make us money.
I read about a ancient concept where you paid your doctor a retainer as long as you stayed well, the minute you fell ill he had an obligation to get you healthy at no charge. How disruptive would that idea be if applied in some form here?
Too many of us are content to continue slogging it out the “tried and tested” way without ever questioning anything. One of my favourite lines in iRobot is “I have a limited number of responses; you must ask the right questions.”
Unlike iRobot, our minds have an unlimited number of responses, so many in fact that it takes the right sort of question to get the right answer out of the soup of ideas simmering in our subconscious. We need to ask the right questions.
Rather than the broad “How can I improve my business?” Get a little more specific about what that improvement could look like, even if the improvement would be radical. “How can my clients have more fun while accessing our services?” “How can we offer extra bonus services at no charge?” “How can I offer my product for free and still make money?”
These are the right sort of question. Questions that demand specific answers and stimulate our immense creativity. Write them down, stick them up somewhere.
Instruct your brain to come up with a solution and let it stew down in your subconscious, where the interaction of neurons and memories can sift information while you get on with your day.
Look at the question daily and keep a note pad or recording device around you. The answer will pop up totally and completely at some point, almost randomly while you are driving, sleeping or doing some other mundane action. Write down the solution, explore it, and act on it.
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