change

On September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the financial district in Lower Manhattan. Declaring, “We are the 99%,” they captured the attention of the nation. Within a few months, however, the park was cleared and the protesters went home, achieving little, if anything.

Steve Jobs didn’t want to build an app store. As Walter Isaacson describes in his biography of Apple’s founder, the famously controlling Jobs was wary of the “bandwidth” needed to police a veritable army of third party developers. At first, he wouldn’t even discuss it.

It’s brand new world out there. 500 million tweets are sent every day. Amazon sells over 250 million products. Over 27,000 reviews are posted on Yelp every minute. The average U.S. TV home now receives 189 TV channels.

In his novel The Castle, Franz Kafka tells the story of a man named “K” who is summoned by mysterious authorities for unknown reasons. He finds himself at the mercy of their bureaucracy and endless paperwork, which is carried out for a purpose that nobody can fathom but everyone seems to accept.

It’s no secret that big corporations aren’t what they used to be. In recent years, we’ve seen paragons such as General Motors, Kodak and Blockbuster have go bankrupt even as upstarts like Tesla, Instagram and Netflix rocket forward. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has fallen from more than 60 years to less than 20.

Last spring, the Clayton Christensen, one of the world’s top management thinkers, suggested that, despite being awash in cash, corporations are “failing to invest in innovations that might foster growth.”He considers this trend so insidious and pervasive that he called it the capitalist’s dilemma in Harvard Business Review.

It was largely during the 20th century that corporations rose to power.Private enterprises— usually run by a cadre of professional managers rather than by entrepreneurs— came to rival the reach and influence of governments, controlling massive resources that were not bound by traditional borders.

In an age of disruption the only viable strategy is to adapt. Today things move too quickly to stick with old paradigms once their time has passed. Once outdated platforms fail to solve new problems, they will be overtaken with blazing speed and we must either make a shift or get left behind.

If you work in customer strategy, sales, service or marketing, there is a high probability that you stay up to date on the latest developments in your field of expertise. You read articles like this. You visit conferences. You talk to colleagues in other companies to exchanges hints, tips and practices. 

Charles Erwin Wilson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense is credited with the quote, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” In fact, what he said was actually the inverse (that what was good for the country was good for GM), but no matter, both statements had an element of truth.