Embracing Growth

In the race towards creating shareholder value, finding growth for the top line becomes the mantra.....No where is this more evident than in industries where product life cycle is near maturing. If you look around you will find ample examples of this. Banks are looking for white space to expand into, software giants must constantly reinvent themselves or find new territories to find growth in an attempt to immunise themselves from disrupters. Even we are not immune from this process.


Standing still is not an option. Take the pharma industry for instance. A big chunk of its competitive advantage period can be lopped off due to the expiration of patent rights and by disrupters flooding the market with generics.

Once the patent expires, it may end in cataclysm for some players.

We can also draw lessons from history. Take a look at the Channeled Scablands where its landscape is carved in a very short time period from a single or series of similar giant flood. Glacier-like speed it appears but is not. At the base of an ice dam, the sheer amount of pressure stops the water molecules from expanding and since they cannot expand, it also cannot freeze. This resulted in a state called "super-cooled" water which remained liquid despite being several degrees below freezing. This force its way into tiny cracks in the ice resulting in an ice dam collapsing and end in cataclysm. Harlen Bretz won a Penrose Medal for thinking that goes against convention wisdom that such landscape is through a gradual process over millions of years. This "tipping point" phenomenon occurs more frequently than we realise.

We must be able to embed and institutionalise this memory so that it becomes second nature to us. For instance, let's examine how social networking tools can allow us to tune into "signals" and filter out the noise. On the other spectrum, we also need to be aware of "black swan". In the short-term we are vulnerable to the "unpredictable", the so-called "fat tail".
However, in the long-run, it is the business model with the right value proposition that will prevail provided we do not fall by the sideway in the meantime.



Keywords: quality, value systems,
trust, domain knowledge, technology, networking, maven traps, speed of trust