Why didn’t a cab driver think of Ola or Uber?
Why didn’t a Shopping Mall owner think of Flipkart?
Why didn’t a Theatre owner think of BookMyShow?
Why didn’t Airtel or Vodafone think of Paytm?
Why didn’t Taj or Marriott think of GoIbibo?
The answer to all above, and the myriad of all other companies displaced by digital disruption, is that at some point they became so busy and coupled with the ongoing need to meet or exceed the quarterly numbers, that they forgot to look far enough outside of their business to see the disruption ahead. A quite convincing reason why so many companies fail to face the disruption is that when someone from the outside uses digital disruption to disrupt you, the strategy most often invoked is to protect and defend the status quo. It is amazing how much time and money organizations spend protecting and defending their current ‘cash cows’. In the past this was a valid strategy that did produce good results. But digital disruption is different. Because it tends to be game-changing with a very low cost of entry, it is not hard for a small startup to quickly disrupt not only a big business, but even an entire industry.
But, why all this is happening now? What is digital disruption?