Are You Ready for Digital Disruption in Your Markets?

Change is happening in every industry today. It’s not new, but the rate continues to increase more every month. New technologies, customer changing needs, and new managers are just beginning to understand how to manage their organizations successfully. All this digital disruption is keeping many of my best clients up at night.

Being a good consultant means when they’re not sleeping, I’ll be up as well. When I started my first business, you could hear the fax machine printing 24 hours a day. Today, with all the ways my clients use technology, I would never sleep. Digital disruption is what keeps me on the road several weeks per month.

Digital disruption is changing the way my clients and their customers work and do business, both personally and professionally. What can I do to help my clients deal effectively with disruption? I came up with an idea several years ago and many of my clients buy into it.  The idea was having me travel to conferences in emerging technologies to see what I could do to help them get ahead of the curve in their industries.

This practice kept my knowledge up to date and, as an added bonus, I could identify key people in these new emerging technologies without clients needing to invest more of their time until we knew how the new technology might cause a disruption in their markets or customer base. I also believe that I’m very good at learning how to leverage technologies to provide my clients a significant advantage in their markets.

So, why do I share this today? I was going to talk about developing stronger leadership partnerships. Here’s my thought, one of the most valuable partnerships you can develop is with the right technology partners. Many times what I learn, I can’t share for many years because my clients tend to leverage technology and people to get breakthrough results. They love collaboration, but not that kind.

In two weeks, I’m going to the conference IBM Vison 2016. The conference theme is Outthink, Outperform. I will be guest of IBM Watson Analytics. It’s a very cool opportunity to interact with many great people from all over during the several day program. Even better, I get to share what I learn with you, my readers. There are over 120,000 leaders here at Market Leadership Journal.

I’m going to share what I see going on in technology in your markets. I will share information here that may cause digital disruption to occur in your industry. I’m very excited to have access to so many great people who will help me help you take advantage of digital disruption in your markets. It should be a great adventure. But before I do this, I have a quick quiz to see if your industry or market is likely to be disrupted.

Here are several questions to jumpstart your thinking on digital disruption.  It may help you determine if the right innovation can help you disrupt your market before others do. Here are the questions.

• Are the people in your industry doing business the same way they did five years ago? Many times, it’s longer, but five years is an easy number to consider.
• Have other companies and organizations starting to change the way you do business with your best clients, customers, and partners?
• Are upstart and new competitors growing faster, and more profitably, than your organization?
• Are you still copying the way you do business from much older, regionally located, and larger competitors?
• Have your competitors created systems and processes that would very costly to recreate in the current business environment?
• Is risk still a four letter word in many parts of your organization?

Starting next week, I share ideas to get you thinking about what is happening in your market and how you might want to leverage technology to build a stronger team. I will help add digital disruption to your playbook.

Over the next 30 days, I will share what I learn and how to apply it to your business to grow a stronger, more innovative organization. If you have been here for very long, you know I don’t share things that are not proven or implementable. I share strategies that you can use to grow a more profitable business.

See you next week.