This if from “The Geek Way” by Andrew McAfee (emphasis added):
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained to me one of the biggest consequences of this shift: “In the classic corporate model, everything is run in a hierarchical way, the office get bigger over time, and bureaucracies abound. Companies like this were actually successful for a long time because they have some strengths: they’re predictable and they serve their customers well, as long as customers keep needing the same thing. The reason that culture doesn’t work very well in the information age is that the customers need changes, and you have to be able to change more quickly than, you know, every five years.”
from “the geek way” by andrew mcaffee
I liked this because it simply and clearly identifies a main driver of business.
Though I would add something. Often, people’s needs don’t change, but how they satisfy those needs do.
Think of the pager.
It served a need to let you know that somebody wanted to contact you even when you weren’t close to your landline telephone.
It served that need well.
That solution was part of an environment where phones were stationary objects.
Pagers aren’t needed anymore, but the need for somebody to instantly contact you remains.
What changed is how that need was met.
Nobody set out with smart, intentional Harvard Business School strategy to disrupt pagers or capture that market.
How that need was met naturally evolved as the environment changed to where phones became mobile and we have them on us most of the time.
The instant contact need also got solved in different ways as those phones evolved capabilities to connect people in more ways. So much so, that phone calls have become almost as much of a relic as pagers, as a good chunk of our communication has shifted to texting and messaging apps.
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