Fascinating article. Long read (I'll be honest, I skipped the middle bits), but the conclusion in interesting.
This was the tl;dr for me:
"Some things we’ve learned over the past 30 years – that novelty is more important than quality; that if you’re not disrupting yourself someone else will disrupt you; that entering new markets is more important than expanding existing markets; that technology has to be evangelized, not asked for by your customers – may no longer be true. Almost every company will continue to be managed as if these things were true, probably right up until they manage themselves out of business. There’s an old saying that generals are always fighting the last war, it’s not just generals, it’s everyone’s natural inclination."
I've been feeling like some of the recent disruption is just somebody taking an existing process and codifying it into well made software. Zendesk, Uber, companies like that, aren't providing anything that didn't exist before (meaning HR onboarding and on-demand taxi services), they're just able to offer it at a larger scale, with a better experience, for cheaper, because instead of paperwork and phone calls being run by people, they have databases and APIs being run by computers. I think if your company relies on exchanging information and enforcing internal rules and isn't codified as software, it's just waiting for somebody to disrupt them and pull the bottom line out from under it.
This was the tl;dr for me:
"Some things we’ve learned over the past 30 years – that novelty is more important than quality; that if you’re not disrupting yourself someone else will disrupt you; that entering new markets is more important than expanding existing markets; that technology has to be evangelized, not asked for by your customers – may no longer be true. Almost every company will continue to be managed as if these things were true, probably right up until they manage themselves out of business. There’s an old saying that generals are always fighting the last war, it’s not just generals, it’s everyone’s natural inclination."