Dominate the competition
Get instant accessAnyone who has played a video game with a kid knows the feeling of helpless frustration of being easily overwhelmed by someone they never considered a serious competitor. That slow, anxious frustration grows as you mash the controller, so sure that whatever it is you’re doing should be effective. Those moves should have worked. You should have won. But you didn’t.
Children can not only anticipate probable outcomes in the game, their expectations are fluid — they see the landscape as it appears without the expectations of what it should be. Business can also like a video game, in that outcomes results from certain triggers. You, too, can learn to adapt, master those rules and win the game.
The 7 Triggers that create crisis in a business begin with rule #1:
Change in competition
Blockbuster Video played the business game by Pong rules — believing the marketplace and consumer loyalty to be a reassuringly predictable volley of back-and-forth. The game of Pong is a perfect representation of sustainable innovation; as many times as you hit the ball across the screen, it’ll bounce back until you miss a swing. Netflix, for instance, came into the video market and detonated the entire consumer habit of owning and renting physical discs, and those effects reached far beyond the retail outlets of retail stores.
