Disruption Culture

The disruption roaring through the marketplace now requires imagination, flexibility and a culture that does not freeze or shrink from the change driving the disruption. This disruption culture requires a willingness and encouragement to experiment and fail while reacting to the change in the marketplace. The key to success in the disruption is the imagination to experiment with new ideas and processes to meet the demands of the marketplace with a goal of creating the disruption in the marketplace. Disruption seems to be the norm, or at least it the changes are greater and increasing in frequency, requiring reactions from the marketplace in order to maintain their place. In the past retailers could wait for the change to solidify before reacting and now they cannot afford to wait for the change to solidify before the next wave of change.




Disruption is identified later in time when the changes have increased in velocity and impact resulting in a broad spectrum change that impacts the marketplace and changes it forever. In other words, disruption is identified when you realize the impact to the marketplace. This is also why it is so important for each participant in the marketplace to react and support the changes in their field. If any one or two of the participants do not support the change they run the very real risk of being left out of the marketplace. In my opinion, this lack of supporting market changes is the key factor for the retail market failures of some of the major retailers recently.




The retail marketplace is now in a time of discontinuous and disruptive change and the only way for the market to react is to develop and encourage a culture of change that embraces and encourages the changes that disrupt the marketplace. That is why it is so important for retailers and the supply chain partners to create a disruption culture that is guided by change and more importantly embraces the change and the resulting disruption. This is not an easy lift because requires the largest partners with the most to lose to be the leaders in the change.




The secret of Amazon and Google and Facebook is that they have developed a disruption culture that searches out change that can disrupt the marketplace and they use this as a way to get ahead of their competition. We have seen this over and over where an upstart enters the market with a new idea and this idea catches fire with the consumer and before you realize it they have disrupted the market and leave the competition behind. This is the point though where especially the largest retailers must focus their resources on sensing and responding to the change. They must realize that they are under attack from the market and the competition and they cannot reduce spending to address the issue, they must refocus their investments on the tools and the culture that will allow them to sense and respond to the changes.