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By: Sumair Sayani

The New Tipping Point

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A Life of Reaction is a Life

of Slavery – Intellectually

and Spiritually.

Rita Mae Brown

How many times have you heard that

companies must put investment in

understanding what lies ahead of the

curve; figure out what’s around the

corner; start planning for tomorrow

by making right decisions today?

It is time you listen. And act.

Why, you wonder?!

The New Tipping Point

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Most of us must have read books and heard leadership trainers talk ad nauseam about the unfortunate list of companies that did not innovate; didn’t keep pace with a changing world and died.• Blockbuster • Polaroid • Kodak• Border’s Books• WoolworthsOr being constantly reminded about brands that may not be around for too long:• RIM (Blackberry)• Sears / JC Penny’s / Macy’s• Yahoo• Publishing industry as a whole

It is important to think about the future

If we were to explain what happened to such large and successful companies and how did they disappear and others will too, we probably won’t be able to do it better than looking at something Henry Ford said:

If you don’t think of the

future, you won’t have one.

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Traditional forecasting models are obsolete And this contagion is not restricted to old and established companies. While there are several statistics out there, the truth is that an overwhelming number of new ventures and products fail fairly regularly.

A short while back, CB Insights did a survey by crunching data on 101 failed start-ups. The analysis revealed that an overwhelming majority of failure is attributed to a combination of poor understanding of the market; product demand and customer.

So it is perhaps reasonable to apportion a part of blame for such colossal and shocking failure to inability of the leadership to look ahead of the curve; to understand what’s around the corner and use that information to make smart decisions.

But is it fair to assume that these companies did not try to plan for the future? I mean we are talking about giants; they were the ones who had set new management theories; and exemplified leadership styles. And yet, we witnessed situations like when Steve Ballmer, the Nokia CEO, who broke down in tears in his last press conference and confessed that the leadership believed they did all the right things and could not understand why they lost.

Could it be that they didn’t innovate fast enough? They didn’t keep pace with the fundamental changes happening in their industry or chose to ignore it. Perhaps they didn’t realize that:

If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the pace of change on the inside, the end is near.

Jack Welch

Can we say that what is really happening here is that most of these organizations are heavily skewed towards being reactive versus proactive? Is it because they are intoxicated by years of successful results or consumed by the overzealous entrepreneurial enthusiasm? Does years of profitability make them averse to touching today’s cash cows? At the end of the day reality is that a large number of companies are consistently failing.

It seems that in a rapidly changing business landscape driven by -technological advances; internet connectivity; low barriers to entry -traditional models of forecasting have lost their effectiveness.

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Now, let’s flip the coin a little to test the theory that those who do forecast smartly, thrive. Let’s take a look at few organizations that continue to not only be relevant in a changing market landscape, but have maintained their leadership.I picked some examples here. Their Industries have gone through massive shift over the years and yet these companies continue to re-invent themselves and thrive.• Apple• Walmart• Amazon• Ford Motor Company• Unilever• Nielsen

Ford CEO recently said that ‘Ford is a technology company’. What he meant to say is that Ford will collect and analyze data about the driver from the car to develop new products & services.

Those who forecast smartly, thriveNielsen recently launched its “Science Behind What’s Next” and what it calls “Connected Systems Program” to bring big data into the mix; Amazon is destroying the long held concept of brick & mortar retail by leveraging billions of records to fine tune what to offer-at what price-to who-where-and how to get it there fastest; Walmartuses technology and complex algorithms to figure out what to place in each of its stores; shall we even start about Apple?

So if you are looking for a common theme, you will find one. And that is how well these organizations have used or enabled others to use information to look ahead of the curve and plan for it well ahead of time. They have found a way to very effectively convert data into actionable intelligence to achieve smart foresight.

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The reason most major

goals are not achieved is

that we spend our time

doing second things first.

Robert J. Mccann

Smart forecasting and using data to

generate insights allows

organizations to set the right

strategy; a clear roadmap and action

prioritization.

Let’s explore what smart use of data

means and how it can help

organizations become Pro-active.

How to leverage data?

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What does using data even mean?How could smart use of data helped avoid this from happening?For starters, they needed to understand that connectivity and globalization has come to the fore and traditional knowledge and strategy models were obsolete. Pace of change had picked up and barriers to entry had broken down.

New data analytics technologies allowed organizations to process billions of rows of data within seconds. Whole new data eco-system is being created encompassing not only organization’s internal data or the data it acquires, but also external data. Smaller organizations are far more agile and nimble to leverage this shift. However, it required organizations to get comfortable in accepting and inculcating these evolving practices in their operating DNA.

For a lot of people, it’s probably a no brainer. Of course we all need information and we all use information. So what’s new there?

That’s probably what Steve and his team at Nokia would have said as well. He believed till the end, that they did everything ‘right’. They followed all the normal practices; strategies and processes. They would have had hundreds of number crunchers looking at trends and data. They would have spent millions on research and product testing et al.

So what was missing? It failed to connect the dots. In time. It did not understand the future demand landscape and overestimated the strength of its brand. It relied a lot on historical excellent performance, in other words on hindsight.

Using the new tools and connecting it with their knowledge about the market and predicting shifts in future consumer demand could have helped them figure out that smartphones were the future. Ironically, Nokia was one of the first companies to invent a touch phone and a smartphone,

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Marshall McLuhan

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Jack Welch published “Straight from the

Gut”. Malcolm Gladwell in successive

books looks for innate qualities leaders

have or untiringly explores special

circumstances and chance or fate that

makes some more successful than

others.

Isn’t gut or intuition but a form of

processing a set of data points

delivered not in the form of

visualizations or dashboards, but bolt of

lightning that hits us at the time of

making important decisions? An

evolved and automated form of which

we now call data analytics.

Is data analytics really the answer?

What today’s data analytics

technologies are doing is taking this

to the next level providing an ability

to scale this up to process billions of

data points from around the

organizational eco-system in a

fraction of time. This idea is not

meant to replace the mystical

powers of gut, rather provide a

structured way to harness collective

acumen of the organization to make

better and timely decisions in a fast

paced external environment.

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So the Tipping Point today is where human and

machine come together in a seamless

integration of knowledge, gut and technology.

Collective acumen of organizational leaders

integrated with the technology to process data

from an organization’s complete eco-system,

would enable organizations to get ahead of the

curve; look around the corner; make smarter

decisions.

Today’s Tipping Point

What is dangerous is not to evolve.Jeff Bezos

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I spoke with several senior business leaders at various stages of my writing and their inputs were synthesized for this article.

Mr. Normand Provost. Marcom and Liaison Chair at nexo-standards.Mr. Piyush Mathur. Senior Vice President, Head of People Analytics. Nielsen,Mr. Munthir Al Ansari. Chief Executive Officer. MMA Consulting.Mr. Arne Herman Reiler. Owner. Reiler Consulting.Mr. Bill Mustard. Chief Executive Officer. Cairn

In addition to researching the publicly available information, the writing is also inspired by various books and articles in HBR; McKinsey; Fortune.

The Caterpillar’s Edge by Sid Mohasseb.Good to Great by Jim Collins.Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu & James Robinson.

Thank you for your contributions

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Sumair Sayani is the President at The

Demand Institute and a Vice President at

Nielsen.

He also advises start-ups.

About the writer

Personal website: https://sumairsayani.com/

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