Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Pace of change an issue for incumbent professional service providers


Previous posts have looked at various aspects of the radical change sweeping through the professions.

Generally, the four main areas where disruptors, innovators and incubators tend to focus their attention are:
  1. unchallenged orthodoxies - the parts of a business model that have remained unchanged and are assumed by industry players to be non-negotiable

  2. unappreciated trends - things that are happening in other unrelated industries that have not been embraced more widely

  3. unleveraged competencies - a focus on what the business knows as opposed to what it does can create new value propositions

  4. unarticulated needs – a focus on the '5 Whys' and 'What job is to be done?'.
As Jack Welch has explained, firms are at significant and potentially irretrievable risk when the rate of internal change is slower than the pace of external change.

True incubators understand that plans for the future must simply be plans for learning. In other words, plan to be wrong - and then learn how to be right as fast as possible.

A new solution must always be simple, reliable and convenient. It will always be delivered at lower margins - the profits will follow as market share is secured.

As the solution is generally only valued by the least profitable customers, a firm that chooses simply to listen to its best customers to identify new products essentially ignores all forms of disruptive innovation and, in turn, essentially ensures that it will fail the innovator's dilemma test.

This means there is a very strong first mover advantage as the incumbents effectively ignore the disruptive model until it is too late.

As mentioned previously, we began the journey to address many of the challenges of redefining the professional services firm business model over 10 years ago.

For many, the journey has started more recently and we believe it important to share our learnings.

In this regard, we are excited to be presenting at the 2016 ALPMA Summit, A Blue Print for Change, 7-9 September in Melbourne – see -http://www.alpma.com.au/Summit

Before then, our upcoming Roadshow will also be a full day example of our contribution in this space.

Download the brochure.

Watch the promo video below.




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