The Ever-Shorter Life Span of an Innovative Advantage in the Era of Shifting Sand

Quite a challenge to keep your footing

To pursue our endeavors and achieve our desired success, we need certainty, consistency, and predictability, a hard floor from which to take a leap. Basketball players can jump higher than beach volleyball players can because they play on a hard wooden floor. It is much more difficult to leap high with the sand shifting beneath your feet.
Dove Seidman, How:  Why How we Do Anything Means Everything…In Business (and in Life)

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I like the analogy of the beach volleyball game contrasted with the hard-court basketball game.  The hard floor vs. the shifting sand.  It seems so apt, so correctly descriptive.

Today, Apple stock is tanking for a second straight day.  Down a ton since it reached its highs just a few months ago.  Are their products worse?  No.  Are they selling fewer?  No.  Just read the opening paragraphs of Farhad Manjoo’s article from this morning, Apple Is Stronger Than Ever:  Don’t let the company’s stock slump fool you, and you walk away wondering how to make sense of much of anything.  Here are Manjoo’s first two paragraphs:

On Wednesday afternoon, Apple announced that during the last three months of 2012, it earned more money than any other non-oil company has ever earned in a single quarter. (Gazprom, Royal Dutch Shell, and ExxonMobil have each topped Apple’s earnings one time.) What’s more, during all of 2012, Apple’s profits topped $41.7 billion, which is also a record for any firm outside the oil industry. (ExxonMobil earned a few billion more in 2006, 2007, and 2008.)

The superlatives didn’t end there. Apple sold nearly 48 million iPhones over the holidays. It didn’t specify how many of them were iPhone 5s, but it’s likely that most were the latest model, which would also be a record for the smartphone business—the iPhone 5’s closest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy SIII, took seven months to sell just 40 million units. Then there’s the iPad: Apple sold 23 million in three months, which is about 50 percent more than it sold during the holidays last year, and also a record. No other company has ever come close to selling as many tablets in so short a time.

Apple continues to innovate — amazingly well.  But, the very impression that others are catching up is enough to leave the impression that they have lost their footing.

My blogging colleague Bob Morris reminded us in a comment to a recent post that we should learn from books that offer solutions as much as we learn from the portions of books that point out the problems.  And he is right.  Here is part of what he wrote in his comment:

Although your criticism applies to many organizations, the fact remains that many others are using principles of innovation and design thinking to establish and then sustain a decisive competitive advantage.

I do like solutions.  I prefer solutions.  I want to see progress, and then a period of certainty, consistency, and predictability, with enough time to “catch my breath,” and simply work for a while enjoying some “success” — a hard floor from which to take a leap.  But such certainty, consistency, predictability seem especially elusive in so many arenas.

In What Matters Now by Gary Hamel, two of the five that really matter now are Innovation and Adaptability.  From his book:

Innovation: 
successful products and strategies are quickly copied. Without relentless innovation, success is fleeting. …there’s not one company in a hundred that has made innovation everyone’s job, every day. 
In most organizations, innovation still happens “despite the system” rather than because of it.
…innovation is the only sustainable strategy for creating long-term value.

Adaptability: 
Problem is, deep change is almost always crisis-driven; it’s tardy, traumatic and expensive. In most organizations, there are too many things that perpetuate the past and too few that encourage proactive change. The “party of the past” is usually more powerful than the “party of the future.” 
In a world where industry leaders can become laggards overnight, the only way to sustain success is to reinvent it.

If innovation is the only sustainable strategy for creating long-term value, the bad news is that today’s successful innovation must be tweaked quickly, almost immediately — improved by, maybe even supplanted by, tomorrow’s innovation.  Keep changing, keep innovating, or else….

So, whatever else is true today, this is true:  today’s solutions and innovations have a shorter shelf-life than ever before.  We are playing far more beach volleyball than we are hard-court basketball.

And if we pretend that the game has not changed, and the surface is not different – if we pretend that we can still make do with yesterday’s upgrades when we need some genuine innovations – we will lose our footing, and lose the game.