Nokia 's journey from manufacturing paper pulp or rubber boots in its early days to becoming a leading company in the emerging mobile phone industry at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one ignores a fundamental question: in reality, what the company did was take advantage of opportunity after opportunity that was offered to it , in a strategy that, in reality, only had the will to survive and maximize income.
Okay, it's not at all simple and it deserves the credit it deserves, but in reality it was just a plan for efficient use of resources based on the businesses that were emerging. A mindset that is certainly interesting, but one that did not help the company avoid its subsequent crisis: one thing is to enter new industries with a fresh and renewed approach, and quite another to understand that the industry you were in and in which you were a leader has completely changed , and that if you don't change with it, you will be completely out of the game.
Change when it goes well
Other cases are actually more inspiring. The transformation of companies like Microsoft or our host today, Sage , for example, from selling cardboard boxes wrapped in cellophane and containing diskettes first and CDs or DVDs later, to becoming one of the most important providers of cloud services , is not so much a simple exploitation of an opportunity, but a careful analysis that demands a change . A change that is also extremely complex and meritorious, because when the decision is made to undertake it, the results of the companies are actually fantastic .
Nothing is more difficult than changing something night clubs and bars email list that is going well : those involved refuse to accept it, they see it more as a threat than an opportunity, and they are completely convinced that, in reality, they are doing well doing what they do, and that those proposing the change have suffered from some kind of temporary mental alienation.
At Microsoft , the time of Steve Ballmer, probably one of the worst managers and biggest destroyers of value in the world, is a clear example of this problem, and the book written by his successor, Satya Nadella, which describes the transformation after his departure is not only a pleasant but also an enormously enriching read.
Undertaking a radical change because your analysis has detected a change in the environment that could hypothetically threaten your future position requires such foresight and conviction that few companies are capable of carrying it out.
Analysis, analysis, analysis
To do this, it is necessary to start from a fundamental problem, called analytical capacity : most successful companies are completely incapable of imagining a scenario in which some of the fundamental premises that make up the industry in which they succeed could change radically .
For many content distribution companies, for example, accepting that the Internet could become so present and ubiquitous in our lives that it could be used as a distribution channel was completely unthinkable, and because of this, it took them years to offer their services through that channel, thus giving rise to a brutal market opportunity for irregular downloads.
