Is your inevitability Day 2? If you had to continue tomorrow what you are doing today, but you may not go about it the way you are today, how would you do it?
At the time of writing this, DeepSeek is getting a lot of airtime. I’m excited about the hypearound DeepSeek and specifically the apparent numbers and their how. Innovations is at the heart of business. At least that’s my belief. For the past two decades we’ve experienced copying and competing.
Like most things in life, we all get different value from the same things. Many years ago, I read “Blue Ocean Strategy” by Renée Mauborgne & W. Chan Kim and it had a lasting impact on me. Don’t copy, don’t compete. Innovate – add real value to all and everything involved.
In a LinkedIn post, Herman Singh writes about Jeff Bezos’ insistence on Day 1 thinking at Amazon –
“’Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?’
That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.
‘Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.’
To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.”
The current has an inevitable end. But it doesn’t have to be the end period.
AI was inevitable – it has been spoken about for at least decades. Mobile phones, self-driving cars, robotics, loss of jobs, inevitable, but not work (Watch Bronwyn Willaims’ interview on jobs vs. work).
Innovation, dare I say change, happens when challenges are experienced. Chinese companies are experiencing challenges – a chip ban. What has always helped me is to do what you can with what you have where you are. Innovation is then inevitable.
Several years ago, in a previous life I was visiting a chicken farmer in northern Zambia. I asked him what his single biggest challenge was/were, and how he dealt/is dealing with it.
Ever-shrinking margins used to be his biggest challenge. Lack of road infrastructure meant that breakdowns of delivery vehicles were becoming expensive, and the cost of fuel because of exchange rate fluctuations were making business expensive for all. This led to price wars, that made business even more expensive. Then he went blue ocean.
He stopped competing and decided to do what he could with what he had.
Utilising technology he had an app built to track delivery of eggs – real-time. His customers had access to the internet and payments could be made using their mobile phones using airtime. He approached the villages in his set-off area offering individuals an opportunity to start their own business – delivering eggs. He would buy each person a bicycle and issue them with a mobile phone – tracking deliveries and receiving payments. Eggs would be delivered to the various villages, and distribution would happen from there.
Bicycles are cheaper than trucks to acquire and maintain. Jobs created in the villages. Impact on the environment is less. Availability of data assisting in planning. Healthier margins allowing for retention and increasing of farm employees, and a satisfied farmer.
At the time of our meeting his biggest challenge was getting three-egg packaging…
If you stop copying and competing. If you go for the blue ocean. If you do what you can with what you have where you are. What is your inevitability?
David Weideman