Adapt or perish…..

The last century can broadly be classified into four distinctive phases – product centric, customer centric, information centric and the one we are living in - collaborative.

It started with the product centric organization, when Henry Ford said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Growth was primarily driven by commoditization and those companies that adapted fast grew while others went bust.

This was followed by years when Japanese companies came to the fore, who initially found it hard to compete with their American peers. With limited money and lack of infrastructure to compete against the big car manufacturers these companies embarked on a customer centric journey. They started to manufacture things in small lots with a specific customer in mind and once they mastered the art of small, understood the customer needs and perfected the supply chain they went big. The difference was how they evolved and their appreciation of the customer.

The third phase was led by organizations such as Amazon and Google and was built on information sharing. These organizations went a step further and gave control of the information to the end user. They never told the end user what to do, but gave them options way beyond what was available to their predecessors. They learnt from the previous generations and built their solution on top of that….

This proliferation of information gave birth to the era we are living in, the era of empowered user and fostered collaboration between customers and organizations. Different companies can use different ways of expressing it but basically you start with the problem in mind, vet it with the customer, iterate based on responses received, launch it to a selected few and based on your learning finally go to the market. In today's world it isn't the customer or the company but both.

While each era saw the rise of few and fall of others, there were organizations that kept on defying the norm and grew during each phase. These organizations didn't live in their shell but were ready to adapt to new challenges. I don’t know what the future holds but to succeed in the current world one not only need to learn from the past but also should adapt and try to be a part of the future.