Amorphous Business

In a recent interview with WSJ, the well-known former GE CEO Jack Welch and his wife Suzy Welch mentioned that the internet has made today’s business amorphous and more competitive than ever. “Now everyone knows everything”. And in fact everyone can compete on almost everything.

It is definitely a fact that there are no longer protected territories in today’s business environment. With the right ideas, all businesses, no matter small or large, can penetrate into each other’s territories and penetrate into once drastically different industries with unprecedented ease enabled by the unprecedented speed in technology innovations.

Such examples are plenty today:

– Telecommunication once had been a long-standing industry with a few larger players. However, Google has started laying out Fiber Optic cables in cities and offering internet services directly to customers.

– Auto industry was straightly a territory for “Big Three” in the US for decades. However a few years after the dust of “the Rusty Belt” has settled, technology firms Google and Apple are now rolling up sleeves to build a future technology-driven automobile industry.

– Since the major consolidation from 50+ companies in 1980s, about 90% of the American media services (news, newspapers and TV programs, etc) have been controlled by 6 large corporations such as News Corp, Disney, Time Warner, GE, etc.. Yet today, numerous startups are entering into the online “social media” arena, which has forced these large media giants to spend millions on acquisitions to stay current. For example, News Corp spent $25 million in 2013 for Storyful, a Dublin-based “social news” startup. Moreover, Netflix or even Amazon are also becoming TV content providers which are directly competing with them.

– The very ancient businesses of money transfers, currency exchanges or loan-making are no longer banks’ protected space today. Growing numbers of tech startups are now offering global money transfer, peer-to-peer lending or digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

These stories are everywhere. Almost no traditional industry has escaped the current waves of threats. Welcome to the age of disruptive innovations!

With the right innovative ideas, technologies can enable everyone to get into everyone else’s business, by new products, services or unique business models. The business competitions are no longer limited to a particular industry, territory or country, but can appear in every corner on the globe. With the transparent and amorphous nature of the business of this age, the challenges are increasingly daunting for today’s business leaders. While businesses with legacies face huge changes and transformations, however new businesses demand broad mindsets and bold innovations, they also require focus and sustainable growth. We will likely expect many more business lessons along with exciting growth or survival stories, as if everyone is learning on the same page.