“Bezos is Amazon’s chief writing evangelist, and his advocacy for the art of long-form writing as a motivational tool and idea-generation technique has been ordering how people think and work at Amazon for the last two decades—most importantly, in how the company creates new ideas, how it shares them, and how it gets support for them from the wider world.”
Introducing Disruptive Innovation to Your Students
To a large extent, business strategy revolves around change—whether creating change, capitalizing on change, or surviving change. The basic concept of business is fixed: It’s always going to be a question of adding value to satisfy customers in a way that generates a sustainable level of profit. However, the way that companies go about adding value and satisfying customers is always evolving, and the business world is currently going through an extraordinary set of changes that are likely to influence students’ career paths for years to come.
Change in Business—From Gradual to Disruptive
Some changes in the business environment happen gradually and often predictably, such as when an aging consumer population increases or decreases demand for particular goods and services. Companies need to anticipate and respond to such changes, but they don’t fundamentally alter the way businesses operate. Similarly, individual brands and products move in and out of fashion, but the overall market sector often remains more or less the same.
Other types of changes, however, can be downright traumatic—or exciting, depending on whether you’re benefiting from a change or getting steamrolled by it. Online retailing, digital music, mobile communication, and social media are examples of changes that permanently shifted the way many consumers behave and many businesses operate. Each of these is a disruptive innovation, a development so fundamentally different and far reaching that it can create new professions, companies, or even entire industries while damaging or destroying others.
These changes are an important phenomenon that all business students should understand, and it presents some intriguing questions that you might want to discuss with your students.
Three Questions to Discuss with Students
First, predicting whether a new technology will be truly disruptive is difficult. In many cases, multiple other forces from the technological, economic, social, and legal regulatory environments need to converge before an innovation has a major impact. For instance, without broadband wireless networks, a digital communication infrastructure, data encryption methods, a vast array of free and low-cost apps, mobile-friendly web services, and more computing power than actual computers used to have, a smartphone would just be an expensive way to make phone calls. With the combined impact of all these innovations, mobile phones have changed the way many people live and the way many businesses operate. Encourage students to keep this in mind if they’re considering joining a company with a promising new product that hasn’t caught on yet—what other changes need to occur before the product and the company will succeed?
Second, predicting when the disruption will happen is just as difficult. Many promising technologies can take years to have an impact. Mobile phones and handheld computers had been around for two or three decades before all the pieces fell into place and the smartphone era took off. Intriguing new inventions can generate a lot of interest, press coverage, and “hype” long before they have any real impact on business, and expectations sometimes outpace what the technology can deliver. This pattern repeats so often that the management consulting firm Gartner famously modeled it as a five-stage roller-coaster curve that it calls the Hype Cycle.
Third, predicting the eventual impact of a disruption is also challenging. Artificial intelligence (AI) is finally going mainstream as a business—and business communication—tool after many decades of hopes and hype, but its long-term impact is difficult to gauge at this point. Millions of jobs involve tasks and decisions that AI could conceivably do (and is now doing in many cases), but it’s impossible to pin down how disruptive it will be to the job market. AI will redefine many jobs, eliminate some, and create some—and people in most professions should be prepared to learn new skills and adapt as opportunities and expectations change.
The best advice for students as they move forward in their careers is to keep their eyes and ears open to innovations that could affect their professions and their companies. Encourage them to carefully consider the predictions they hear, but before they make any major career decisions, ask themselves what will have to happen for those predictions to come true. Predicting the future is always a dicey proposition, but with a skeptical approach, they have a better chance of separating reasonable projections from pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business in Action, 9th ed. (New York: Pearson 2020), 22.
Teaching Your Introduction to Business Students about Innovations in Workforce Management
From the gig economy to workforce analytics to artificial intelligence in the hiring process, human resource management is undergoing some radical changes. Make sure your course stays on top of these developments with Business in Action, 9th Edition, by Bovee and Thill (Pearson).
Google Tells Some Advertisers It Will Handle Campaign Strategies
"Google announced, in an email from Google Ads sent to some advertisers on Thursday, that it will handle 'campaigns, so you can focus on your business.'”
"Automation is increasingly an area of focus for Google, slowly taking the responsibility from the advertiser and agency.
"In this case, the initiative is part automation and part human intervention. Google will bring in “Google Ads experts” to manage campaigns."
The Secret to Getting More Followers and Customers
"The secret to attracting more followers and customers is to tap the expertise of the existing ones you have," writes Josh Spector at his blog – For the Interested.
The simplest way to do this is to ask your audience five simple questions.
Personal Loans 101: How They Work and Who Can Qualify for Them
"You may be able to get a small loan from family or friends, and you can always apply for a credit card. But, there's another option to consider that comes with certain advantages — and that option is a personal loan. While personal loans have gotten a bad rap, they can offer a predictable way to borrow money," writes Holly Johnson (photo, left) at BusinessInsider.com
The World’s Biggest Spice Company Is Using AI to Find New Flavors
"After 130 years, it can be hard to come up with new flavors, so the world's largest spice company is becoming the latest food producer to turn to artificial intelligence for help."
"McCormick — the maker of Old Bay and other seasonings, spices and condiments — hopes the technology can help it tantalize taste buds. It worked with IBM Research to build an AI system trained on decades worth of data about spices and flavors to come up with new flavor combinations."
Preparing Students to Thrive in the Digital Enterprise
The business world is experiencing a wave of digital disruptions that are reshaping what it’s like to launch, lead, and work for companies. Consider this stunning change: In a 2015 survey, fewer than 1 percent of executives believed digital technology would disrupt their industries. Only two years later, more than 75% said digital would have a “major” or “transformative” impact on their industries.
In a fundamental way, virtually all businesses are becoming digital enterprises, regardless of what they produce, because digital systems are essential to how they create value and connect with customers. This digital transformation is affecting every aspect of business, from HR to finance to marketing.
Many companies in the past two or three decades were “born digital,” but many others have learned that digital competency has become key to their survival. Even a business as small as an espresso stand can use social media to expand sales, for example, and it can live or die based on the reviews it gets on Yelp. And in industries that might seem as far from the digital world of cloud computing and mobile apps as it’s possible to get, thousands of companies are turning to digital. Sectors ranging from agriculture to mining to heavy manufacturing increasingly rely on these technologies to improve productivity, manage operations, and market their products.
The Exciting—and Unsettling—Prospect of Digital Transformation
Students need to be ready for this new world of business for two key reasons. First, executives who are scrambling to implement their own digital transformations are looking for employees who are tuned into these concepts and technologies. New graduates aren't necessarily expected to be experts in these fields, naturally, but all business graduates should be aware of the basic concepts, particularly those that are prominent in their chosen career field.
Second, students can’t afford to set their sights on traditional career paths without understanding how those paths are changing—or in some cases, disappearing. Many of today’s jobs are vulnerable to disruption from artificial intelligence and related technologies, and many graduates will be working in jobs we can’t even envision today.
Predicting the eventual impact of a disruption this profound is also challenging. Artificial intelligence (AI) is finally going mainstream as a business tool after many decades of hopes and hype, but its long-term impact is difficult to gauge at this point. Millions of jobs involve tasks and decisions that AI could conceivably do (and is now doing in many cases), but it’s impossible to pin down how disruptive it will be to the job market. AI will redefine many jobs, eliminate some, and create some—and people in most professions should be prepared to learn new skills and adapt as opportunities and expectations change.
Integrating Digital Concepts in the Introduction to Business Course
Of course, the last thing any intro to business instructor wants to hear about is another topic that needs to be covered in a course that already covers so many.
To make it as easy as possible to introduce your students to these vital ideas without adding to your workload, the new Ninth Edition of Business in Action offers a unique approach called Thriving in the Digital Enterprise. Each chapter concludes with a section that explores one aspect of the digital enterprise, from general concepts such as big data and virtual reality to more specialized tools such as marketing analytics. These brief, nontechnical introductions help students understand the basic ideas and be more prepared if one of these topics appears in a job posting or comes up during a job interview.
To learn more about this new edition, please visit explorebia9.info.
Image credit: Jeremy Keith
Available Warehouse Space at Lowest Level Since 2000
"But the struggle doesn't end with finding available warehouse space. Companies are in need of space that can handle the needs of a large-scale e-commerce model. However, only 11% of warehouse space was built in the last decade, and the remaining space might not be up to snuff for modern day demands."
Retailers Rethink Physical Stores as Click and Collect Catches On
"Buy online, pick-up in store is often heralded as the future of retail: Customers shopping on their own terms, as efficiently as possible. But it might end up being a bigger lift than expected for retail stores."