Smartphones and the internet are shifting power between suppliers, companies and customers. The new breed of leaders has a tough task.
As new communications tools appear, the challenge for managers is to deal with the disruptions these technologies bring to their businesses.
Launching Deloitte Digital’s release of Taking Leadership in the Digital Economy last week the Executive Director of Telstra Digital Consumers, Gerd Schenkel, described how business is changing as consumers are being empowered by smartphones.
A good example of this is the taxi industry where applications like GoCatch, InGoGo and Uber give passengers the opportunity to fight back against poor service from protected operators.
Sydney is an attractive market for taxi industry disruptors as the current protected market fails both passengers and drivers. Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, said at the Sydney launch of his service earlier last week that the city is one of the more ‘problematic” markets they’ve entered alongside San Francisco and Paris.
That letting down drivers along with passengers is an also an important point – drivers get 80% of Uber’s charges while InGoGo and GoCatch free operators from poor booking systems that frustrate everybody involved in the industry while making the system as unaccountable as possible.
Similar changes are happening in other industries as technology changes the way suppliers, customers and staff work.
A good example of changing work practices is the adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in the workplace. A few years ago in most businesses it was unthought of that staff could be allowed to bring their own computers to work. Today it’s common and soon the companies that don’t have a BYOD policy will be exception.
BYOD has happened because of the arrival of cheap consumer devices like smartphones and tablets along with IT departments rolling out web based services.
We’ve seen this before – probably the greatest influences on the shape of modern society had been electricity and the motor car. These, and many other technological changes have shaped today’s workplace.
Many businesses though suffer for those changes as we’re seeing with the drying up of the newspapers’ “rivers of gold”.
For Telstra this is seen in the demise of their phone directory business; Sensis was a true river of gold in the days of printed phone directories, but a number of management mis-steps over the last 15 years meant they totally missed the transition to digital.
The tragedy for Telstra that Sensis’ strength in the local advertising market should have been a positive given Google’s failure to execute on their local search strategy.
On reflecting about the struggle to deal with transitions to new technology, just how many business are like Sensis and Fairfax in having leaders that aren’t equipped to deal with these changes.
The leaders of the 1980s whose business models were based on the assumption of economic growth underpinned by easy credit, cheap energy and demographic growth and now finding those factors are moving against them at the same time technology change is disrupting their industries.
For the upcoming generation of leaders, both in business and government, having the ability to adapt to the changed power relationships between customers, suppliers and workers is going to be essential. For those steeped in last century’s certainties, it’s going to be a tough time.
