Stability is the enemy of progress. Yes, I said it. I cringe to pen the words, but it makes so much sense to me now. Maybe not in our personal lives but in the world of business, markets and products, stability of the environment leads to stagnation.
When a category doesn’t experience intense rivalry between players, the overall quality of services, products, advertising, and customer choice inevitably becomes mediocre. We are wired to give our best mostly when in the mix of a challenging environment. Ease hardly creates excellence.
Chaos is needed.
This is why governments enforce anti-trust regulations. In principle, these laws exist to encourage competition by limiting the market power of any firm. In practice, it happens that ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ happen where firms collude to stifle competition, usually under the premise of not competing away profits for everyone.
Once companies in a sector begin to collude to keep new players out or to arbitrarily keep prices high, governments who know why they exist pull the rug from under them. Companies need to actively be competing for customers to get the best value. This shouldn’t be left to governments, competing firms should drive this on their own.
When was the last time you saw an industry where a particular player always launched a new service or innovation that didn’t provoke its competitors to ‘respond’? In a previous life, that word gave me constant whiplash. ‘Responding’ to the competition was not to be debated, it was an imperative. At the time I probably thought it was excessive but now I see that not only did we give our best work in such periods of chaos, the customers were spoilt for choice as competing players did their best to attract their patronage.
In recent times there sometimes seems to be a conspiracy of mediocrity. Many sectors are showing an almost gentlemanly agreement to push out sameness. If I don’t rock your boat, you wont rock my boat. The customers are ultimately the losers here as most of those who should be competing to delight them are trying rather not to push too far ahead of the pack, lest too much value is destroyed.
I understand this. No one wants to have increasing costs and shrinking profits but this will happen anyway if we all try not to rock the boat. Companies and their brands need to be pushing the edges of innovation as much as they can to create new value that can be monetized.
When Meta pushed out its Threads app within days of the tweet restriction drama from Twitter HQ, it was a breath of fresh air for text based social networking. Elon Musk had gotten so comfortable with the idea that Twitter (or X…jeez) could never be bested. The jury is out on how well Threads will fare but mercifully twitter users will be better respected by their landlord because a stronger challenger has entered their orbit.
Source: www.gulfnews.com
The only way for advances in product development, markets and new customers to rise a slumbering sector, indeed an economy is when we embrace chaos.
The struggle to delight, to best others in a field where we play must be embraced.
Let us not embrace the uncertain illusion of calm to avoid value destruction
New value will emerge when we seek out chaos.
That prickly man in Westeros said it best ‘Chaos is a ladder’.
