Your Inner CEO: Out With The Old, In With The New

Today there’s a hunger for new breakthrough technologies in all areas of business. Apple probably did more to create this hunger than any other company, with Steve Jobs’ dramatic unveilings of new Apple products. As an entrepreneur, of course, you are the product – so you need to re-invent and re-introduce yourself on an ongoing basis.

You need to show your clients that you’re on the cutting edge. You need to make them believe it, and you need to believe it yourself as well. You have to convincingly present your understanding and mastery of change. That’s the only way to satisfy the hunger for newness that has become a principle of business success.

The US Post Office has been losing millions of dollars a year. One reason is the fact that the Post Office is locked into a certain way of doing things that simply cannot be radically changed. First class postage was a moneymaker for the post office, but what happened to first class postage when fax machines began to appear – not to mention email. The Post Office had all their distribution centers, they had trucks, and they had mail sorting, but all that became irrelevant when totally new technologies appeared.

Here’s the point. If you can offer your client new and powerful problem-solving benefits, you don’t have to compete with whoever had been the dominant player. You don’t need to be on the same playing field as the post office. You can create a whole new game with new and different rules.

Consider what happened to telecommunication systems. With all the old landlines, to succeed in that business you had to have cables and right-of-ways and all kinds of other hardware. Then somebody put a microwave tower on a hill and everything changed. Steve Jobs created the iPhone and everything changed again. These were huge leaps beyond where the old phone-system was.

Another example: the publishing industry is trapped in a 400-year-old paradigm, based on printing hard copies of books. Now an almost infinite number of electronic books can be distributed just by pushing a button. An e-book publisher can completely bypass the traditional publishing industry.

At one time the most accurate watches in the world were made in Switzerland. You needed to be extremely meticulous and spend years looking into a magnifying glass at little gears in order to make them. You had to understand everything about gears and springs to be a watch manufacturer. Then some people in Japan said, “Forget that! We’ll just put it on a quartz chip. It vibrates at an absolutely stable rate when stimulated by a tiny battery.”

The amazing part is, the Japanese didn’t invent quartz watch technology. The Swiss invented it, but they didn’t patent it. So the Japanese just put it in the chip, because the Swiss had already told them how to do it. The Swiss were so invested in the springs and gears that they couldn’t see how the time for change was here.

At one time the Swiss had 95% of the watch market. Now the Japanese own 95% of the watch market. Because the Swiss didn’t take the technology that they had invented themselves, they got beaten with their own technology.

What lessons do stories like these hold for you as the CEO of your own inner corporation? How can you create a new version of yourself that makes you attractive as an innovator? Or how can you recognize and improve upon an already existing idea, so that it becomes your own? “Out with the old, in with the new” – we should all embody this ancient principle, and we should make it seem like we just thought of it ten minutes ago.