Industries are in flux. Google’s driverless cars are waiting at the intersection of internal combustion and search engines. Payment companies such as M-Pesa, Stripe and PayPal are testing the locks on banks’ safe deposit boxes. Samsung, Apple and Google’s Android have put BlackBerry and Nokia on hold. If you are the chief executive of a carmaker, financial institution or mobile phone maker and you are not yet worrying about the blurred edges of what was once a clearly demarcated border between sectors, you are lost.
Yet corporate cavemen still trigger the smugness alarm with statements such as “I don’t want any surprises” or “don’t bring me a problem unless you’ve got a solution”.
Rita Gunther McGrath, of Columbia Business School, says such comments are characteristic of leaders who think they have found a “competitive advantage” – the holy grail of strategists since Michael Porter defined it in 1985, in his book of the same name.