I recently watched Alexander Osterwalder deliver a keynote on “Building an Invincible Company“, based on his book with the same name. He shares a lot of great insights on leadership, innovation and building sustainable business advantage for businesses. You can watch the entire keynote here.
Here are some lessons I took away from the talk:
The moment a company thinks it is invincible, their decline becomes inevitable.
Invincible companies constantly reinvent themselves while they are successful. They fully realise that they will be disrupted and so work hard to find invest in technologies and business ideas that could potentially disrupt themselves.
They use the success of their business to fuel the next generation of ideas. Since it is not possible to know in advance which ideas will succeed, they use the venture capital model and invest in a portfolio of ideas.
Each idea starts out with the exact same kind of investment and over specific periods of time, the team that is working on the idea work towards gathering data or proof that the idea merits subsequent investments or stop working on the idea. And with time and proof points, they end up with potentially big breakthrough ideas.
Companies that want to continue to be relevant for long periods of time and do well during these times, understand that competing on products / services alone is not a long term winning strategy. They understand and compete on superior business models or as ecosystems.
Companies that want to be invincible tend to redefine industry boundaries. They do not operate within the industry boundary but transcend them. They create free flow of ideas from multiple industries and create new definition of what constitutes industry best practices.
In conclusion:
Alex also shares a lot of examples and insights about how a company can become invincible, but I think these three features sum them up well. Now, that you know this, can you evaluate your company on these parameters? How does it stack up? Will your company be around in the next decade?
