8Data, Innovation, and Disruption
“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway was known for his stories about a lost generation, bullfighting, and big game hunting, but one does not generally associate Hemingway with thinking on innovation and disruption. Yet, in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway creates an apt metaphor for the nature of innovative and disruptive change. When a character in the novel is asked “How did you go bankrupt?” he replies, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”1 What better way to describe the process by which innovation and disruption can creep up on an industry or an organization, resulting in a sudden shift in the landscape?
It seems like it was only yesterday that a new breed of data-driven businesses arrived on the scene. In the interceding years, a number of these firms – Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook – have gone on to achieve extraordinary market capitalizations, while challenging incumbent businesses whose market dominance has lasted generations. The impact of this disruption is just beginning to be fully realized. An overwhelming majority of Fortune 1000 executives report that they fear disruption from agile, data-driven competitors. For these firms, the inability to be nimble and compete on data and analytics represented the biggest competitive threat facing their businesses today.
Fortune 1000 companies are rapidly coming to the realization that ...
Get Fail Fast, Learn Faster now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
