Goliath's Revenge

Chapter 10 Company View: Your Disruptor’s Playbook

It’s okay to have butterflies. Just get them flying in formation.

—Francisco López, musician

Take a moment to celebrate how far you’ve come. You have inventoried the crown jewels that confer the incumbent’s advantage on your company, understood why winners take most in digital competition, and self-assessed both your company and career relative to each of the six rules of Goliath’s Revenge.

Now it is time to put that new knowledge to work and shift from thinking to doing. In this chapter you will learn how to build what we call a “disruptor’s playbook” for your company, which will help turn the tables on your industry’s digital disruptors. In the next chapter, you will narrow the focus to your career and the sequence in which you will close gaps in your professional readiness for a digital future.

On the company-strategy front, Francisco López has it right. Alignment of execution across functions, divisions, and geographies is paramount in making the changes needed to achieve Goliath’s Revenge. This is a team sport like football, not an individual one like tennis. It is not enough to have one group—a chosen few on your data science team or in your research labs, for example—executing your strategy. Established companies need to harness their collective skills, energy, and knowledge to out-innovate the digital disruptors.

You Are Not Too Late

Whether you work for a small, midsized, or large company, it is not too late to ...