Undisruptable

3S Curves: A Framework for Permanent Reinvention

‘There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.’

— R. Buckminster Fuller

Imagine you live in the late 1890s, most people travel by horse-driven coach, railway and streetcar. Rail is more comfortable than horse and cart because roads are glorified dirt tracks and suspension is not yet widespread. When you hear rumours of this thing called a motorcar, ‘a mechanical horse’, you dismiss it as a passing craze. After a while, you see several motor cars appear. These first cars are unreliable, need a lot of maintenance and smell so badly that people call them ‘stink chariots’. Besides all that, there are no roads on which to drive stink chariots.

This is a flavour of the environment in which Henry Ford pursued his vision of a high-quality car at an affordable price. Many obstacles stood in the way of that vision, trust in cars, the transport ecosystem and even securing investment in his company. Take for example, Horace Rackham, one of the early investors in The Ford Motor Company. With great uncertainty and against the advice of others, Rackham bought fifty shares of Ford stock (from a total of eight hundred and ninety shares). The president of the Michigan Savings Bank strongly advised Rackham not to invest:¹ ‘The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad’. In retrospect, this seems like an awful prediction and perhaps we might even think we would never make such a mistake. ...