Today the Tipping Point is where human intellect & collective acumen of leaders seamlessly converge with Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence to meet the challenges of fast changing business landscape.

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By: Sumair Sayani
The New
Tipping Point

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A Life of Reaction is a Life
of Slavery – Intellectually
and Spiritually.
Rita Mae Brown
How many times have you heard that
companies must put investment in
understanding what lies ahead of the
curve; figure out what’s around the
corner; start planning for tomorrow
by making right decisions today?
It is time you listen. And act.
Why, you wonder?!
The New Tipping Point
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Most of us must have read books and
heard leadership trainers talk ad
nauseam about the unfortunate list of
companies that did not innovate; didn’t
keep pace with a changing world and
died.
• Blockbuster
• Polaroid
• Kodak
• Border’s Books
• Woolworths
Or being constantly reminded about
brands that may not be around for too
long:
• RIM (Blackberry)
• Sears / JC Penny’s / Macy’s
• Yahoo
• Publishing industry as a whole
It is important to think about the future
If we were to explain what
happened to such large and
successful companies and
how did they disappear and
others will too, we probably
won’t be able to do it better
than looking at something
Henry Ford said:
If you don’t think of the
future, you won’t have one.
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Traditional forecasting models are obsolete
And this contagion is not restricted to old
and established companies. While there
are several statistics out there, the truth
is that an overwhelming number of new
ventures and products fail fairly
regularly.
A short while back, CB Insights did a
survey by crunching data on 101 failed
start-ups. The analysis revealed that an
overwhelming majority of failure is
attributed to a combination of poor
understanding of the market; product
demand and customer.
So it is perhaps reasonable to apportion
a part of blame for such colossal and
shocking failure to inability of the
leadership to look ahead of the curve; to
understand what’s around the corner
and use that information to make smart
decisions.
But is it fair to assume that these companies
did not try to plan for the future? I mean we are
talking about giants; they were the ones who
had set new management theories; and
exemplified leadership styles. And yet, we
witnessed situations like when Steve Ballmer,
the Nokia CEO, who broke down in tears in his
last press conference and confessed that the
leadership believed they did all the right things
and could not understand why they lost.
Could it be that they didn’t innovate fast
enough? They didn’t keep pace with the
fundamental changes happening in their
industry or chose to ignore it. Perhaps they
didn’t realize that:
If the rate of change on the outside exceeds
the pace of change on the inside, the end is
near.
Jack Welch
Can we say that what is really happening
here is that most of these organizations
are heavily skewed towards being
reactive versus proactive? Is it because
they are intoxicated by years of
successful results or consumed by the
overzealous entrepreneurial
enthusiasm? Does years of profitability
make them averse to touching today’s
cash cows? At the end of the day reality
is that a large number of companies are
consistently failing.
It seems that in a rapidly changing
business landscape driven by -
technological advances; internet
connectivity; low barriers to entry -
traditional models of forecasting have
lost their effectiveness.
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Now, let’s flip the coin a little to test the
theory that those who do forecast smartly,
thrive. Let’s take a look at few organizations
that continue to not only be relevant in a
changing market landscape, but have
maintained their leadership.
I picked some examples here. Their
Industries have gone through massive shift
over the years and yet these companies
continue to re-invent themselves and thrive.
• Apple
• Walmart
• Amazon
• Ford Motor Company
• Unilever
• Nielsen
Ford CEO recently said that ‘Ford is a
technology company’. What he meant to say
is that Ford will collect and analyze data
about the driver from the car to develop new
products & services.
Those who forecast smartly, thrive
Nielsen recently launched its “Science
Behind What’s Next” and what it calls
“Connected Systems Program” to bring
big data into the mix; Amazon is
destroying the long held concept of
brick & mortar retail by leveraging
billions of records to fine tune what to
offer-at what price-to who-where-and
how to get it there fastest; Walmart
uses technology and complex
algorithms to figure out what to place in
each of its stores; shall we even start
about Apple?
So if you are looking for a common
theme, you will find one. And that is
how well these organizations have
used or enabled others to use
information to look ahead of the curve
and plan for it well ahead of time. They
have found a way to very effectively
convert data into actionable
intelligence to achieve smart foresight.
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The reason most major
goals are not achieved is
that we spend our time
doing second things first.
Robert J. Mccann
Smart forecasting and using data to
generate insights allows
organizations to set the right
strategy; a clear roadmap and action
prioritization.
Let’s explore what smart use of data
means and how it can help
organizations become Pro-active.
How to leverage data?
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What does using data even mean?
How could smart use of data helped
avoid this from happening?
For starters, they needed to understand
that connectivity and globalization has
come to the fore and traditional
knowledge and strategy models were
obsolete. Pace of change had picked up
and barriers to entry had broken down.
New data analytics technologies allowed
organizations to process billions of rows
of data within seconds. Whole new data
eco-system is being created
encompassing not only organization’s
internal data or the data it acquires, but
also external data. Smaller organizations
are far more agile and nimble to
leverage this shift. However, it required
organizations to get comfortable in
accepting and inculcating these evolving
practices in their operating DNA.
For a lot of people, it’s probably a no brainer. Of
course we all need information and we all use
information. So what’s new there?
That’s probably what Steve and his team at
Nokia would have said as well. He believed till
the end, that they did everything ‘right’. They
followed all the normal practices; strategies
and processes. They would have had hundreds
of number crunchers looking at trends and
data. They would have spent millions on
research and product testing et al.
So what was missing?
It failed to connect the dots. In time. It did not
understand the future demand landscape and
overestimated the strength of its brand. It
relied a lot on historical excellent performance,
in other words on hindsight.
Using the new tools and connecting it
with their knowledge about the market
and predicting shifts in future consumer
demand could have helped them figure
out that smartphones were the future.
Ironically, Nokia was one of the first
companies to invent a touch phone and
a smartphone,
A point of view can be a dangerous
luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding.
Marshall McLuhan
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Jack Welch published “Straight from the
Gut”. Malcolm Gladwell in successive
books looks for innate qualities leaders
have or untiringly explores special
circumstances and chance or fate that
makes some more successful than
others.
Isn’t gut or intuition but a form of
processing a set of data points
delivered not in the form of
visualizations or dashboards, but bolt of
lightning that hits us at the time of
making important decisions? An
evolved and automated form of which
we now call data analytics.
Is data analytics really the answer?
What today’s data analytics
technologies are doing is taking this
to the next level providing an ability
to scale this up to process billions of
data points from around the
organizational eco-system in a
fraction of time. This idea is not
meant to replace the mystical
powers of gut, rather provide a
structured way to harness collective
acumen of the organization to make
better and timely decisions in a fast
paced external environment.
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9. Business Google SlidesB
So the Tipping Point today is where human and
machine come together in a seamless
integration of knowledge, gut and technology.
Collective acumen of organizational leaders
integrated with the technology to process data
from an organization’s complete eco-system,
would enable organizations to get ahead of the
curve; look around the corner; make smarter
decisions.
Today’s Tipping Point
What is dangerous is not to evolve.
Jeff Bezos
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I spoke with several senior business leaders at various stages
of my writing and their inputs were synthesized for this article.
Mr. Normand Provost. Marcom and Liaison Chair at nexo-
standards.
Mr. Piyush Mathur. Senior Vice President, Head of People
Analytics. Nielsen,
Mr. Munthir Al Ansari. Chief Executive Officer. MMA
Consulting.
Mr. Arne Herman Reiler. Owner. Reiler Consulting.
Mr. Bill Mustard. Chief Executive Officer. Cairn
In addition to researching the publicly available information,
the writing is also inspired by various books and articles in
HBR; McKinsey; Fortune.
The Caterpillar’s Edge by Sid Mohasseb.
Good to Great by Jim Collins.
Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu & James Robinson.
Thank you for your
contributions
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Sumair Sayani is the President at The
Demand Institute and a Vice President at
Nielsen.
He also advises start-ups.
About the writer
Personal website: https://sumairsayani.com/
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