What happens when the rules of the market change

Speed as a humanizing, competitive advantage

Being truly customer-centric also means being ultra-fast. So fast that an organisation needs to be able to move together with the customer, on a granular individual level. This kind of intelligent speed can only be attained through the power of digital. Big Data, predictive analytics, robots, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Quantum computing and the Internet of Things: they should all be on your wish list, or at least on your ‘to watch very closely’ list. Not because they are cool and disruptive - and they really (really) are - but because they will help you be faster, more efficient but, above all, much more human to your customer.

But having the right tools that humanize your company, will not give you the extreme speed you need to catch the ever more fickle customer. Not if you do not change the very fabric of your company. Organisations need to become networks themselves. It is the only way they will equal the speed of the complex adaptive systems that their markets have become. They need to become fluid, flat, experimentative, creative, simple, low-cost and radical like a network. It is the only way that they will be able to respond to the customer in the manner that (s)he expects.

When the game changes, those who play it will have a lot of adapting to do. But, this blog post is not meant to scare you into oblivion. It is meant to be the spark that sets off a transformation that might be long overdue. For that reason, we created an e-book blog compilation with a disruption checklist to show you how your organisation ought to evolve if it wants to survive in the new, hybrid age of networks, where the customer should be the top metric of an organisation.