Business
Disruption may be the most over-used word of the 21st century, but there’s often a reason why something becomes a cliche: because it’s at least partly true. The world is changing so fast today that what might be a sound business - or business model - now may not stay that way for long. Incumbent companies get “disrupted” when insurgent (often, but not always, start-ups) find a new way to sell an old product or service, all the while stealing market share or profit margin (or both). In this series of two-part episodes, we discuss the dynamics of disruption and break it down to two basic mechanisms. The first is inspired by legendary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s observation that there are only two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling. This is a simple yet deceptively powerful idea - one that you may not know through these labels but have definitely seen out in real life: When Apple reinvented the music business, it unbundled the one song from the whole CD that you used to have to buy to get it. iTunes gave you that hit for 99 cents and the rest is history. When Spotify reinvented the music business again, it did so by bundling those songs - and all the songs you could ever want to stream or listen to - into one monthly subscription. As you can see, Marc A is right: the evolution of business is, in some real ways, simply a continuous process of bundling and unbundling your product or service. in Part I, we tackle that first topic and apply it you, the company owner or free agent. In doing so, we hope to give you the tools to disrupt yourself … before someone else does it to you.