Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang understands the singularity effect and uses it to drive… (+) growth. Photo: Annabel Chee/Bloomberg
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In 2006, Nokia was the world leader in mobile phones, with double-digit growth. The company was rated the 8th most innovative company in the world by BusinessWeek. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, there are a lot of them.
In 2006, Nokia invited me to give a lecture on driving growth through innovation to an elite group of 50 “high-potential” managers who came to Palo Alto from all over the world. The survey I conducted before the session should have alerted me to Nokia’s future dilemma. I asked about barriers to innovation, half expecting them to leave the question unanswered. Instead, “we are risk averse.” “Our operational mindset is dominant and we suffer from big business syndrome.”
Innovation guru Robert B. Tucker shares his personal experience with… (+) Nokia’s decline from the mobile phone market.
Photo by Greg Kroes, Mountain View Films.
I still remember asking this group the following question: One manager exclaimed: Being in this company only makes me more frustrated. There is so much bureaucracy that it will never be possible to implement the idea. ”
I dismissed what I learned about Nokia as an anomaly. “Rapid growth covers up many sins.” But a year later, Nokia realized something different. In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone and Nokia began its dramatic downfall. They were horribly unprepared for the tipping point that suddenly confronted them.
We are about to face the biggest turning point in the history of business and society, and like Nokia, we are unprepared.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil defines the singularity as a period in which the pace of technological change is so rapid and its impact so great that human life and business are irreversibly altered. We are almost there, and the impact is felt everywhere.
Revolutions are occurring simultaneously in business, society, geopolitics, climate, and more. Over the next decade, various industries will experience exponential change. Customer needs change overnight. New technologies emerge at record speed. The type of workforce and talent required is fundamentally different. In my work, I’ve seen many companies caught off guard by the Singularity future. I believe that the biggest challenge facing organizations is the challenge of rapid change. Research shows that 40% of the 500 largest publicly traded companies may no longer exist in 10 years.
Intel, once led by a CEO who wrote “Only the Paranoid Survive” (Andrew S. Grove), was roped into serving the PC and data center markets. Intel missed the smartphone trend. Ten years later, they missed out on the AI revolution. However, Inter’s rivals saw an opportunity and pounced. Nvidia has begun repurposing chips designed for video games and using them to power the AI revolution.
Boeing is facing its own singularity moment. Once upon a time, the company’s commitment to safety and quality was second to none. Their slogan was, “If it’s not Boeing, we won’t go.” Boeing swallowed up rivals and expanded its business from jet planes to military equipment and rockets. The Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the moon was proudly manufactured by Boeing.
But then the bean counter took over. Today, Boeing faces endless tailwinds. Boeing’s attempts to avoid pilot retraining costs led to the crashes of two of the company’s 737 Max jets, killing hundreds of passengers, as revealed by various investigations. .
Two astronauts aboard the Boeing Starliner spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station on June 6, 2024. They were scheduled to stay for a week. But they still exist because of a series of embarrassing technical failures. They won’t return to Earth until February. NASA has called Starliner “too dangerous.”
Meanwhile, rival SpaceX is making the most of the Singularity Moment. The company’s Falcon 9 rocket is driving unprecedented growth and market share. The Falcon 9 was developed at a fraction of the cost it would have taken Boeing to develop a comparable system. CEO Elon Musk’s insistence on a fixed-price, milestone-based payment model has led SpaceX to adopt a leaner and more innovative engineering approach. Boeing limped along with its traditional “cost-plus” business model.
To grow and thrive in the next decade, organizations and their leaders will need to cope with the ever-increasing pace of change and the need to constantly disrupt, or be disrupted.
