The Vikings were famous for travelling light, moving fast and raiding unpredictably. Where they encountered problems or set backs, they rapidly learned from their setbacks, changed approach and attacked with even more vigour. Their main motivations were to gather as much silver and gold as they could, as well as to obtain and settle on arable lands. As a result they spread extensively over Europe and towards North America. Russia, the Baltic States, Britain, Ireland, France, Greenland and Iceland were all impacted and shaped by them and their trade networks reached out into the islamic world. Key to their success was not just the simplicity of their approach, but also their discipline and the passion with which they pursued their goals.
In many ways this parallels what is being seen with modern digital businesses and the agile approach that they take to product development. It seems that every week we read of or start using a new digital service or business which is attacking entrenched market places, disrupting well entrenched businesses and overturning market places, by inventing new business models and re-writing market place business rules. Mostly this is as a result of trying to understand what customers value and address customer business experience. Then they pursue multiple rapid developments resulting in quick evolution of products and gaining insight into what works in their market places. Key to this is the scalability which is achievable by keeping things simple. If he were alive today, Stalin might have rewritten his observation about quantity to say that "Simplicity has a Quality all of its own".
So how does an entrenched business learn to fight back. The vikings were defeated by Alfred the Great who focused on a number of key strategies: he fortified the major towns so that the population could retreat behind stone walls and take their treasure with them; he blocked major rivers with stone bridges which were easily defended and difficult for viking long boats to get past; he developed a navy to patrol and intercept them and he developed a trained army which could fight them on an even footing when he lured them into battlefields of his own chosing.
So what does this teach a traditional bricks and mortar business with much of its capital tied up in assets? The first thing is that many of the modern digital vikings are slow to conform with all regulatory requirements. So a business should look at how it complies and try to optimise between meeting regulations effectively and doing so in as simple a way as possible. This raises the barrier to entry and acts as a defensive wall.
The second issue is that many of the new entrants are actually offering a new market service. They connect customers and suppliers in a value added manner. Existing businesses need to get together with competitors to develop their own market services. This is like building a navy to head off the vikings before they get to shore.
The third measure must be to build agile (and then DevOps) product development capability so that traditional products are continuously revolutionaised so that it is difficult for a new entrant to beet an existing product. (This is like building a capable army).
Finally, existing companies must protect their own IPR and customer related data. They must then build BI (and then big data) capability which can be used to develop new insight into customer behaviour and what works for customers. It may also help identify what additional services could be sold alongside existing products to optimise business value. This may involve building new collaborative relationships with other enterprises who sell different things to the same customers, so that they can then bring new digitally enabled value propositions to customers. Getting there before a new entrant, effectivel denies them access to the market and is similar to building a stone bridge across a river to deny a long boat access to the rest of the river).
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