The “Shmoogle Scenario,” and why denial is a fatal threat to your company View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed The “Shmoogle Scenario,” and why denial is a fatal threat to your company The greatest threat to a successful company may be a competitor that doesn’t exist (yet). Get curious, find purpose, and become more resilient at work BusinessDisruptive TechnologyOrganizational ResilienceRisk AnalysisStrategic Management Adapted from Disrupters at the Gate: When Visionaries, Trailblazers, and Two Guys in a Garage Turn the World Upside Down by Jeffrey I. Published by Ideapress Publishing.
In most organizations, preparing for disruption when everything is working smoothly almost never happens. Enjoying success, complacent CEOs focus on greeting happy investors, speaking at business conferences about their extraordinary skills, winning awards, receiving enormous paychecks and dividend packages, and teaching enraptured students at business schools. Managing a successful business is a good life.
The last thing CEOs want to do while at the peak of success is think about how the mountain could collapse. But this is precisely what they should be doing. An effective CEO has a sharp focus on the main competition and understands how government regulation, trade policies, and customer sentiment affect the business.
But it is the rare leader — the great one — who enjoys the trappings of success but has been preparing for disruption from the first day on the job. Great performance is no reason to take a foot off the pedal — even for a moment. Google serves as the example.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were developing Google, search engines were already well-established. But Google performed much better than the others by tallying the number of times a search item was linked to a specific site. Early users will remember the first time they used Google because the results it produced were so superior to the competition that the app seemed to read the user’s mind.
Sometimes, when Google came back with “did you mean to say,” it appeared to know what users meant better than they did. From their days working in the garage, Page and Brin knew someone else would eventually disrupt them, just as they had disrupted others by creating a new and better search engine. Insiders described the potential new player to threaten Google as “Shmoogle” — as in “Google/Shmoogle.” The “Shmoogle Scenario” is based on the expectation that computer scientists, or “two guys in another garage,” would create a new algorithm for search.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
