Be The Cannibal

In the business world there is an often-muttered fear of “cannibalization.”  This silly phrase is used when one person at a company comes up with a new idea or figures out how to better serve a customer.  Immediately, the fear-mongering bureaucrats object, stating that this new solution might “cannibalize” their business.

Good! We should hope it does.

Refusing to embrace new products or services based on the horror that they may cannibalize the old ones is a faulty argument.  It assumes you can prevent being cannibalized in the first place and are somehow magically in control of the entire market.

Unless you are a government-owned monopoly, you cannot prevent disruption no matter how powerful your organization.  In a free-market economy, innovation trumps those who cling to the past.  The automobile, despite dissenters’ loudest objections, displaced the most powerful carriage company.

Can you imagine the folks at the Union Pacific Railways denouncing a move into the air transport industry based on the fear that it would “cannibalize” their business?  Or senior leadership at the largest typewriter manufacturer voting against a move into personal computers?  Good luck trying to stop progress.

In today’s highly competitive world, you must sprint toward cannibalization – not avoid it.  Change and innovation will happen and you can’t do a damn thing about it.  The one thing you can control is whether or not you are the source of disruption.  You can become a consistent source of reinvention, or you can hide in the corner and cling to buzzwords, while your competition enjoys a feast.

Author Gary Hamel puts it best: “Right now, there’s an entrepreneur out there forging a bullet with your company’s name on it.  Your only choice is to shoot first.  You must out-innovate the innovators.”

This same spirit of reinvention applies also to individuals.  When people obsess with protecting past accomplishments in lieu of discovering new ones, growth ceases.  To reach your full potential, spend less time worrying that you are going to get yourself fired and redirect that energy on imagining new possibilities.  Leaving your creative fingerprint on your organization will do far more for your career than following procedures and hoping no one notices while you slip into irrelevance.

Some day a company will come along and put you out of business.  It might as well be yours.  Someday a person will come along and replace you by doing your job better and more creatively. Might as well be you.

Stop futilely trying to protect that which cannot be protected. The real fear isn’t cannibalization; it’s not being the cannibal yourself.

Enjoy your meal.

Read More

New Thinking for the New Era of Business

Albert Einstein famously noted, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them.” In our post-COVID world of ...

When an Astronaut Needs a Pen

Ever get stuck on a problem, only to realize you're solving for the wrong thing? That's exactly what happened when the rocket scientists at NASA ...

How Shake Shack Drives Innovation

Do you prefer the crispy mozzarella, tempura watercress, and black garlic mayonnaise cheeseburger or the pumpkin mustard, bacon, cranberries, and sage hot dog? For something ...

Lady Gaga’s Secret to Creativity

Just before she won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, I watched Lady Gaga dazzle the live audience with a pitch perfect performance of ...

Creativity: Does Size Matter?

For some reason, we’ve been taught that for creativity and innovation to count they need to have a magnitude the size of the 1989 San ...

The Lexicon of Creativity

There’s more confusion around the meaning of the word innovation than the chaos at the airline ticket counter after a cancelled flight. Is there a difference between ...

The Brain Science of Becoming More Creative

When we hear stories about iconic leaders like Salesforce.com’s founder Marc Benioff, or widely celebrated virtuosos like Lin-Manuel Miranda for that matter, we immediately think ...

Correct the Overcorrect

When the misguided leaders at Enron, Tyco and Worldcom committed fraud and marred their shareholders with huge losses, the Securities and Exchange Commission rightfully swooped ...

Learning to Color

Fact: Creativity has become the most needed skill in business. It’s gone from a nice-to-have to becoming mission-critical. Fact: Creativity is a learnable skill. All humans have ...