Greg Satell, author of "Mapping Innovation," has a good blog post about disruption that seems particularly relevant to CPAs and other professional services.
(See Infographic: Three Disruptive Forces Upending The Accounting Industry And What To Do About Them.)
You can read the entire post here, but the first two paragraphs really drive home the point that most companies focus on doing what they do better, which is good for the short term, but also need to focus on adapting what they do because that's the only way to succeed in the long term given the way customer needs change.
The principles of running a business are fairly straightforward. You create clear objectives, achieve them efficiently and try to get better as you go. Business school professors have fancy names for this stuff, like “strategic DNA,” “core competencies” and “continuous improvement,” but in a nutshell all that stuff means is that you try to do things better, faster and cheaper.The problem comes when you find yourself running a square-peg business in a round-hole world. When that happens, following traditional best practices will only result in getting better and better at doing things people want less and less. Round holes don’t care how good your square pegs are or how efficiently you can produce them.
That suggests companies should periodically stop and ask themselves three questions:
- Are you a square peg?
- Is your industry becoming a round hole?
- What can you do about it?
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