This is a
continuation of our Opportunity Everywhere series. I am going to focus on
opportunities created by drones. In my last blog I discussed wearables. By discussing
these products, my intent is to really open your mind up to the idea that you
should be able to pick up the newspaper and see an opportunity for your
business every day. Don’t get trapped into the mindset that you have to always
look for a specific thing. Yes, that's good - - you always want to stay
focused. You want to always make sure that you're capitalizing on what you do
best because that's leverageable. It builds on your core, it helps you with
your competitive differentiation. Doing what you do best is a huge formula or
ingredient for success, but you may be missing some great opportunities that
are not within the parameters of your exact search.
How do you
really analyze what's going on in the business environment right now so that
you can present what you do best to businesses that, at the moment, may not
even know they need you? Let’s use drones as illustrations of this process, because
you may not think that drones have anything to do with your business. These
flying machines going around doing stuff here and there - that's kind of a
hobby, recreation kind of thing, right? That's not something that impacts what you
do. You’re in staffing; you’re in chemical manufacturing; you’re in
construction. What would drones have to do with you?
Well, let's
just think about this and let's talk about Henry Ford for example. Now it made
a lot of sense that somebody would say, well, if I didn't have to deal with
horses -- you know, you have to feed them; you have to care for them. They only
live so long. They can only go so long a day. So then he decided he was going
to make a horseless carriage. People thought he was crazy, but then it was proven
that it could be done. The untold story about the horseless carriage is the
industry that it created. I want you to think about the automobile industry as
it exists today, and the opportunity that has been created for what we call “prom
suppliers” (those suppliers that are direct to the car manufacturers: second
tier, third tier, fourth tier). Just think about all the various services that
a car manufacturer needs. You name it - from soup to nuts. They require medical
services. They need construction to build plants. They need people skills. They
need technology. They need pretty much everything. They buy computers, they buy
refrigerators, they buy office supplies, they buy medical equipment, they buy
just so many various things. It's staggering to start looking at what all they
purchase - and only because someone decided that they wanted a horseless
carriage. Think about what drones mean to the automobile or the transportation
industry in general today. Yes -- major disruption. The whole notion that
Amazon might actually be able to stop using vehicles is impactful. They're
experimenting with using drones to actually deliver packages right now. Just
imagine what that means if you have a company that has a fleet of vehicles for
cargo services. I don't really care how big or small the cargo service is. What
does that mean? How much savings might they have if they can abandon the cost
of the fleet and move to drones, which at this point are unregulated. There is
going to be a whole host of issues, but if it turns out that economic benefit
is there, they’re going to find a way to get greater utilization of drones.
What does it
mean if your business can bring a solution utilizing drones to an existing
customer? Think about how you would deliver your service if either you were
bringing a solution to them to use drones, or they were using drones and you
anticipated some of their other needs that occur from using drones. For
example, who's going to fly the drones? How are they going to be maintained? How
do you train people on that? Where do you get the skills from the pilot, the
drones or to do drone repair? What do you do if you have issues while the
drones are in flight, or if they get some place and they get stuck or other
kinds of things? What opportunities are created just by the mere fact that
somebody is using a new technology? What are the additional technologies that
they're going to need?
These issues
are similar to what the horseless carriage was like. It's one thing to get it
out. It's another to actually build it into a production facility. What might
somebody need to support a horseless carriage industry? What might someone need
to support a drone industry? What are going to be the impacts on the people, processes
and technologies in that company, and how might my company help?
If you know that there is a new industry being created around drones, how might
you insert your business into that industry? Now we are talking about the
innovation and the type of thinking that actually helps fortune 500 companies advance
their cause. Now you are looking at bringing innovation in, and now you are
beginning to show them what it is your company can do to help them become more
productive, to add more value, to save money, to reduce operating costs. You're
now in that process where you're looking at just the mere fact that we're
getting into driverless cars. If Uber, Lyft, and it looks like General Motors are
actually looking at more self-driving cars, what's going to be the impact of
that as companies begin to roll it out? And what might be the role you can play
to help them adopt that technology into their business, because they're going
to need
things that they haven't really thought of just yet -- and that's going to
create huge opportunities for the supply base.
With these
illustrations, I hope to open your mind to realizing that when you read the
newspaper every single day, you should see opportunities for your business --
ways you can play in different parts of the fortune 500 supply chain, and take
your business to levels you hadn't even begun to imagine.
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