I've been paying a team to kill my company.
The idea came from one of my favourite books....
Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma - the book Steve Jobs called his favourite business book and Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM!
Here's the key idea 💡
The death of a company isn't usually caused by bad management.
It's caused by good management doing exactly what they're supposed to do - optimising the current business, listening to current customers, protecting current margins.
Which is why disruption almost always comes from outside the business.
So we built our own "outside" and we call the team "FlightX". They have their own roles in the company, and come together to form a second team.
They sit within our company FLIGHT, which is aspiring to become the Disney Of The Creator Economy.
They have one job: make everything we've built obsolete before someone else does - find ways to kill our current business.
Their own budget. Their own approval process. Reporting directly to me.
🏴☠️ Right now they're building AI-driven podcasts that could replace The Diary of a CEO entirely (pray for me) via FLIGHTSTORY
🏴☠️ They worked on digital screen technology that could replace our need for physical production sets.
🏴☠️ They're also working on a better podcast advertising system that could kill how podcast adverts currently work.
I think every fast growing company, in a rapidly changing world, should follow suit - there is some naive kid, in their bedroom, messing around on their computer, who is going to disrupt your business 1, 5 or 10 years from now.
CREATE A TEAM THAT CAN ACT LIKE A KID MESSING AROUND IN THEIR BEDROOM.
Thomas Watson, founder of IBM knew this.
🦆 So he created a team called "Wild Ducks" - a small group of 8 innovators who reported directly to the CEO and were given complete freedom to break rules, pursue breakthrough ideas, and bypass standard procedures.
The concept, inspired by philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, was based on the idea that "you can make wild goose tame, but you can never make tame goose wild again" - recognising that creative people lose their ability to innovate once constrained by corporate bureaucracy!
The system worked brilliantly for 50 years at IBM!
I think most companies die because they're threatened by innovation, so they bury their heads in the sand, dismiss it and pretend it's not happening.
But they always see it coming...
Kodak invented the digital camera.
Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million.
Nokia saw the iPhone coming.
They all had the information.
What they didn't have was permission to kill their own business whilst it was still working.
That's the real lesson of The Innovator's Dilemma.
The forces that make you successful are often the same ones that make you vulnerable.
Thanks for reading, and please do share your thoughts or questions below!
Shoutout: Isaac Martin, Grace Miller, Matt Toland, Marcus Poole & Vu Nong
