Originally published by Laura Desmond on LinkedIn: To Get Competitive, Forget Perfection. Fail Fast and Forward
Here’s how to increase speed and agility at your organization
Scale has always been an advantage in business. In a traditional marketplace, the more you have of something the better.
In my business of media planning and buying, this had been true for decades. When I was an executive at Starcom Mediavest Group, our organization was one of the largest global media agencies in the world. In 2016, according to RECMA, we purchased $54 billion of media on behalf of our clients and were #1 in the United States, China, the Middle East and many markets around the world.
But media was changing fast and dramatically. The historical advantages were being disrupted.
New companies like Google and Facebook radically changed the game. Their scale was driven by technology and new global platforms that simply worked faster and in real time to plan or buy ad space anywhere in the world with or without a sales rep, in or out of a home country. Even more importantly, planning and buying worked on detailed & specific audience definitions, key words and auction-based marketplaces, not traditional two-way scale negotiation on demographics and CPM’s. This was groundbreaking. Suddenly traditional buying scale was replaced by algorithms, audiences, platforms, content versions, and frictionless access.
To keep pace with the likes of Google and Facebook, we had to build new capability, hire and develop a whole new breed of talent versed and skilled in search, social, programmatic and real-time storytelling. As CEO, I knew that we didn’t have time to lose. We had to get out front, try ideas and learn from them as quickly as possible.
Two decisions we made early on were implemented to create a new vision for the kind of company we wanted to be. The first decision was to transform ourselves from a traditional media agency business to a digitally-driven business by moving our business model from analogue to a business model based on digital, content and data analytics.
The second decision was to simultaneously retrain and reskill our existing 8,000-employee base to “cross athletes,” as well as hire new skill sets in data science, analytics, content creation and digital strategy. We wanted our existing teams to learn new skills and capabilities, and we invested heavily in training and development to achieve these goals. We wanted our new hires to become evangelists for the company to follow and emulate.
When faced with immense competition, a lot of organizations slow to a grinding halt trying to find the perfect solution. By doing so, they miss the golden opportunity. This is because the competition has moved faster, consumer trends have moved on and the market opportunity has closed.