Glisse(Dance)/Glissade(mountaineering)/Glissant(Music) all have their root in the idea of sliding. So Glissification simply encapsulates the idea of how the old ways of doing business are slip sliding away and being replaced by new ways of doing business (i.e. the old tunes are being replaced by tunes that we haven’t heard before). Plus, just like fauxionary, it’s a delicious new word to play with.
I suspect the winners in this new hyper connected economy will thrive by glissing rather than gaming the system. Having said that I have coined the word Glissification to describe what happens to those who fail to glisse (i.e. Dance to a new tune played on a new scale).
The reason I like the idea of glissing (Another made up word I suspect) is it contrasts well with the idea of gaming. When we game the system we do so to “Stack the deck” in our favor (i.e. aggressively exploit the limitations of the rules of the game and the competition to maximum advantage). In comparison when we glisse we are simply sliding to a new position and in doing so we not only take our competition by surprise, we fundamental changes the rules of the game.
When the competition has been Glissed you leave them to struggle with the prospect of declining margins, and increased costs of doing business and falling market share while you reap the benefits of their customers flocking to you.
For example this short presentation released today by Asymco’s Horace Dediu demonstrates how Apple glissed Nokia.
You make think of it as disruption. I think of it as glissing.
For me the key to understanding the potential of the internet is to forget about disrupt industries and think about glissing them.
It’s all about sliding your business into new places that has never been before.
Now some incumbents learn to gliss. They successfully slide into a new space and take full advantage of the new opportunities that emerge from embracing the hyper-connected world of online commerce. While others stand still and ultimately see their businesses fail. This was Borders and it may well be Yahoo! and AOL moving forward. Only time will tell.
What I am trying to say is the internet isn’t disruptive. Business paradoxically disrupt themselves by failing to take the opportunity to glisse as the technology emerges to help them glisse almost effortlessly into a new position of market dominance.
In this way glissing as the antithesis of the American idea of creative destruction. While creative destruction is a blunt, and dare I say immature, instrument for economic renewal glissing is both a delicate and sophisticated way of achieving the desired economic outcome.
The fundamental flaw of creative destruction is that, although it offers some hope for the future, it comes at a significant risk and that risk is you fall over and don’t get up. We see elements of that assumed risk in the bold Nokiasoft experiment being conducted at the moment. Nokia is presently being transformed by a wave of self-inflicted creative destruction. The gambling being played out is that, like a veritable phoenix, a new Nokia will emerge from the ashes of the old and rightfully resume its place as the market leader in Mobile Devices.
In stark contrast and rather than falling into the abyss of creative destruction Nokia could have simply glissed the market by giving the market what it so desperately wants.
For example, we all know everybody wants an iPhone but not everybody can afford one so the logical answer to the Apple challenge wasn’t to compete head to head with an iPhone on steroids but to launch he ultimate low-cost dumb phone that allowed the rest of the world to accessed all the games and services they could possibly want in the cloud. Thereby offering customers all the advantages of the iPhone experience at a fraction of the price while delivering brand new revenue streams to the Telcos and the content/app developers looking to provide content and services without having the hassle of doping business through the app store. Add a secure cloud based mobile money come payments layer and the market has fundamentally changed.
The simple message being if you lose your iPhone you have lost more than your wallet. Lose the new Nokia and you lose nothing. Simply connect your next dumb phone or even your TV set into your personalised cloud. Safer, cheaper and ultimately disposable the ultimate dumb phone would have outsmarted the ultimate smartphone.
In the end glissing is about seeing the opportunities that lay well beyond the game you are playing today and then leveraging the internet to take you there. Is it a new way of doing business? Maybe. In reality is more about a new way of thinking about how you choose to do business tomorrow.
A decade ago we would have quoted Wayne Gretzky and it’s all about learning to skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been. Today it’s all about learning how to dance to new tunes… and the quicker you learn the most prosperous you will be going forward.
Posted on August 14, 2011
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