Enjoying the Surf in the Wave of Disruption

Was reading the essay “You Don’t Understand Our Audience,” by John Hockenberry in the latest edition of the MIT Technology Review. Very interesting piece about the shift in the views of the audience from his time at NBC and discusses the nature of realizing that the shift is occurring. A piece of the text from the piece that really struck me:

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC’s news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned Tivos, which enabled them to zip past the commercials that paid their salaries. “It’s such a great gadget. It changed my life,” one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first not the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technology change for a new gadget.

It makes me think of the Technology Strategy course I took a technology strategy course with Professor Rebecca Henderson, one of my favorite courses. We focused a lot of the disruption curve, what it does to industries and to mature businesses in that industry. But what about the human factor, the people in those industries and in those established firms.

Do they often not even realize the disruption is upon them and “enjoy the surf” as a consumer of the “new thing” themselves? The NBC execs and Tivo is an example. Did Barnes & Noble execs go and buy books on Amazon.com during the holiday rush because it was easier than going to the store? (at least before they got it together and launched their own site) Executives at AT&T using Skype at home to call their children in college or to friends internationally? At what point did someone at Polaroid (who just closed down shop their instant film division) rave about their shiny, new digital camera not realizing it was the beginning of the end for a 60-year run.

There must be tons of examples…