Disruption Causes Innovation

posted on: Wednesday, May 04, 2011 by: EngageTeamCustSvc

Jon Darling, President

Becky Murphy and I were discussing landmark years and anniversaries recently. It made me think back to 20 years ago when I worked at Ford Motor Company. For the invincible young among us who don't think time goes by quickly, 1990 seems like yesterday. Now my oldest daughter is starting to look at colleges. There is no way that's possible. No way.

While it seems like my time at Ford was a short time ago, I look at all that has changed. In graduate school I took a computer-programming course at Purdue University. Time in the computer lab was considered precious and you had to sign up well in advance. It often required visits in the middle of the night. I'll never forget the frustration of trying to figure out "if, then" statements while slugging coffee at 2 am. I hated that class. It hated me. It didn't turn out well. My programming career consisted of that one miserable class.

One of my daily tasks at Ford involved developing financial reports from the previous day's production activity for the transmission plant in Livonia, Mich.  We used a program called Multiplan, a cheap knock off of the king of spreadsheets at the time, Lotus 1-2-3. A little company called Microsoft had developed Multiplan in 1982. No one had heard of Microsoft at the time, and I recall that one of our biggest complaints was, "why aren't we using Lotus?" When I left that plant, a colleague was proposing a switch to this new operating system called Windows.  I'm not sure how it was received but I'm guessing the reports aren't done on Multiplan anymore.

Other gadgets arrived in the 90's- car phones (the first ones were politely called bag phones for the suitcase required to carry them). The Internet arrived that decade with an amazing new communication device - email.

Innovations present threats and opportunities. To the companies making typewriters, personal computers were certainly a threat and presented a huge opportunity to software developers like Microsoft. Cars made horse and buggy travel obsolete and Henry Ford took advantage of that. House telephones are slowly being replaced by individual cell phones.

It's interesting that disruptive innovations like these examples often don't come from within your own industry. That's why it is so important to keep looking forward to find new ways to assist customers with durable graphics.

We want to be an organization that has the talent and curiosity to create unique outcomes for clients, doing things unconventionally when necessary. If we don't do it, you can bet someone else will!