Escape Velocity

Why You Need to Escape

Don’t count on the future being like the past. Dangerously, the past works like gravity: It holds everything in place. For example, most companies base their new annual budgets on the previous year’s needs. If you’re operating in a stable market, that works. However, the markets for mature products tend to decay as new products emerge. It takes energy to get moving again. Unless you can generate that energy and blast your company into the future, you’ll do business the same old way with ever-decreasing profits. You must flee the past to create substantial growth. To reach “escape velocity,” a “force that is greater than the inertial momentum of current operations,” draw on five possible sources of power:

1. “Category Power”

User demand for your product or service in relation to competitive categories creates your primary, most general source of power. Comparing smartphones to landlines provides a good example of the difference between high- and low-demand categories. Any serious entry in the smartphone category experiences high growth, while the best landline providers struggle. Moving from a shrinking category to a growing category can...