Disruptive jiu-jitsu
• The foresight and courage to disrupt the disruptors
Practicing disruptive jiu-jitsu—learning from the competition, then deliberately disrupting one’s own business model to stay ahead of it—can enable CEOs to go on the offensive in the face of disruptive marketplace threats.
A decade ago, the first public blockchain was developed as a ledger for transactions of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. But while Bitcoin made headlines for its rapid appreciation in value (and subsequent crash amid concerns around illegitimate use),1 its real significance, the use of blockchain as a distributed verification mechanism, was more profound. By eliminating the need for transactions to be brokered by banks, blockchain had (and still has) the potential to disrupt the entire financial system—by rendering the traditional “financial institution as trusted broker” concept obsolete.
Aware of this possibility, some incumbent banks did something atypical for many large, established companies. Rather than attempt to protect themselves only through traditional defensive methods—such as improving their existing offerings’ terms or underlying economics—they chose to embrace blockchain technology, focusing specifically on its ability to enable low-cost, high-speed transactions. By understanding the advantages of blockchain and determining how it could be integrated into their business model, these traditional banks were seeking to identify opportunities to enhance their own value proposition to customers. At the same time, they took aim at what is arguably cryptocurrency’s key vulnerability: The natural anxiety among market participants that if their assets were to disappear due to a technical glitch or a cyberattack, there would be no one to reach out to for help.
A growing number of banks have now been experimenting with blockchain as an essential part of their global infrastructures while simultaneously chipping away at the principle of decentralized trust. (Witness, for instance, JP Morgan’s unveiling of its own so-called cryptocurrency, the JPM Coin.)2 They are reasserting their historic role as trusted brokers, promising, We’re here for you if you have a question or concern. If they are successful—and the jury is still out on blockchain’s long-term impact on banks and the extent to which it will disrupt traditional financial intermediaries—these incumbent banks might neutralize blockchain’s most disruptive potential impact on their industry, even as they aim to capitalize on the technology’s benefits.
In choosing to go on the offensive, seize new competitors’ forward momentum, and turn that momentum against them, the CEOs of these legacy banks are practicing an approach that we call disruptive jiu-jitsu—one of the five attributes of the “undisruptable CEO” that we first wrote about in 2017.
Περισσότερα εδώ: www2.deloitte.com
