Lean CX Score – Lean CX Shows You How To Create A Disruptor

This is an excerpt from "The Lean CX Score." Get your copy now and start creating disruptors that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news! You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time. Get the Lean CX Score now.

Lean CX Shows You How to Create a Disruptor in Your Industry

Over the past forty years there have been a handful of standout disruptive companies and products in the great world of business. A disruptor, as we see it, is something that changes the rules of the game – often in an existing field – so that it is seen as better, can grow faster, and sell more than anything in its industry. Traditional businesses are afraid of disruptors, because disruptors can seriously reduce the profit of those companies and they don’t understand what it takes to make one.

The Lean CX Score will give you the exact framework you need to create disruptors instead of fearing them. And the good news is, many disruptors are created in already existing fields.

You may or may not remember what it was like to operate a computer in the late 1980s. Computers used an operating system called MS DOS, where you had to physically type in everything you wanted to do on your computer. Want to play your favourite game? (Take the original “Prince of Persia” for example, one of my personal favourites). Well, you had to:

Type in “C:\dir/p” – this would show you all the directories, one page at a time so you could find the one with your game in it.
Then “cd pop”, which would take you to the “Prince of Persia” directory.
Then “adlib.exe” to ensure the music was toggled correctly (you had to know the exact port your sound card was set to), and finally;
“prince.exe” to play the game.

Sounds tedious, doesn’t it? And then Microsoft Windows came along. It was a graphical user interface that made things much easier, and people flocked to it in droves. Now to play the same game you did one thing: Click on the game icon on the home screen. The founder of this software, Bill Gates, enjoyed (and at the time of writing, still enjoys) many years as the world’s richest man. Bill Gates didn’t know it at the time, but he had met all the criteria for a 100% Lean CX Score, and that’s why people used it. It was a disruptor.

Remember when you had dozens (if not hundreds) of cassette tapes or CDs, and had to avoid scratching them, getting the tape tangled or worse? Then the Apple iPod came along and put 1000 songs in your pocket, in the one place which you could play with one click. All of a sudden it was impossible to make a mistake (i.e. tangle your cassette tapes or scratch your CDs), and instead of changing CDs every time you wanted to listen to something you only had to click the song you liked. It completely upended the industry. Many people focussed on the technology as being the agent of change, but they missed the point of the principles – the Lean CX principles – that were used to get there.

How about this one: In the late 1990s it was common on a Friday night to get into your car, drive down to the local “Blockbuster Video” store, have a browse through the latest movies and then pay for one or two to watch that night. But it was around that time that NetFlix was born, where instead of going to all that effort and driving around, all you had to do was subscribe and then browse any movie you liked online from the comfort of your own home, without the need to go anywhere. DVDs were mailed to your home, and returned whenever you liked for free. Then in 2007 it released online streaming of its movies which you could sign up for and watch immediately, reducing customers’ effort even further. Was this simple, easy, and fast? You bet. And the stock prices of the two companies over the years (unfortunately for Blockbuster) tell the story better than I ever could. In 2003 Blockbuster peaked and began to fall, while Netflix began to rise. Their prices crossed over some time in 2008, and a few years later Blockbuster Video went bankrupt.

There are many more standout examples that we’ll look at in the next few chapters – Amazon Kindle disrupting the book industry, ZipRecruiter disrupting the recruitment industry, Frank disrupting the Energy industry – and you will see exactly how to create your own “disruptor” using the Lean CX Score.

The key takeaway is that amateurs focus on the technology, or the end result when these businesses come to light and then wonder how they did it, while professionals understand the philosophy behind their ideas so they can create them again and again. These were all things that were being done already – songs, games, movies, driving – the entrepreneurs behind these disruptors just looked at them with a different lens in order to move into new “blue ocean” areas. And this, dear reader, is just a fraction of what the Lean CX Score can do.

The Strategic Lens, The Business Lens and The Team Lens

Looking at something through a magnifying glass can give you an enhanced view, seeing greater detail than if you were viewing something with the naked eye. In the same way, by looking at your products, your business, and even your teams through the lens of the Lean CX Score you can see ways to improve them that weren’t there before.

With the disruptors example previously, it might look like this:But it also works at reducing costs, increasing speed and improving morale within your business by using it as a management system to lead your teams.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Project Success

Giving you the tools for Project Management Success

Lean CX Score – Lean CX Shows You How To Create A Disruptor

Related