DYOB: Destroy your own business

GE, one of the Fortune 500 companies that lay off one of its arm each year and reconsolidates every time it goes about selling its sub-business. Recently, it brought its appliances business up for sale through auction but then it has a completely diversified business line like GE Universal Studios. Isn’t such an association of Universal Studios with GE a little difficult to be thought of? The organization has moved itself from a position where it was bound to face competition in to a completely new arena. DYOB (Destroy your own business) is the essence here which leads to destructing its earlier business model and adapting a newer one. 

It is the core values which are imbibed in this organization that forces it to reinvent itself every now and then. It was Jack Welch who was running the organization then and it is Jeff Immelt now who is steering the organization but it is the values that act as the forces to drive the organization to go about reinventing itself every time. 

It has been a time when continuous improvement in services have been looked at to provide that extra advantage over one’s competitors but it is a disruptive innovation that can keep one over the others for a longer while. It is this innovation that can help an enterprise to not only outperform others but also leapfrog into new areas of competitive advantage which has been termed as the ‘Blue Ocean’. Studies indicate that continuous reinventing of the business models have been actively scrutinized in the areas of Business Strategy. However, there is not much direction and thought built upon reshaping/evaluating the present business model so as to phase it out and bring about the proposed new business model.

In this era of rapidly changing battlefield of business, new sources for sustainable competitive edge can be assured only by reinventing the business model every now and then. 

Evident examples:

1)www.Demonoid.com is a market space where the latest movies are available for free downloads. Such a disruption has actually destroyed the evolutions like DVD which had come a long way from the foundations of VHS.

2)For the philanthropic reason of having a greener and a better world, the automobile industry has moved from Diesel/Petrol run cars to Compressed Natural Gas ones. What now? There’s a revolution of electric hybrid vehicles that are in the making and will re-mould the entire industry.

3)Business like IBM and Apple as organizations which went about moving from the same value chain as that of providing computer hardware to that of Business Services and Music Services respectively. It is a disruptive idea and a requirement in the business environment which made them move from their core business areas to untried battlefields. They had to let go off their earlier revenue model and tap areas that were left unidentified.

In all the spheres available, there is only one thought and it all means the same. 
a) ‘eat lunch or be lunch’, 
b) ‘control your own destiny or someone else will’
c) ‘destroy yourself or get destroyed’