The Young & their interests
We put ‘The Young’ as a customer category and spelled out what interests them. When time came to identify the industry/sector, we found that we had to scratch our heads a bit. This is significant.
KEY POINT – The boundaries between industries and sectors are disappearing or getting blurred. Certain industries or product/service categories are fighting for survival itself examples – music industry, mobile service providers, movie halls, publishing industry, retail shops.
This is because of disruption caused by technology.
Disruption – Examples
Netflix/ 
rentals ; Internet movies/ theatre screenings ; Uber/ rental cars & 
ownership itself ; Amazon/book stores ; itunes/Spotify / Rhythm house ; Kindle/ Printed books; Mobile apps/ television viewing ; Online booking/ travel agencies ; Paytm/ card-swiping. Bottomline is that a company can move into an entirely different product line or service category.
If watching television via app catches on, ‘television’ as a product category gets wiped out. Hotels will struggle big time if one house in every street decides to become an Air B&B partner. E-commerce is where people are turning to, but in truth, they are yet to figure out a sustainable path for making money and staying viable. Flipkarts recent downward valuation bears that out.
What Disruption means for HR
SHIFT to Human Resource Management and it’s three topics –
Performance management,
Training & Development
Career planning.
KEY LEARNING POINT
We live in an age of such intense disruption that organizations are agonizing over what they should be in – which field or what product or service category – simply to survive and then prosper. When you don’t know what to do next, how much can you realistically plan for your own employees – their career paths and their skill-sets?
After all, we might just change our line of business or go into multiple directions- eg Driverless cars or wearable technology – Google’s bets on the future. Google is and has to continuously ask – what skill sets do we require 5-10-15 years ahead? And act now!
When companies enter new fields, they are not so clear on how to define performance either. In such a scenario, the available knowledge on performance management, training & development, career planning is like a football aiming for a moving goal post. Businesses are doing things sometimes just for the sake of continuity because they don’t know any better. They don’t know how to start from scratch or start all over again.
KEY TAKEAWAY
As marketing professionals, when you know how business is getting disrupted, you must ask – are companies disrupting themselves enough on the HR front to manage performance, train employees, guide careers? And if you find they are not, then you must disrupt yourselves as individual professionals for your own future. You might be doing a vanishing job in a soon-to-be disrupted industry with a soon-to-be obsolete skillset.
Observe what’s happening around you.