With COVID19, We’ve Crossed The Digital Rubicon. You Have Five Years To Win— Or Lose

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River with his army in January, 49 BCE, he violated a centuries old stricture, effectively declaring war on the Roman Senate. Everyone with Caesar that day knew they’d either emerge victors or vanquished.

With COVID19, we’ve all crossed the Digital Rubicon. The current crisis should eliminate any uncertainty about the wisdom and urgency of fundamental digital transformation.

Through this pandemic, digitally savvy organizations are shifting faster how they work, produce, serve and protect. Companies enabling these transitions have been rare performers on collapsing equities markets, such as Zoom, ZScaler and Crowdstrike.

COVID19 makes resistance to digital transformation appear short-sighted, even naive. Digital savvy companies are more effectively shifting to remote work, re-organizing stressed supply chains, supporting customers and partners in crisis mode.

What changes will be required? Each industry and company differs, but what is true across all environments is that incremental digitalization of what you already do will not work.

The reason is simple. Customers—human beings—want what they want, when, where and how they want it. Digital technologies enable companies to respond exponentially faster. No matter how many incremental steps you take, you’ll never get to an exponentially better solution. Meanwhile, competitors will.

Digital technologies push the production and provision of products and services ever closer to the moment of demand.

We call this Proximity. Digital and digitally enabled technologies— from IoT and data analytics to additive manufacturing and distributed energy generation— allow us to sense, analyze, respond, produce and service virtual and physical products with unprecedented speed, specificity and flexibility.

The changes they enable in the economy eventually force incumbents to transform. Incremental changes to traditional processes simply cannot keep pace.

The next five years will determine the proximity winners and losers. That’s the time it will take for the pivotal, catalytic infrastructure to roll out: 5G.

At TWIN Global 2019, Toby Redshaw, SVP for Enterprise Innovation and 5G Solutions at Verizon, shared a rapid-fire exploration: 5G in 9 Minutes. “Give me whatever sensor data you’ve got and I’ll give you the capability to be Proactive, Preventive, Pattern match, Personalized, Peer-connected, Precise.”

Redshaw’s 6 Ps empower our emerging proximate world. “Companies bifurcate into ones that are those 6 Ps, and ones that aren’t. Which companies do you want to work at? The ones that have those, or the ones that don’t? Do you want to go to the hospital that is personalized and proactive and precise and preventative—or do you want to go to the other one?”

The current conflagration— requiring agility confounded by heightened uncertainty— exposes the incremental approach to change as brittle and far higher risk than the hard work of truly building your digital future.

If your CEO’s approach is to cut and wait for the old normal, you’ve got the wrong CEO. If your inclination is to run and hide, you’re not an innovator.

If you think, ‘innovating is tough, especially in a crisis,’ you’re right. My colleagues and I at Clareo, our innovation strategy consultancy, viscerally feel the challenge. Our clients are under extraordinary pressure. Our employees and their families depend on us. We depend on each other. Like all entrepreneurs, any investments come directly out of our pockets.