Vaporize Your Business Before Someone Does it for You

Vaporized. That’s the word Robert Tercek, founder and President of General Creativity uses to define the future of business. By vaporized, Tercek doesn’t mean that your business is literally going to be destroyed. He’s actually talking about digital transformation—a paradigm shift that will move business models in almost every sector imaginable away from product-centricity in favor of information and services.

 

“By the end of the decade, two-thirds of humanity will be using a smartphone… If your business isn’t present on that phone, [customers] don’t, like, put their phone down and go looking in the shopping mall or go look in the yellow pages. We don’t have those habits anymore. You’ve lost that customer entirely.”

During his keynote speech at Microsoft Envision 2016, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at length about digital transformation. In part, he noted that already-established businesses aren’t the only ones that will benefit from vaporization. New, lean business models are already being developed by young companies, purpose-built to take advantage of digitalization.

In Tercek’s words, understanding how digital technology operates and how digital transformation will unfold is everybody’s job—from your digital marketing teams to every other corner of your business. The cloud, for instance, can be harnessed to “vaporize” your back office.

It’s time we all took a hard look at our business models, empowering our own employees to disrupt and innovate from within—before some startup swoops in from out of the blue and blows us out of the water.For more on embracing digital transformation and how to vaporize your business, check out the full interview with Robert Tercek, straight from the floor of Microsoft Envision.