Industry and market structures sometimes last for many, many years and seem completely stable. The world aluminium industry, for instance, after one century is still led by the Pittsburgh-based Aluminium Company of America which held the original patents, and by its Canadian offspring, Alcan of Montreal. There has only been one major newcomer in the world’s cigarette industry since the 1920s, the South African Rembrandt group. And in an entire century only two newcomers have emerged as leading electrical apparatus manufacturers in the world: Philips in Holland and Hitachi in Japan. Similarly no major new retail chain emerged in the United States for forty years, between the early twenties when Sears, Roebuck began to move from mail order into retail stores, and the mid-sixties when an old dime-store chain, Kresge, launched the K-Mart discount stores. Indeed, industry and market structures appear so solid that the people in an industry are likely to consider them fore-ordained, part of the order of nature, and certain to endure forever.
Actually, market and industry structures are quite brittle. One small scratch and they disintegrate, often fast. When this happens, every member of the industry has to act. To continue to do business as before is almost a guarantee of disaster and might well condemn a company to extinction. At the very least the company will lose its leadership position; and once lost, such leadership is almost never regained. But a change in market or industry structure is also a major opportunity for innovation.
In industry structure, a change requires entrepreneurship from every member of the industry. It requires that each one ask anew: ‘What is our business?’ And each of the members will have to give a different, but above all a new, answer to that question.
The automobile industry in the early years of this century grew so fast that its markets changed drastically. There were four different responses to this change, all of them successful. The early industry through 1900 had basically been a provider of a luxury product for the very rich. By then, however, it was outgrowing this narrow market with a rate of growth that doubled the industry’s sales volume every three years. Yet the existing companies all still concentrated on the ‘carriage trade’.
One response to this was the British company, Rolls-Royce, founded in 1904. The founders realized that automobiles were growing so plentiful as to become ‘common’, and set out to build and sell an automobile which, as an early Rolls-Royce prospectus put it, would have ‘the cachet of royalty’. They deliberately went back to earlier, already obsolete, manufacturing methods in which each car was machined by a skilled mechanic and assembled individually with hand tools. And then they promised that the car would never wear out. They designed it to be driven by a professional chauffeur trained by Rolls-Royce for the job. They restricted sales to customers of whom they approved – preferably titled ones, of course. And to make sure that no ‘riff-raff’ bought their car, they priced the Rolls-Royce as high as a small yacht, at about forty times the annual income of a skilled mechanic or prosperous tradesman.
A few years later in Detroit, the young Henry Ford also saw that the market structure was changing and that automobiles in America were no longer a rich man’s toy. His response was to design a car that could be totally mass-produced, largely by semi-skilled labour, and that could be driven by the owner and repaired by him. Contrary to legend, the 1908 Model T was not ‘cheap’: it was priced at a little over what the world’s highest-priced skilled mechanic, the American one, earned in a full year. (These days, the cheapest new car on the American market costs about one-tenth of what an unskilled assembly-line worker gets in wages and benefits in a year.) But the Model T cost one-fifth of the cheapest model then on the market and was infinitely easier to drive and to maintain.
Another American, William Crapo Durant, saw the change in market structure as an opportunity to put together a professionally managed large automobile company that would satisfy all segments of what he foresaw would be a huge ‘universal’ market. He founded General Motors in 1905, began to buy existing automobile com-panies, and integrated them into a large modern business.
A little earlier, in 1899, the young Italian Giovanni Agnelli had seen that the automobile would become a military necessity, especially as a staff car for officers. He founded FIAT in Turin, which within a few years became the leading supplier of staff cars to the Italian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian armies.
Market structures in the world automobile industry changed once again between 1960 and 1980. For forty years after World War I, the automobile industry had consisted of national suppliers dominating national markets. All one saw on Italy’s roads and parking lots were Fiats and a few Alfa Romeos and Lancias; outside of Italy, these makes were fairly rare. In France, there were Renaults, Peugeots, and Citroens; in Germany, Mercedes, Opels, and the German Fords; in the United States, GM cars, Fords, and Chryslers. Then around 1960 the auto-mobile industry all of a sudden became a ‘global’ industry.
Different companies reacted quite differently. The Japanese, who had remained the most insular and had barely exported their cars, decided to become world exporters. Their first attempt at the U.S. market in the late sixties was a fiasco. They regrouped, thought through again what their policy should be, and redefined it as offering an American-type car with American styling, American comfort, and American performance characteristics, but smaller, with better fuel consumption, much more rigorous quality control and, above all, better customer service. And when they got a second chance with the petroleum panic in 1979, they succeeded brilliantly. The Ford Motor Company, too, decided to go ‘global’ through a ‘European’ strategy. Ten years later, in the mid-seventies, Ford had become a strong contender for the number one spot in Europe.
Fiat decided to become a European rather than merely an Italian company, aiming to be a strong number two in every important European country while retaining its primary position in Italy. General Motors at first decided to remain American and to retain its traditional 50 per cent share of the American market, but in such a way as to reap something like 70 per cent of all profits from automobile sales in North America. And it succeeded. Ten years later, in the mid-seventies, GM shifted gears and decided to contend with Ford and Fiat for leadership in Europe – and again it succeeded. In 1983–84, GM, it would seem, decided finally to become a truly global company and to link up with a number of Japanese; first with two smaller companies, and in the end with Toyota. And Mercedes in West Germany decided on yet another strategy – again a global one – where it limited itself to narrow segments of the world market, to luxury cars, taxicabs, and buses.
All these strategies worked reasonably well. Indeed, it is impossible to say which one worked better than another. But the companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.
One example is, of course, Chrysler. The people at Chrysler knew what was happening – everybody in the industry did. But they ducked instead of deciding. Chrysler might have chosen an ‘American’ strategy and put all its resources into strengthening its position within the United States, still the world’s largest automobile market. Or it might have merged with a strong European firm and aimed at taking third place in the world’s most important automobile markets, the United States and Europe. It is known that Mercedes was seriously interested – but Chrysler was not. Instead, Chrysler frittered away its resources on make-believe. It acquired defeated ‘also-rans’ in Europe to make itself look multinational. But this, while giving Chrysler no additional strength, drained its resources and left no money for the investment needed to give Chrysler a chance in the American market. When the day of reckoning came after the petroleum shock of 1979, Chrysler had nothing in Europe and not much more in the United States. Only the U.S. government saved it.
The story is not much different for British Leyland, once Britain’s largest automobile company and a strong contender for leadership in Europe; nor for the big French automobile company, Peugeot. Both refused to face up to the fact that a decision was needed. As a result, they rapidly lost both market position and profitability. Today all three – Chrysler, British Leyland, and Peugeot – have become more or less marginal.
But the most interesting and important examples are those of much smaller companies. Every one of the world’s automobile manufacturers, large or small, has had to act or face permanent eclipse. However, three small and quite marginal companies saw in this a major opportunity to innovate: Volvo, BMW, or Porsche.
Around 1960, when the automobile industry market suddenly changed, the informed betting was heavily on the disappearance of these three companies during the coming ‘shakeout’. Instead, all three have done well and have created for themselves market niches in which they are the leaders. They have done so through an innovated strategy which, in effect, had reshaped them into different businesses. Volvo in 1965 was small, struggling and barely breaking even. For a few critical years, it did lose large amounts of money. But Volvo went to work reinventing itself, so to speak. It became an aggressive worldwide marketer – especially strong in the United States – of what one might call the ‘sensible’ car; not very luxurious, far from low-priced, not at all fashionable, but sturdy and radiating common sense and ‘better value’. Volvo has marketed itself as the car for professionals who do not need to demonstrate how successful they are through the car they drive, but who value being known for their ‘good judgement’.
BMW, equally marginal in 1960 if not more so, has been equally successful, especially in countries like Italy and France. It has marketed itself as the car for ‘young comers’, for people who want to be taken as young but who already have attained substantial success in their work and profession, people who want to demonstrate that they ‘know the difference’ and are willing to pay for it. BMW is unashamedly a luxury car for the well-to-do, but it appeals to those among the affluent who want to appear ‘nonestablishment’. Whereas Mercedes and Cadillac are the cars for company presidents and for heads of state, BMW is muy macho, and bills itself as the ‘ultimate driving machine’.
Finally Porsche (originally a Volkswagen with extra styling) repositioned itself as the sports car, the one and only car for those who still do not want transportation but excitement in an automobile.
But those smaller automobile manufacturers who did not innovate and present themselves differently in what is, in effect, a different business – those who continued their established ways – have become casualties. The British MG, for instance, was thirty years ago what Porsche has now become, the sports car par excellence. It is almost extinct by now. And where is Citroen? Thirty years ago it was the car that had the solid innovative engineering, the sturdy construction, the middle-class reliability. Citroen would have seemed to be ideally positioned for the market niche Volvo has taken over. But Citroen failed to think through its business and to innovate; as a result, it has neither product nor strategy.
A change in industry structure offers exceptional opportunities, highly visible and quite predictable to outsiders. But the insiders perceive these same changes primarily as threats. The outsiders who innovate can thus become a major factor in an important industry or area quite fast, and at relatively low risk.
Here are some examples.
In the late 1950s three young men met, almost by accident, in New York City. Each of them worked for financial institutions, mostly Wall Street houses. They found themselves in agreement on one point: the securities business – unchanged since the Depression twenty years earlier – was poised for rapid structural change. They decided that this change had to offer opportunities. So they systematically studied the financial industry and the financial markets to find an opportunity for newcomers with limited capital resources and practically no connections. The result was a new firm: Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Five years after it had been started in 1959, it had become a major force on Wall Street.
What these three young men found was that a whole new group of customers was emerging fast: the pension fund administrators. These new customers did not need anything that was particularly difficult to supply, but they needed something different. And no existing firm had organized itself to give it to them. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette established a brokerage firm to focus on these new customers and to give them the ‘research’ they needed.
About the same time, another young man in the securities business also realized that the industry was in the throes of structural change and that this could offer him an opportunity to build a different securities business of his own. The opportunity he found was ‘the intelligent investor’ mentioned earlier. On this, he then built what is now a big and still fast-growing firm.
During the early or mid-sixties, the structure of American health care began to change very fast. Three young people, the oldest not quite thirty, then working as junior managers in a large Midwestern hospital, decided that this offered them an opportunity to start their own innovative business. They concluded that hospitals would increasingly need expertise in running such housekeeping services as kitchen, laundry, maintenance, and so on. They systematized the work to be done. Then they offered contracts to hospitals under which their new firm would put in its own trained people to run these services, with the fee a portion of the resultant savings. Twenty years later, this company billed almost a billion dollars of services.
The final case is that of the discounters like MCI and Sprint in the American long-distance telephone market. They were total outsiders; Sprint, for instance, was started by a railroad, the Southern Pacific. These outsiders began to look for the chink in Bell System’s armour. They found it in the pricing structure of long-distance services. Until World War II, long-distance calls had been a luxury confined to government and large businesses, or to emergencies such as a death in the family. After World War II, they became commonplace. Indeed, they became the growth sector of telecommunications. But under pressure from the regulatory authorities for the various states which control telephone rates, the Bell System continued to price long-distance as a luxury, way above costs, with the profits being used to subsidize local service. To sweeten the pill, however, the Bell System gave substantial discounts to large buyers of long-distance service.
By 1970, revenues from long-distance service had come to equal those from local service and were fast outgrowing them. Still, the original price structure was maintained. And this is what the newcomers exploited. They signed up for volume service at the discount and then retailed it to smaller users, splitting the discount with them. This gave them a substantial profit while also giving their subscribers long-distance service at substantially lower cost. Ten years later, in the early eighties, the long-distance discounters handled a larger volume of calls than the entire Bell System had handled when the discounters first started.
These cases would just be anecdotes except for one fact: each of the innovators concerned knew that there was a major innovative opportunity in the industry. Each was reasonably sure that an innovation would succeed, and succeed with minimal risk. How could they be so sure?
Four near-certain, highly visible indicators of impending change in industry structure can be pinpointed.
1. The most reliable and the most easily spotted of these indicators is rapid growth of an industry. This is, in effect, what each of the above examples (but also the automobile industry examples) have in common. If an industry grows significantly faster than economy or population, it can be predicted with high probability that its structure will change drastically – at the very latest by the time it has doubled in volume. Existing practices are still highly successful, so nobody is inclined to tamper with them. Yet they are becoming obsolete. Neither the people at Citroen nor those at Bell Telephone were willing to accept this, however – which explains why ‘newcomers’, ‘outsiders’, or former ‘second-raters’ could beat them in their own markets.
2. By the time an industry growing rapidly has doubled in volume, the way it perceives and services its market is likely to have become inappropriate. In particular, the ways in which the traditional leaders define and segment the market no longer reflect reality, they reflect history. Yet reports and figures still represent the traditional view of the market. This is the explanation for the success of two such different innovators as Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette and the Midwestern ‘intelligent investor’ brokerage house. Each found a segment that the existing financial service institutions had not perceived and therefore did not serve adequately; the pension funds because they were too new, the ‘intelligent investor’ because he did not fit the Wall Street stereotype.
But the hospital management story is also one of traditional aggregates no longer being adequate after a period of rapid growth. What grew in the years after World War II were the ‘paramedics’, that is, the hospital professions: X-Ray, pathology, the medical lab, therapists of all kinds, and so on. Before World War II these had barely existed. And hospital administration itself became a profession. The traditional ‘housekeeping’ services, which had dominated hospital operations in earlier times, thus steadily became a problem for the administrator, proving increasingly difficult and costly as hospital employees, especially the low-paid ones, began to unionize.
And the case of the book chains reported earlier (in Chapter 3) is also a story of structural change because of rapid growth. What neither the publishers nor the traditional American bookstores realized was that new customers, the ‘shoppers’, were emerging side by side with the old customers, the traditional readers. The traditional bookstore simply did not perceive these new customers and never attempted to serve them.
But there is also the tendency if an industry grows very fast to become complacent and, above all, to try to ‘skim the cream’. This is what the Bell System did with respect to long-distance calls. The sole result is to invite competition (on this see also Chapter 17).
Yet another example is to be found in the American art field. Before World War II, museums were considered ‘upper-class’. After World War II, going to museums became a middle-class habit; in city after city new museums were founded. Before World War II, collecting art was something a few very rich people did. After World War II, collecting all kinds of art became increasingly popular, with thousands of people getting into the act, some of them people of fairly limited means.
One young man working in a museum saw this as an opportunity for innovation. He found it in the most unexpected place – in fact, in a place he had never heard of before, insurance. He established himself as an insurance broker specializing in art and insuring both museums and collectors. Because of his art expertise, the underwriters in the major insurance companies, who had been reluctant to insure art collections, became willing to take the risk, and at premiums up to 70 per cent below those charged before. This young man now has a large insurance brokerage firm.
3. Another development that will predictably lead to sudden changes in industry fracture is the convergence of technologies that hitherto were seen as distinctly separate.
One example is that of the private branch exchange (PBX), that is, the switchboard for offices and other large telephone users. Basically, all the scientific and technical work on this in the United States has been done by Bell Labs, the research arm of the Bell System. But the main beneficiaries have been a few newcomers such as ROLM Corporation. In the new PBX, two different technologies converge: telephone technology and computer technology. The PBX can be seen as a telecommunications instrument that uses a computer, or as a computer that is being used in telecommunications. Technically, the Bell System would have been perfectly capable of handling this – in fact, it has all along been a computer pioneer. In its view of the market, however, and of the user, Bell System saw the computer as something totally different and far away. While it designed and actually introduced a computer-type PBX, it never pushed it. As a result, a total newcomer has become a major competitor. In fact, ROLM, started by four young engineers, was founded to build a small computer for fighter aircraft, and only stumbled by accident into the telephone business. The Bell System now has not much more than one-third of that market, despite its technical leadership.
4. An industry is ripe for basic structural change if the way in which it does business is changing rapidly.
Thirty years ago, the overwhelming majority of American physicians practised on their own. By 1980, only 60 per cent were doing so. Now, 40 per cent (and 75 per cent of the younger ones) practise in a group, either in a partnership or as employees of a Health Maintenance Organization or a hospital. A few people who saw what was happening early on, around 1970, realized that it offered an opportunity for innovation. A service company could design the group’s office, tell the physicians what equipment they needed, and either manage their group practice for them or train their managers.
Innovations that exploit changes in industry structure are particularly effective if the industry and its markets are dominated by one very large manufacturer or supplier, or by a very few. Even if there is no true monopoly, these large, dominant producers and suppliers, having been successful and unchallenged for many years, tend to be arrogant. At first they dismiss the newcomer as insignificant and, indeed, amateurish. But even when the newcomer takes a larger and larger share of their business, they find it hard to mobilize themselves for counteraction. It took the Bell System almost ten years before it first responded to the long-distance discounters and to the challenge from the PBX manufacturers.
Equally sluggish, however, was the response of the American producers of aspirin when the ‘non-aspirin aspirins’ – Tylenol and Datril – first appeared (on this see also Chapter 17). Again, the innovators diagnosed an opportunity because of an impending change in industry structure, based very largely on rapid growth. There was no reason whatever why the existing aspirin manufacturers, a very small number of very large com-panies, could not have brought out ‘non-aspirin aspirin’ and sold it effectively. After all, the dangers and limitations of aspirin were no secret; medical literature was full of them. Yet, for the first five or eight years, the newcomers had the market to themselves.
Similarly, the United States Postal Service did not react for many years to innovators who took away larger and larger chunks of the most profitable services. First, United Parcel Service took away ordinary parcel post; then Emery Air Freight and Federal Express took away the even more profitable delivery of urgent or high value merchandise and letters. What made the Postal Service so vulnerable was its rapid growth. Volume grew so fast that it neglected what seemed to be minor categories, and thus practically delivered an invitation to the innovators.
Again and again when market or industry structure changes, the producers or suppliers who are today’s industry leaders will be found neglecting the fastest-growing market segments. They will cling to practices that are rapidly becoming dysfunctional and obsolete. The new growth opportunities rarely fit the way the industry has ‘always’ approached the market, been organized for it, and defines it. The innovator in this area therefore has a good chance of being left alone. For some time, the old businesses or services in the field will still be doing well serving the old market the old way. They are likely to pay little attention to the new challenge, either treating it with condescension or ignoring it altogether.
But there is one important caveat. It is absolutely essential to keep the innovation in this area simple. Complicated innovations do not work. Here is one example; the most intelligent business strategy I know of and one of the most dismal failures.
Volkswagen triggered the change which converted the automobile industry around 1960 into a global market. The Volkswagen Beetle was the first car since the Model T forty years earlier that became a truly international car. It was as ubiquitous in the United States as it was in its native Germany, and as familiar in Tanganyika as it was in the Solomon Islands. And yet Volkswagen missed the opportunity it had created itself – primarily by being too clever.
By 1970, ten years after its breakthrough into the world market, the Beetle was becoming obsolete in Europe. In the United States, the Beetle’s second-best market, it still sold moderately well. And in Brazil, the Beetle’s third-largest market, it apparently still had substantial growth ahead. Obviously, new strategy was called for.
The chief executive officer of Volkswagen proposed switching the German plants entirely to the new model, the successor to the Beetle, which the German plants would also supply to the United States market. But the continuing demand for Beetles in the United States would be satisfied out of Brazil, which would then give Volkswagen do Brasil the needed capacity to enlarge its plants and to maintain for another ten years the Beetle’s leadership in the growing Brazilian market. To assure the American customers of the ‘German quality’ that was one of the Beetle’s main attractions, the critical parts such as engines and transmissions for all cars sold in North America would, however, still be made in Germany, with the finished car for the North American market then assembled in the United States.
In its way, this was the first genuinely global strategy, with different parts to be made in different countries and assembled in different places according to the needs of different markets. Had it worked, it would have been the right strategy, and a highly innovative one at that. It was killed primarily by the German labour unions. ‘Assembling Beetles in the United States means exporting German jobs,’ they said, ‘and we won’t stand for it.’ But the American dealers were also doubtful about a car that was ‘made in Brazil’, even though the critical parts would still be ‘made in Germany’. And so Volkswagen had to give up its brilliant plan.
The result has been the loss of Volkswagen’s second market, the United States. Volkswagen, and not the Japanese, should have had the small car market when small cars became all the rage after the fall of the Shah of Iran triggered the second petroleum panic. Only the Germans had no product. And when, a few years later, Brazil went into a severe economic crisis and automobile sales dropped, Volkswagen do Brasil got into difficulties. There were no export customers for the capacity it had had to build there during the seventies.
The specific reasons why Volkswagen’s brilliant strategy failed – to the point where the long-term future of the company may have become problematical – are secondary. The moral of the story is that a ‘clever’ innovative strategy always fails, particularly if it is aimed at exploiting an opportunity created by a change in industry structure. Then only the very simple, specific strategy has a chance of succeeding.