In 2018 senior partners from McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, published “Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds.” The authors discovered that over a 10-year period, just one in 12 companies managed to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance―where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit―to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. They propose to dramatically improve performance, you must overcome incrementalism.
One could take the position that innovation can be revolutionary or evolutionary (incrementalism). Incrementalism is just the sort of challenge we face in the commercial flooring industry. Incrementalism, lack of revolutionary innovation, anchors our relative positions at the middle (construction & engineering) or low end of the business power curve (building products) compared to software at the very top end of the curve. While so many industries continue to push forward with true innovation, our industry linking commercial building products with construction continues to struggle with incrementalism and lack of innovation. Innovation can be related to product, process, or business model. It cannot be accomplished by siloed functions, and in our industry, it does not take place in some laboratory.