Big companies must learn to use digital technologies for better customer interactions
Company managers must learn to think like start ups, learn from their entrepreneurial culture and embrace digital disruption
Many corporates – not just in Hong Kong or China, but around the world – have always looked askance at their staff using the Internet in work time – and with good reason. Spending hours browsing for a good restaurant in Wan Chai or Facebooking images taken from the top of Lantau Island may not seem very productive.
However, managers in new start-ups are doing the opposite – and embracing the digital world, along with a totally different way of thinking. By doing so, they could soon find they turn into the next big company.
The reality is, corporates are not start-ups. However, what they can do is take the lessons from the entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial way of thinking and apply that.
The pace of change at board level and executive level to come up with a solution or basket of solutions that empowers the start-up to innovate, to think entrepreneurially, to think like a start-up, is becoming ever more present, and high on every chairman’s and CEO’s agenda.
Companies are launching field trips, for example, to incubators and accelerators. They see people wearing jeans and beads and interacting with their customers and suppliers on social media, with low costs, and high returns, and they go back and say, “Oh, well, that’s fantastic. How do we become like them?”