A couple of posts ago I compared changing your company’s DNA (culture being another word for it) to quiting smoking.  While I’ve never been a smoker, it appears to me that there are several challenges people face while trying to quit that also apply to changing your DNA.

Your natural urges and habits work against you.  In the case of smokers, it is a combination of chemical addiction and habit drawing them back in.  In the case of people and companies, their natural personalities and routines are comfortable and are easy to fall back into.

It won’t be comfortable while you are quiting.  Pretty obvious for smokers with withdrawal pains.  For companies it will mean doing thing differently and in ways that will feel unnatural.

You had better be motivated.  Smokers successfully quit b/c they realize the health risks or they want to kick an expensive habit.  Companies successfully change their culture b/c they have to to survive or they see an opportunity to greatly increase their potential.  The latter of these is the more difficult for companies – it is one thing to make a dramatic change when things are dire, it is completely another to do so when things are otherwise going well.  Sticking with the smoking analogy, this is like all the people that had foresite and decided to quit smoking before it was common knowledge that smoking kills you over time.  They had to have a pretty strong motivation of their own, b/c it wasn’t clear that anything ominous was imminent.

There are a lot of companies in the traditional video world (and some of us in the MVaaS world) that need to take a hard look at their DNA and see if it needs changing.  In our case, we need to morph from a leading edge technology company into a market-driven, customer focused sales and marketing powerhouse that is built on leading edge technology.  In the case of the traditional video players, they need to stop viewing themselves as hardware providers (cameras and DVRs and cables) and start viewing themselves as service providers that are helping companies use video to improve their businesses.