The challenge for the CEO of a traditional larger enterprise whatever sector is to reimagine their industry as an ecosystem, identify their natural allies, ask what they can do to make in their interests to work collaboratively, and to open themselves up to consumer-orientated applications to run over them. British Gas could have created Nest. British Telecom could have created Skype. Volkswagen or General Motors could have created Tesla.

But they didn’t. They didn’t reimagine their industries as ecosystems, so an entrepreneur did.

The transportation sector is no different. Amazon’s announcement that they were testing drone delivery forced the CFO of every DHL, Fedex, UPS and TNT to do two things before Christmas:

• reforecast their revenue downwards from Amazon
• look for a dance partner in the UAV space.

That’s the thing – again and again – Goliath doesn’t have the clock-speed, rests on his laurels, doesn’t anticipate change much less embrace change, and that gives the David the opportunity. I saw that in 2003 when I had just started advising Skype, and the CEO of a major incumbent telco told me I would lose my shirt with Skype and they would go bust. I responded, ‘how fascinating: you’ve decided to underestimate the entrepreneur who disrupted the entire music industry with Kazaa. Let me tell you – he is so glad you are underestimating him right now. You are buying him time. To change the world.’

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Tags: British Gas, British Telecom, Skype