Transforming Organizations for the Subscription Economy: Starting from Scratch

The emerging present is a fast changing context for incumbent organizations, especially in market segments where online behavior is replacing physical proximity, and users engage with digital platforms for the acquisition of products and services. These are platforms that allow users to behave, to leave a mark, and to participate in the community of others, which are the values people now seek.

In this reality transactions take place on behavior platforms, some of which are for entertainment – Twitch, YouTube - and some which are service and retail platforms - Amazon, AliExpress, EBay - allowing users to conduct remote transactions online. The potential of this behavior, its true possibility is the delivery of everything as a subscription service. This leads us into the Subscription Service Economy, possibly the most significant disruption the economic system has experienced in the last 200 years. In this new context, increasing numbers of incumbent organizations in a variety of industries will be challenged to the core of their imagination.

For these organizations the challenge is not simply about change, but about transformation.

The book reveals ideas about what is possible if we transform the present. The narrative is organized around what is actual and what is potential; what is the probable future that we can arrive at through change, and what is the possible future that we can build through transformation.

When engaging in transformation the following strategic question develops: if you were designing your organization today, how would you design it? In other words, how would you go about it starting from scratch?