Rita McGrath
speaker
126 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 8 Jun
Rita McGrath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Icon, who's a very famous activist investor, sees the opportunity, swoops in, buys the company, looks at Tioko's plans to do things and doesn't have any better feeling about it than the previous owner did. And so he cancels both of those things. The reality is, if you think about something that represents, I'll call it a time zero event. So the thing is here, you can take pictures of it.
It's in the front page of the Wall Street Journal. We all know it's here. By the time you wait till then, it's definitely too late because now you're in reactive mode. And if there were any excess profits to be made, the early movers would have gotten them. But you also don't want to move too early.
And that's where I think a lot of these big, buzzy technologies that manage to attract a lot of venture capital money get themselves in trouble because there's a lot of ecosystem considerations that need to be taken into account. There's a lot of, can I get the talent that I need? Can I get the real estate that I need? Can I figure out how this is going to work?
So if you think about autonomous technology, autonomous vehicle technology, I don't know about you, but we were going to have autonomous technology in 2016. Remember that? And it's still kind of a promise to be gotten because I think the technology is hard enough.
But when you're talking about something that's going to affect the everyday lives of potentially hundreds of millions of people, there is risk you have to sort out. There's ownership regimes, what roads are safe for these things to go on. And so there's a whole social dimension that needs to happen in addition to just getting the tech right. And that's hard enough.
So in the beginning, people see the potential, right? So autonomous cars, right? Oh, my God, you know, wouldn't this be awesome? Older people won't have to lose their independence and, you know, we'll be able to have these regulated things in cities and it'll reduce pollution and it's going to be amazing. So there's a hype cycle.
Then what happens is the hype doesn't deliver to its expectations, at least in the short run. So the first... year or two, and then we have, you know, the AI winter sets in and everybody's disillusioned. And, oh, you know, we thought it was going to do everything from making Cocoa Pop still launching to the moon. And then everybody gets disillusioned.
But what happens is the survivors of that period have actually worked some cool stuff out now. So if you think about Dollar Shave Club, if you think about what came before the early internet, remember the late 90s and the dot-com crash, and everybody said, oh, this internet thing is never going to be a thing you know, we should all just forget it, forget it, right?
But out of that came Amazon, eBay, some of the early, really successful internet commerce platforms, programs which showed us that this could be useful in our lives. And so the next cycle is this sort of trough of disillusionment, but the weeding out of the stuff that isn't going to work till you find the stuff that works.
And then in the third stage, you have people saying, whoa, oh, now I get it. I could use that thing to do X, Y, Z. So what you see is this flowering of opportunities and this flowering of new applications. And that's the really exciting period, right? That's the period where You're now actually seeing real growth businesses built around that stuff.
And I'd say Dollar Shave Club would be a great example of that. And then you have the kind of, oh, yeah, this is just normal. This is like, what do you mean there was a time before high-speed broadband?
Well, the way I like to look at it is if you imagine this, as I said, a time zero event, and then you work backward, you just say, what would have to be true before this could actually happen? And what I like to do with companies is we'll make actually like a chart. I call it an early warnings signal model. And then we watch it.
And then we say, wait a minute, if this happens and that happens and this other thing happens and, whoa, there's this other thing happening, maybe now's the time we need to really evaluate this for taking action now. So let me give an example. In 2020, 21, I was working with a pharmaceutical company.
And one of the big questions they had was, well, is the tech, you know, is online or some kind of tech involvement going to be the first patient port of call for access to healthcare? So if there's no doctors in offices, that's kind of a problem if you're a sales rep. So we looked at that and we said, well, what would have to be true for this to actually happen?
And there's a bunch of things that would have to be true. Medicare and Medicaid would have to figure out payment models for services that were not done in a facility, for services that were done either at home or mediated technologically. You probably would have to have legislative action which says, hey, drugs delivered electronically are as legitimate as drugs delivered any what way.
So we went back probably two and a half years later, and we looked at those early warnings that we had developed back in the day. And what you saw was yes, yes, yes, and yes. In fact, a bunch of the things that we'd anticipated were now starting to happen. When it came time to saying, hey, do we need to hire a data scientist? The answer was yes.
When it came time to say, let's figure out what marketing looks like in a doctor-free environment. And there were a whole bunch of other things as well. For example, a lot of private physician practices were being sold to large players. You saw the disproportionate influence of the paying, the insurance companies, and, and, and, and. And so it caused them to take a real strategic shift.
And a very good one, you know, that it doesn't cost you anything to see what people are actually doing. So I'll never forget, I was some years back, probably in the late, right around 2000, I was doing some work with Nokia in a program called Choices, which was for the people that were in their new product development company. And at the time, I was working for a lot of telecom companies.
It was a very hot area. And so as I traveled around the world, I would always go to phone stores. So in the airport or on the street. And you'd watch what was going on in the physical phone store because it would tell you a lot about market share and who was hot and who was not and what were the salespeople pushing and all that kind of thing.
And what I started to see was the section of the store devoted to Nokia products was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And so I was with this class and I said to people, well, tell me what you learn when you go visit a phone store. And the room went completely silent. And I said, well, nobody has any ideas. And they looked at me and they said, we don't visit phone stores.
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