A fintech start-up from India accelerated its growth plans in the U.S. market. The new technology of GenAI further reduced the time to customize their bespoke CRM solutions to weeks, versus the months taken by large incumbents with their more standard offerings. The start-up’s “all-hands-on-deck” team culture (along with modular product design) enabled them to rapidly adopt and integrate the new technology into their business. For them, speed trumped scale.
This new competitive dynamic represents an extraordinary turn of events. For the past 100 years, global companies have succeeded by competing on the basis of their scale, which drove greater cost efficiency. To execute this strategy, their leaders built hierarchical organizations with a command-and-control culture. But while efficient in its execution, it was also inherently bureaucratic and slow to adapt or meet fast-changing local customer needs. Today, these companies’ global scale is becoming a source of local weakness in the fragmenting world.
