INTERVIEW
The key of disruption is that your
competition doesn’t outcompete you by being better or more beautiful... but by being completely inferior
packaged knowledge. So you can get it from a person, an app or a room
– it doesn’t really matter, as long as you get the knowledge.”
A DISRUPTIVE INFLUENCE He continues: “Disruption is very interesting. The key of disruption is that your competition doesn’t outcompete you by being better or more beautiful or more fancy than you are. Your competition outcompetes you by being completely inferior. “I’ve probably spent at least €2,000 a
year in fitness clubs. I’m now spending €30 a year for an app and a wristband.
And it’s not as good as my fitness club or my PT, but my god it saves time and money. I don’t spent two hours getting ready, travelling to the gym, working out, getting back again… I spend 20 minutes. So even though it’s inferior, I’m doing it instead. I’m giving my money to a completely new category of company that are actually inferior. That means they’re earning money, which means they can spend money to improve themselves, and that’s how disruption happens. “What are fitness clubs going to do
about this? I don’t know, but they should probably disrupt themselves – by which I mean building an inferior alternative of themselves. That’s the first point of disruption that Clayton Christensen talks about. I know many of us are unwilling to do that, because we don’t like to destroy when something is good. We want to take care of our customers, provide good service, find new revenue opportunities, so selling something
Lindkvist: Futurology gets people to rewrite their own first draft of the future
inferior is counter-intuitive – but it’s the only thing we’ve found that works.” Didn’t the budget clubs already do
this, I ask, by creating a stripped-back, low-cost version of the full-service gym? “If we compare health clubs to the
airline sector, if a normal club is British Airways or Lufthansa, the budget clubs are Germanwings or Ryanair. You’re still spending the same length of time in the air, but now you’re doing it without a blanket or food, and the people are threatening to charge you to use the toilet. Meanwhile wearable technology and apps offer a teleportation machine: instead of spending nine hours flying across the Atlantic, you can do it in two hours. That’s the magic of a disruption – it changes the game and the rules of the game. “Interestingly, I would say everyone
knows exactly what the problem is, what the challenges are, but they do nothing about it. That’s not because they’re lazy or stupid or blind. Quite the opposite: they actively decide to do nothing about it. It’s something Don Sull, a researcher at London Business School, has coined ‘active inertia’. “When I speak to fitness club owners about wearable technology, some of
46 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
them will just dismiss it as a fad, saying what they do is much better. But that’s exactly my point: wearable tech is an inferior piece of work, which is precisely why you should worry.”
FAILURE AS A SUCCESS So has the fitness sector not been very good at responding to warning signs generally over the years? At face value Lindkvist’s view on this is a bit of a kick in the gut: “Actually there have been so many failures in the fitness sector.” However, it quickly transpires that in his mind this is a good thing. “I think one of the reasons we see so
much diversity in the world of fitness today is that it’s a highly experimental sector with a high rate of failure. I think the brands that have succeeded are the brands that have been experimental, not monolithic – not ‘this is the way we do things’. If you look at the successful clubs, they’ve taken a bit from here and a bit from there and there’s something for everyone – and you also know that most of what they offer will look different three years from now. “You can look back at individual trends in fitness over the years and wonder ‘what were we thinking?’ – but to single
February 2015 © Cybertrek 2015
PHOTO: PATRIK ENGSTRÖM
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