New technology

New technology should be viewed only as an accelerator toward a goal, not as a goal itself.

Good-to-great companies used new technology primarily to accelerate their momentum in the direction they were already going in, but never to indicate the direction itself. They saw technology as a means to an end, not the other way around.

Comparison companies often felt new technologies were a threat, and worried about being left behind in a technology fad, scrambling to adopt them without an overarching plan.

Good-to-great companies, on the other hand, carefully contemplated whether the particular technology could accelerate them on their path. If so, they became pioneers of that technology, otherwise they either ignored it or merely matched their industry’s pace in adoption.

Walgreens, a major drugstore chain, provides an excellent example of how new technology can best be harnessed.

At the beginning of the e-commerce boom, the online drugstore company Drugstore.com was launched amid major market hype. The mere perception of being slower in adopting online business cost Walgreens 40 percent of its share value, and the pressure was on for them to lunge at this new technology.

Rather than yielding, they considered how an online presence could help them in their original strategy: making the drugstore experience even more convenient and further raising profits-per-customer.

Just over a year later, they launched Walgreens.com, which advanced their original strategy through, for example, online prescriptions. While Drugstore.com lost nearly all of its original value in a year, Walgreens bounced back and almost doubled its stock price in the same time.