Copyright © 2025 Michael Herman (Bindloss, Alberta, Canada) – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License
Three Little Pigs
Top Line
“If the Big Bad Wolf of business is disruption — then your house of straw, your house of sticks, your house of bricks … they each represent how you respond. To survive, you can’t just build the straw or the sticks. You need the bricks.” (Italics added)
aa
If the “big bad wolf” symbolizes disruption, then the Three Little Pigs are three business responses you need to cover to survive and thrive:
- Pig 1 — Transform: internal change. Make transformation an inside-out function: rethink organizational structure, culture and capabilities so you can meet customers where they are. (Think: change how you operate, not just what you sell.)
- Pig 2 — Innovate: build products, services or experiences that actually connect with people — new tools, features or touchpoints that create fresh ways to engage.
- Pig 3 — Transact: rework how you enable commerce and conversion — the channels, payment flows, and customer journeys that let people buy or interact on their terms.
Why he uses the tale: the fairy tale makes the point visceral: if you only build a “straw” or “stick” strategy (only one of Transform/Innovate/Transact), the wolf (disruption) will blow you down. You need all three to be resilient.
Pig 1: Transform
- Build capability and culture first. Don’t only redesign products; change how the organisation thinks, decides and moves.
- Focus on skills, structure and processes that let you adapt: cross-functional teams, fast decision loops, data fluency, and an experimentation mindset.
- Make customer context part of every change: measure real customer behaviour (not just surveys) and let that guide priorities.
- Concrete early wins: align one existing team to run a rapid experiment (2–4 week sprint), hire/rotate a digital product lead into a legacy unit, or map your customer journey and remove the top 3 friction points.
- Useful KPIs: time-to-decision, % of revenue from products launched in last 18 months, experiment velocity (number of tested hypotheses per quarter), and Net Promoter Score or task completion rates for key journeys.
“Once you’ve begun transforming internally, you need to create things that people actually want. Innovation isn’t about chasing shiny objects; it’s about connecting better with customers.” — Mitch Joel
Pig 2: Innovate
Pig 3: Transact