Excerpt from Transformative

Democratization is defined as “the action of making something accessible to everyone.” Whether it is the desire to bring to the world a good cup of dark roast coffee, affordable furniture, or a ride on demand, organizations such as Starbucks, IKEA, Uber, and many other transformative companies share a common aspiration to make their solutions as widely available as possible.

Democratization is both a capability and a mindset. It is more than just making something more widely available. It is a reset of the “why?”—the customer outcome—which instantly makes a product or service more widely appealing, creating an inflection point in the market and accelerating growth. It focuses on lifting constraints for customers to find, access, and use it where and when they want.

Democratization means more than just availability or price. There is a depth to democratization that involves producing the right customer outcome at the right place and the right time for mass appeal. It lifts constraints to finding, accessing, buying, and using solutions with adaptations and trade-offs to optimize customer outcomes. Consider some of the multiple dimensions of democratization:

• Location
• Immediacy
• The intersection of time and place
• Depth of availability
• Access
• Effort

​Democratizing goes beyond any single product, event, outcome, or achievement. Among transformative companies, democratization is a common mindset, leading to an ongoing process to continually improve upon it.

Explore this and other topics in the upcoming book Transformative.