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Disruption & change

Published on June 30, 2021   22 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Mr. Bailey: Welcome to today's talk on the subject of disruption and change. Possibly one of the most overused, misrepresented, and misunderstood buzzwords in our current vernacular. I am Mark Bailey and along with my colleague and business partner Bill Faust, we'll be taking you through some interesting insights and perspectives around this very topical and pertinent subject today.
0:23
Bill and I have worked together for something like 15-plus years. We were previously competitors, and then co-founders of the CustomerFusion group. Bill is also author of the best-selling business book, 'Pitch Yourself.' Both our business lives are focused on disruption, change and transformation, for many businesses and brands around the globe through CustomerFusion, and additionally through Bill's work in presentations, teaching and publications. We hope you enjoy these pragmatic insights, I'll now hand over to Bill.
0:58
Mr. Faust: What is disruption? Disruption, there are two real definitions to disruption. One is the dictionary definition, that definition is very simple. It's a negative, and in that negative, disruption means to stop an event, a process, a system, from happening as it should usually do. That in itself, is straightforward. But in the business definition, what have we done? We've changed this negative into a positive. What we now have for the business definition is a change of the industry for the positive, and that change means the whole industry evolves. However, many people use the word disruption for many different things. They suggest that Apple is a disruptor, they suggest that Uber is a disruptor, they suggest that Amazon has been a disruptor. Those things have disrupted the competition, but they haven't fundamentally changed industries in the way that we're looking at it. What was an interesting way of looking at disruption, instead of just looking at another word for innovation, creativity, or progress, or change, is the case of Dell. Dell disrupted the way computers were sold, and they were the first to do this. It was so normal, so everyday, so traditional in the way of thinking in real terms. They said: "We've got computers, they go online, why don't we sell them online?" That fundamentally changed how the industry worked. If we think about things now, when the 'world wide web' was invented, it allowed us to do many things. We have people called the 'digital natives' now. Is there anything that we can do now that we could not do before? I'm not going to pause for a big answer, fundamentally, there isn't. It has allowed us to do things more quickly, and that's going to be key.