NEW YORK–Still adjusting to “disruption?” Then you may not be pleased to hear one person is now talking about “new disruption.”
Tom Goodwin, the EVP of Innovation with Zenith Media USA and a frequent author, delivered remarks around “Where and How Should We Innovate: Unleashing the Power of New Disruption” to CO-OP’s THINK Conference here.
The question for many, said Goodwin, is to wonder “What is going on? How are these things we know to work a certain way suddenly different? To me, the essence behind it is this idea of new disruption.”
Goodwin summed it up this way: “Things have never changed so fast before, but will never change so slowly again.”
Goodwin observed that increasingly the most transformative products ever made are made by brand-new companies on their very first attempt. Companies such as Tesla, Dyson and Amazon have become market leaders, despite no experience in automobiles, vacuum cleaners, and retail, respectively.
“Have they succeeded despite this lack of experience, or because of it?” asked Goodwin.
What “new disruption” is about, he said, is “getting breakthrough results by ignoring assumptions by people who were better placed.”
Goodwin offered credit unions these points to ponder:
- What would your business look like if you set it up today? What assumptions do you have that frame how you do things that you should cast aside?
- The Power of Digital Transformation. “When you completely rebuild around the potential of new technology, you get vast paradigm shifts. We’re now at the same point with the digital age.”
- Altitude of Digital. “Digitalization is taking a legacy business and adding a digital garnish to it. Digitally transformed businesses are like Uber; it’s an extremely good case study of thinking about things in a new way. Uber is a car rental company that has no cars and no employees and you do all the work. That is how you would build a taxi company today.”
- What would your business look like if you set it up AROUND technology and behaviors?
Goodwin also recommended credit unions exploit these rules:
- Beware of the expert. “Trump is a good example. His first job in politics is the biggest job in politics. His inability to be an expert has helped him. “
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
- Avoid Muscle Memory. “The first steamships had sails on them. It appears no one thought to take them off. Today, there are lots of lazy assumptions about targeting Millennials and older people.”
- New paradigms need new experts and new connectors. “Lots of skills from the past have become useless. A lot of the expertise we used to need we don’t need anymore.”
- Build around behaviors, not technology. Build around technology that changes behaviors. “We always add technology to things, because we think more technology is better. Often, it’s not how people behave. Technology needs to be a background enabler.”
- Be anticipatory, not just agile. “Everyone talks agile; I think it’s more interesting to be predictive. Just about every role in companies has a backwards focus. You’re looking at last year’s results. It would be good to start looking forward.”
As a “final thought,” Goodwin said every organization needs to “start saying ‘No’ a lot more. It’s good to get really simple. Apple launched one phone in the same year Nokia launched 83 handsets. You recognize now that making one extremely good phone would have been a better idea.”