Nick Webb
FUTURIST

#GSF Conference[spacer height=”20px”]


[spacer height=”20px”]Yeah when you guys invited me to this movie I didn’t know I was gonna be the movie. Well let’s get this out in the open, you know right away. I’m obviously far less attractive in person than my publicist would like you to believe. I know you guys are thinking that. So there you go.

You know it’s interesting watching part of the earlier session was really cool to kind of see, you know, where your priorities are as an organization and the kinds of things that you find to be enterprise priorities. It’s always interesting to see that because it really tells you a lot about the cultural DNA of an organization. do you think are one of the things that really stood out to me the most what would you say the number one thing from that last event from the last session. Just one those characteristics

Culture. Yeah actually it wasn’t that although that’s cool and everything. It was great hair. I mean right. Like I spend five thousand dollars a year on hair product. I’m thinking I am in the right place today. That is awesome. Yeah. Good hair. So you know let’s think about you know where I see your industry maybe different than maybe other people may see it.

And I want to propose some stuff to you guys today that maybe a little bit provocative and maybe even a little unsettling. Because I don’t think it squares up with what we read in trade journals and the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review. And that is is that disruption is the best thing that could happen to the food industry. How many of you have heard or read the term disruption associated with the food industry in the last year

It’s pretty common phenomenon we hear the term disruption. In fact our consulting firm did a survey and we well over 100 executives and we said how important is disruption to the future of your enterprise. And interestingly enough, and I’ve never been involved in a survey that was so completely One hundred percent said that disruption was critical to the future of their enterprise.

And then I asked them one more question. What’s disruption? And you know interestingly enough, not one person was able to answer what disruption is. So it’s become kind of a unicorn. Right? So what I’d like to do is to maybe frame up what disruption is for you today so that you can understand its molecular makeup so that you can actually these incredible tools to drive sustainable growth and profitability, to attract the best talent, to keep the best talent, to do a far better job. Even though I know you guys have a great enterprise but you know can we do better in the way in which we architect customer experiences. We’ll talk about that as well. So when we think about disruption probably the best way for me to describe disruption to you in an actionable way, is that disruption is nothing more than the speed and the size of innovation. You know it used to be not too long ago that an organization, Fortune 500 company would live for 75 years. That’s now down to 15 years. And we’re now looking at these organizations really failing and losing their leadership in as short a time as seven years. So the idea that you know that we get to build upon our enterprise in fact there’s problem with what we see is there is this sort of beginning… genesis of an enterprise where we really understand our customer and we really understand the value that we provide.

And we’re really good at that and this resulted that we grow and then we hit this corporate lifecycle of hyper internal focus and organizational- and we lose sight the ability to get better insights from our marketplace and from our customers to drive disruption. Because what I would proclaim here today, and there’s no question about this… just I think everybody here is getting a copy of my best selling book What Customers Crave. I looked at over 2200 organizations and found that basically disruption is your future. And it is happening maybe even greater than you may realize. And the organizations that are going to win at this are building formal CX strategies. And not only is it good for your customer, it’s incredibly good for your enterprise. Because mission centric organizations that have missions that matter, that are really focusing on their customer organizations have the highest degree of quality of work life and sustainable growth and profitability. What was cool when I did my research is I found that Glassdoor ratings, the way employees rate your organization directly square up customer experience ratings. So that when we create beautiful experiences that have a mission that matters then we have the ability to really drive sustainable growth and profitability. So when we’re thinking about disruption it’s really about the speed and the size of innovation which is really changing in an incredible way.