Ray Wang tells us now that writing a book and launching a company are incredibly fulfilling things to do - but ideally, not at the same time. He thought it would take a year to write "Disrupting Digital Business", but since it overlapped with building Constellation Research it took three! But at the same time, his book is all the richer for that experience.
Ray is on a worldwide book tour (tweeting under the hash tag #cxotour). I was thrilled to participate in the Melbourne leg last week. We convened a dinner at Melbourne restaurant The Deck" and were joined by a cross section of Australian private and public sector businesses. There were current and recent executives from Energy Australia, Rio Tinto, the Victorian Government and Australia Post among others, plus the founders of several exciting local start-ups. And we were lucky to have special guests Brian Katz and Ben Robbins - two renowned mobility gurus.
The format for all the launch events has one or two topical short speeches from Constellation analysts and Associates, and a fireside chat by Ray. In Melbourne, we were joined by two of Australia's deep digital economy experts, Gavin Heaton and Joanne Jacobs. Gavin got us going on the night, surveying the importance of innovation, and the double-edged opportunities and threats of digital disruption.
Then Ray spoke off-the-cuff about his book, summarising years of technology research and analysis, and the a great many cases of business disruption, old and new. Ray has an encyclopedic grasp of tech-driven successes and failures going back decades, yet his presentations are always up-to-the-minute and full of practical can-do calls to action. He's hugely engaging and having him on a small stage for a change lets him have a real conversation with the audience.
Speaking with no notes and PowerPoint-free, Ray ranged across all sorts of disruptions in all sorts of sectors, including:
- Sony's double cassette Walkman (which Ray argues playfully was their "last innovation")
- Coca Cola going digital, and the speculative "ten cent sip"
- the real lesson of the iPhone: geeks spend time arguing about whether Apple's technology is original or appropriated, when the point is their phone disrupted 20 or more other business models
- the contrasting Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A380 mega jumbo - radically different ways to maximise the one thing that matters to airlines: dollars per passenger-miles, and
- Uber, which observers don't always fully comprehend as a rich mix of mobility, cloud and Big Data.
And I closed the scheduled part of the evening with a provocation on privacy. I asked the group to think about what it means to call any online business practice "creepy". Have community norms and standards really changed in the move online? What's worse: government surveillance for political ends, or private sector surveillance for profit? If we pay for free online services with our personal information, do regular consumers understand the bargain? And if cynics have been asking "Is Privacy Dead?" for over 100 years, doesn't it mean the question is purely rhetorical? Who amongst us truly wants privacy to be over?!
The discussion quickly attained a life of its own - muscular, but civilized. And it provided ample proof that whatever you think about privacy, it is complicated and surprising, and definitely disruptive! (For people who want to dig further into the paradoxes of modern digital privacy, Ray and I recently recorded a nice long chat about it).
The Digital Disruption tour dates are just around the corner, so you're welcome to RSVP, if you haven't already.
- San Francisco May 4th - sponsored by Wipro Digital
- Atlanta May 14th - sponsored by Adobe & Wipro Digital
- London June 18th - sponsored by Financial Force
- Amsterdam June 22nd
Enjoy!