Gregg Garrett and Warren Ritchie: Episode 139

Transcript

[0:00:41] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Gregg Garrett and Warren Ritchie. The coauthors of Competing in the Connecting World. The internet of things is disrupting every single industry. Information that was once trapped in products is now being unleashed and it’s creating a flow of new services and business models and ecosystems and that means the old way of doing things that organizations have depended on for years could become obsolete. The competition could destroy them. The businesses that fail to change will not survive. And that’s where Gregg and Warren come in. They’ve spent their career strategically transforming organizations. They believe that there are strategies that will help you survive in periods of disruption. Greg and Warren have both worked with C level executives in fortune 500 product and services companies and as strategic business consultants with large and small firms. They’ve gained a unique perspective over the course of the past 15 years working and teaching together which has given them a lot of experience in helping corporate leaders, guiding their firms to compete in the connected world. In this episode, they’ll give you their proven framework and approach for assisting leaders and bravely transforming their companies to thrive in the new digital era. Now, here is our conversation with Gregg Garrett and Warren Ritchie.

[0:02:51] GG: When I was still with the Volkswagen in North America and my job was basically looking for disruptive ways that technology is going to reshape our business. I was with some of the senior members of the leadership team at the otter show in New York and I would distinctly remember sitting on this couch at a hotel lobby about 45 minutes to brief them before they were going in to do a major meeting. I had a big, normal corporate deck, a bunch of slides and I got maybe 20% of the way through and the deck was labeled “IT Strategy: Technology Strategy For The Company” and this one particular senior leader, he was very large in stature, he was leading over me and reviewing this and he stopped me about 10 minutes into it and he turned to me and looked me straight in the eyes and said, “This is a not IT strategy.” I thought to myself, “This is tough for a guy whose job is IT strategy” and I asked him, I said, “Well, should I wrap up the resume?” He said “No. This is not IT strategy for us, this is the way that technology is going to completely transform our industry and what you think that we need to do to be able to get there.” That was a crystallizing moment for me that people that have been so successful in their careers, sometimes need a little bit of light to look at things differently because it’s so natural for me. My entire career has been about change but those that have been operators, those that are successfully operating companies, sometimes can’t get there. So that was a real crystallizing moment and I didn’t go on to write a book after that but I heard the challenge in a much different way than I ever had before. That’s one crystallizing moment for me and maybe one that’s much more near term was in the classroom after we had been through some of these experiences with Warren an I together, I would ask students, did they have a basic understanding of the connected world of the internet side of things, of the digitizing world and I would ask them a simple question. “Can they imagine anything that wouldn’t be affected by this? Any business or any product that wouldn’t be eventually digitized or be effected?” I can tell you over the last seven years or so, the list, what used to be thousands of examples and just in the last 12 months, it was the first classroom that someone said, “I can’t imagine a single thing that won’t be effected.” Those two moments, I think probably contribute the most to this book to drive out the need for this kind of conversation to continue to be had.

[0:05:14] Charlie Hoehn: Great stories by the way, thank you for sharing those Greg. What I’m wondering is, for Competing In The Connecting World, you just said everything is going to be affected which I agree with, what are some of the more surprising things that maybe a few years ago we didn’t expect to be affected but now we’re like “Yeah, that’s going to be touched as well.”

[0:05:39] GG: I think there’s a lot of mundane things, I don’t know if they’re surprising, so you know, if you look at the stats out there, there’s different figures around internet of things at least, of the things that will be connected to the internet and there’s some that argue in just the next couple of years by 2020, there will be 25 billion or there will be 50 billion. I’ve seen some projections as high as a hundred billion. Things of the world that are connected and these range from the phones that everybody carries in their pocket that are absolutely connected all the way to clothing or I think, there’s mundane like appliances and there is very interesting, like a secondary skin. Skin that is now connected and that is actually taking the energy from your body. Much like the potato that you were when you were kid and stuck the probes in and made a clock. They can take the energy from your sweat basically and power this microprocessors that are being able to be put on and measure the way that your body is functioning. It truly is everything and I haven’t been able to find an industry yet that we weren’t able to either imagine how it would be done or research that it would be done, and basically think of really small computers. Think of those really small computers being put on anything and then understanding if the information’s able to be measured from them, what they can deduce seating, lighting, floor boards, everything.

[0:06:55] Charlie Hoehn: No matter who we are, no matter what industry we’re in, we’re going to be affected. You have a section in your book called Prepare, Don’t Predict. I understand the importance of preparation, why not try to predict where things are going, A? And B, what is the best way to prepare?

[0:07:15] WR: Well, the notion of preparation in terms of forecasting and identifying that at this point, our industry will be affected by that, affected this way and a subsequent point will be – the ecosystems are just not formed well enough to be able to have that degree of certainty in it. Who are going to be the dominant players, how they’re going to go to market, what the emergent or dominant business models are going to be, these things are just still a little bit too early to determine for any individual industry. The notion is that industries are going to have to build their own internal capabilities to individual firms or they’ll have to build their own internal capabilities and then they’re going to have to collaborate on how they’re going to work together. To be able to take advantage of this and our point in this is waiting for it to occur and then getting involved and determining what capabilities you need – it’s a sure way to be very late to the game and it’s going to put you in a very difficult position with the rest of the industry. The endorsement or from our perspective, preparing for this, starting to do with some review of your internal capabilities to find what capabilities you’re going to need in the future and starting to work towards those now, without knowing exactly how things will be configured in the future. This is the challenge. That same chapter that’s referred to, we also talk about fortune favoring the prepared. All though the industry maybe a little bit ambiguous in terms of how it’s been original or how it’s going to eventually turn out, the preparation that is directional is going to be well served in the long term.

[0:08:46] GG: I just like to think about it as the leaders out there don’t know all the rules of the game yet, the game’s rules haven’t all been written, there’s some themes that will remind the readers and the leaders out there that are probably ever-greening that they have lived between many different industries. But the reality is, in order to predict accurately, you kind of have to understand the boundaries of what you’re predicting them in. You can’t, I mean, the bottom line is why not predict? Because you can’t accurately. The only other option is, you have two options. Either prepare for the future on the few things that you do know but just accept you may not be accurate. Or wait. And waiting may be the most deadly sin when it comes to leadership in a business.

[0:09:30] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you even say, “change or die,” that’s a section in the book now. So many organizations though are inert, they’re not moving. So what if you work for an organization like that that’s steady as she goes, things are going well, keep this ship afloat?

[0:09:48] GG: Well, depends on I guess, it depends on if you were just working there or if you’re leading there. If you're a leader or you intend to be a leader, potentially take some of the lessons that we’re trying to lay out in the book and apply them to start the change. Everybody uses the metaphor, takes a long time to turn the big ship, right? To write the ship. You’ve got to assume that it’s going to still take a long time in the future, so why not start making the movement. Early in my career, there used to be this graphic that we would use with an X and Y axis and two bullseyes on it, one was up into the right and the other one was up into the right even further but not on a linear path. The point we would make with leaders is the distance between the two bullseyes, it’s a lot shorter than from zero, zero to the second bullseye so why don’t you get your journey started? If you think there’s a chance of you moving entirely the wrong direction, that could be an issue, maybe pause a little bit but if you're pretty certain that you’re moving generally in the right direction, get going, get towards that first bullseye and when you course correct, it’s going to be a lot easier. My advice to those employers would be, start changing their functions, start changing their span of control in that direction and they’re going to be a lot better off once the world starts opening up and if they can’t, unfortunately, maybe they need to find a place that they can.

[0:10:58] WR: Just on that last point, I think if you’re an individual that’s working in the firm that is more or less the nerd run response over seemingly irresponsible to these sort of changes, I think you know it yourself to think about where are you going to be in terms of your career in this? You know, competing in the connected world and preparing to that is both at the corporate level or the firm level, the individual solved for, managers, executives can see themselves being immersed in this in the next 20 or 30 years would serve themselves well to start to think through what personal capabilities do they need in order to be able to really be an effective manager to move forward – independent of what their current firm may be thinking about.

[0:11:38] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely. In the book, you talk about embracing new perspectives. I’m guessing that’s envisioning what a disrupted future could look like. Walk us through how we can embrace these new perspectives?

[0:11:56] GG: Yeah, it is a lot about but it’s getting – it’s the leader, the reader, the leader, starting to imagine the art of possible. It’s starting to appreciate history of you know, fortunately, for all the leaders out there today, it’s – this isn’t the first disruption, it’s not even the first technologically driven disruption that’s happened to an industry and we can learn a lot of what happened when steam power first came out, or when electrical generation and distribution became the norm. They can look to the past, they can look to the recent past of what’s happened even when the internet came versus the internet of things. And appreciate the world that they live in right now towards that and then really maybe surrounding themselves with some folks that if they’re not the specialist and thinking about this, surround themselves with people that do have that perspective no matter if it’s futurists, or if it’s strategists, or just technologists. That can help them apply how things like Alexa that maybe are affecting the home by the way people interact with your business in a business to business setting. Or how the stories of autonomous vehicles, even though you’re not a car company, how that might affect you if you’re a hospitality company. That maybe today’s car could be tomorrow’s hotel room. It’s really just opening your mind and spending time with it and maybe I’ll close this question a little bit with a lot of people – A lot of people talk – we do lot of work in innovation and a lot of people ask me over and over again especially in the last few years, “What do you think about the 20% time for employees to be innovative, the 20% innovation time that Google made famous last decade?” I usually turn the question around and say, well, I think the 20% is actually more important for the top leadership and the mid to top leadership of the company than it is for the standard employee because that’s the space that the constraints actually occur so often. If you buy in to spending time to be innovative, time to think about the future, really get outside of your own industry and see how others are doing it and then imagine how that might be applied to you.

[0:13:53] WR: The point of getting outside of your industry and the changing of perspective which was the start of the question is, I think people are really going to have to start to zoom way out to look beyond the discreet products or services they currently provide and start to think about and talk internally about how the discreet products that we currently offer in the marketplace, how are they involved with people’s lives and what are people doing immediately before using our product and immediately after using your product or services? Zooming out to see exactly how your product fits in to an individual’s life is really in fact what we’re seeing as being a necessary step. Because those are the connections, pre-use, post-use of a product or service and then integrating with the providers of those pre and post products and services. That’s really what we’re talking about. The implication of that is –

[0:14:48] Charlie Hoehn: Could you give an example of that real quickly Warren? Just to make it a little more concrete?

[0:14:54] WR: I think a great – I was eluding to it a little bit but if you're a manufacturer of vehicles and you use your vehicles for certain use on a regular basis to take a trip, to drive on a business trip, to go to a hotel, to eventually be at a restaurant, to eventually do something later in the day. Those patterns are established. When you start to think about your trip and start to put in nav system. It starts to then decide or ask you, “Do you want the reservation, do you want these table at the restaurants, you want this certain thing in your room, do you want the channels preset?” These things can all be sort of anticipated and offered as options upfront by one product as it integrates with other subsequent services. That’s kind of a simple example on how it might work – what you start to see in order to enable that is a product industry, a vehicle industry, has to start to build a way to communicate with hospitality and whether that be a hotel or whether it be restaurant. Then actually get down into the specifics of it. To pull the lens back that way and walk through a customer’s journey on how they use your product, how they use other products and services that are related or adjacent is really what we’re talking about and enabling it really means that your industry had us to start to understand what other products it serves too, in a sequence and then start to build those connections with those parts.

[0:16:24] GG: Just to lag out on last piece there, I mean, we make a pretty big point of the book and we’ve been trained that you need to that integration is really a big piece of the currency of the future. I don’t only mean data integration but the perspective integration of being able to truly put your customer in the center of the picture. Really understand how that customer is consuming your pieces and probably build business relationships with those industries, or those firms that are producing the products and services that are adjacent to your industry because the consumer has always had to have been but the user of the product are good and the service has always had to thin the mastery integrator. From pretty much all of history, it’s been up to them to take your product and the next company’s product, or your product and that company’s servicer experience and integrate them at the point of use. With the connected world really promises is to simplify these individual’s lives and the ultimate currency is high in really at the end, it’s really the time but if they don’t do that, the challenge of the world of IOT is the mass integration that’s going to fall on the responsibility of the consumer. I mean, just imagine, your life right now or your listener’s lives of how many passwords and usernames and presets and all of the digital interactions that they need. So many of them if they’re not well integrated in the background, they become a distraction to the real experience that they want. The ones that are sophisticated, the ones that are beautiful are actually kind of orchestrated into an overall landscape. Now, just zoom back and think of everything that you touch in a day, everything that you walk by a day and every experience of your day, you know, consuming and spinning of information. They all are going to need to be architected together and that’s kind of that beautiful perspective that you need to have to pull back and say, “Where are the most critical ones and where can I start doing some of that integration early on, that will be relevant to my consumer, to my customer that will allow me to be differentiated in the market.”

[0:18:31] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. So I mean Apple seems to be doing a great job of integrating all the media experiences that we take in on a day to day basis. What are some of your other favorite companies that are doing a really great job on these integrations right now?

[0:19:31] GG: I’d start to say that I am not sure there’s any of them that are doing really great but there are certainly ones that are making an effort to it and that’s really a good first step. We talk in the book a little bit about the commander term and we think that there is a few brands and few firms out there that are looking at the world more broadly than maybe their competitors and so a lot of these happened to be companies that grew up in the digital space. That doesn’t need to be held by that but if you think of the Amazon’s and you think of the Microsoft’s and you think of the Google’s/alphabets and you think of the Apple’s many of them have the luxury in that they started in the consumer electronics or consumer software side of things and because they were there, they had a far reach and their devices started being – their consumer started to bastardize them for uses beyond. And they started saying, “Well I am already touching them at their personal computer, I can now touch them at their phone and because of touching them at those both of places that I can go to the television screen or because I know they’re shopping behavior, I can integrate into different spaces,” but because of where they were at the time, they have a real commander kind of view of the world meaning that they touched many different touch points in a consumer’s life. So they are doing it as well as anybody. The question is are some of the product companies out there that maybe have been non-digital who also have maybe other significant touches in people’s lives. I know in the automotive industry, there’s lots of projections out there but upwards of 20% of people’s lives during any given week are being spent inside of a car, those are also significant touch points. The same thing with the desk. You know certain desks that people go to, those are significant points in life. So these other places have the potential but I would say that those brands I spoke about before might be some of them that are a little bit further along because of the nature of how they grew up.

[0:21:16] Charlie Hoehn: So let’s get into the strategy component of the book. Let’s continue with the car example, what strategy advice do you two have? What are the options for let’s just say an automotive company to prepare themselves for this changing world?

[0:21:35] WR: Well I think the first thing is the realization that they’ve come up with this product, companies selling a discreet product that is used by consumers for their transportation needs but they’re rapidly going to be in both the product and service business or they have a choice to be in the products and service business where sensors are embedded in cars, sensors embedded in transportation, sensors embedded in services. That are predecessor and successor to the use of the vehicle are now starting to converge and so automobile usage is becoming as much as a service as actually the ownership of the product. From a strategy perspective there are or what we have said in the book is that what’s happening for product industries is the economics or industrial economics of you know the economics manufacturing and both products, physical products which you don’t decline and value overtime. Are meeting the economics of information which one’s created information services, they don’t decline in value overtime. They don’t wear three uses, they can add users with a near zero variable cost and the convergence of those two forms of economics, product economics or industrial economics and information economics is leading to a reconsideration of the business model for product companies or for the auto company. So all the usage of a vehicle as you drive it, a product itself is streaming data off of it about how you are using it but also how the product is performing and that has value to the consumer once it can be classified, generalized and then determined how in fact the consumer might be able to get to realize some value for it. The main point is that products are no longer discreet. Products with sensors start to become information generating devices and those information-generating devices – Or that information, product and used data can actually be the basis for services. So, one of our main premises of the book is that people who grew up and executives who achieved a high level of success in the companies as product companies are starting to be faced with business models that involved the economics and information, and network effects and are starting to have to consider or think about two sided platform business models where you are selling a product. But you are also then potentially collecting information from that product and being able to bundle that into information-based services for the user and also for the other consumers of information.

[0:24:10] GG: That was a PHD of Corporate Strategy speaking there so.

[0:24:14] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah but it was really well stated and I actually took down a note of an idea just based on that, so thank you Warren.

[0:24:22] WR: So Greg will make it real now.

[0:24:23] GG: No, I’m not sure I will make it any more real but I will say a line or maybe three points. The first is, we lay this out in the text, but some of that Warren actually taught me early on when I first met him that simplified – that the term strategy is used so often. I can’t even say that it’s misused. He can, he has a PHD in it, but I can’t even say that it’s misused. But I can tell you that that it was a very loose common definition walking around most offices spaces. So we’ve managed to pull out first thing to say, “Which strategy are you talking about? Pick a strategy. Is it the corporate strategy? What business are you choosing to be in? Is it the business strategy? How are you going to choose to differentiate and compete in that business or is it the functional strategy which is really how you’re deploying the resources properly to be able to compete in that business that way?” and that seems to help. So if you take that connective piece in there, people are talking about connected strategy, which one are you talking about? Are you really going to allow your company to look at being in a different business or are you not? If you are in that business or at a different business are you really looking to compete in that differently because of all the sensor information and this product and used data that we talked about it in the book? Are you really talking about the role of your function or your capability? So that whole kind of script I think is something that for me at least is simplified the message as; What is it that we’re really talking about? But the second piece is coming up with a strategy and implementing a strategy are two entirely different things. So it is our belief that the formulation is challenging but not anywhere near as challenging as trying to actually do it and being realistic about doing it. And having a real plan and we talk about this first mile journey of what leaders need to do as they are considering these things and the roles that that implementation planning really has. And that formulation for a simple modation, I think as people think about strategy is that import concept and the last one is really to the leader. To all the listeners that are leaders or wanting to be leaders in their firm is the self-realization that they have a big role in this. They have a real big role and as these business models are decided, so much of it comes down to the inertia that they set that is really on their backs of either their use and what they have been trained and talked to do for all these years or the structure that they’ve put in place and allowed to constrain the future. But it is really those three components that I think need to be leaned into or dug deeper on for people that read this book.

[0:26:47] WR: And so to fill on that and really cut to the chase, so that our main premise is that in the connecting world you are not in the same business as you are currently. You will be in a fundamentally different business, if you are a service company or if you come from the world of digital or information economics or that type of company and you are considering getting into the product business that’s different. If you are in the product business and you are looking to embed sensors in your product. And add information services as fundamentally different than what you are currently in and you’re going to have to rethink whether you want to be in that business, this is the corporate strategy, what business are you, in it’s time to rethink. When you get into the business layer of strategy, how are we competing? You’re going to have different options to consider as you determine how do you differentiate yourself from others. And as Gregg eluded to, how do you deploy your resources functionally, the functional strategy it really comes down to what capabilities are you going to have to either acquire or adjust or potentially even digest from in order to deliver on that differentiation strategy to be in the business you choose in. These are fundamental identity issues for organizations that they are going to wrestle with.

[0:28:03] Charlie Hoehn: So let’s start to kind of wrap up with some hope for our people which is what have been some of the transformations that you’ve seen either with the companies you’ve worked with, the organizations, or even the students that you have taught, what have been the most promising or exciting transformations you have witnessed in those folks?

[0:28:27] GG: So I could start off with a couple of them. Some of them I could speak about, some that are maybe minor but can be pointed about and other ones need to be a little more general to protect the innocent if you will. But I mean some of the transformations, people are doing this, companies are doing this, leaders are doing this and some of it is just as easy as looking at the title. At the beginning, I’ll pick a classic example. At the beginning of one MBA course that we’ve chosen to see, I forced all of the students, I don’t know if many MBA programs do this but I forced all of the students to introduce themselves to one another and really become a cohort in that class alone. I make them talk about their name and their title and why they took the class and whatnot and seven years ago, there wasn’t a single title that was anywhere near connected. This is all brand new concepts. In the past two years, two semesters ago I had a student raised their hand and said, “The reason that I have taken this class is I read the syllabus for the class and I compared it to my role description and it is almost a one to one,” and when you ask what he was doing, he was the head of strategy for a connective division of an automotive company. Interesting but he said, “I figured if I take the class I would figure out what am I supposed to do with this job because no one has ever told me before.” So that little incremental pieces that says well companies are trying to put resources towards those things are quite interesting. The secondary piece is I was in a conversation just as recently as yesterday at more of the industry level and they said, “You know think about autonomous…” when they were making the comparison to the Wright Brothers they said, “These are two farmers and bicycle makers basically,” people that made bicycles in their garage that made airplanes fly. The resources that basically made the first airplanes were two individuals in a garage in bicycles. If you think about the autonomous industry which is one small example to connect the world, you have major multinational corporations with an incredible balance sheets and some of the brightest minds in the world all getting aligned and in lock step saying, “This will happen. Five years ago, no one – people were still arguing, “It could have happened.” Now the arguments within under a five-year period of when fully autonomous vehicles will be rolling on the road and so I think the biggest pieces for me is that companies are really spending the resources towards it. Startups all over the world are getting well-funded by venture money that’s appreciating it and industries are believing in it and Wall Street in some senses are standing behind it. So there’s tons of indicators that this is coming. I think that it is actually interesting that there is no particular script that says, “This is exactly how it is going to happen,” which makes it exciting.

[0:31:03] WR: Interesting. So a few years ago, someone who is influential in my life more from quips and comments and things said to me that, “You know a lot of people want to be different but far few are really are willing to change,” and I think that is the same for corporations in aggregate. A lot of executives would like to be different or lead a corporation in a different direction but fewer are willing to make the change. I think the way that we are trying to describe this to continue in this connected world, a lot of existing or legacy companies really need to start rethinking, invoking much more entrepreneurial things. Starting new things that are different without really knowing or believing that this is exactly the right thing to do, but we have to do something different. We have to start to change and those are the companies that I find actually quite refreshing. That are starting to embrace a little bit of the entrepreneurial things as we are going to have to dedicate a certain portion of the rewards and the current legacy business we are in towards being a different business and a new business and we accept that we are going to make mistakes, which is really very much the entrepreneurial model. We are going to try things we hope to fill quickly and not invest resources you know beyond a certain point. But we need to try a lot of different things and so without naming specific firms, but you see them in the press or you hear about these firms that are making acquisitions, that are trying to start something that is different and you have to wonder from the outside, “What’s going on in the inside of that firm?” They are adding capabilities to their firm, suggesting that they want to change because they somehow think they need to be different in the future. And so, that’s the encouraging piece of it. I mean there are models, it is essentially not prescriptive. We don’t say, “This is what you must do to be successful and learning to compete in the connective world”, what we are saying is, “You, the capabilities that have made you successful in the past are not the capabilities that you can rely on to keep you successful in the connected world and you need to start to probe and you need to start to invest in things without actually knowing what the ROI may be.” Start to prepare yourself as opposed to predict the ROI sort of stuff, so that is the encouraging piece. It’s out there. We talked about in terms of writing the book is that for putting these thoughts together we’ve gathered over years of experience and from learning from others and being influenced by ideas of others is that of if some people somewhere one, two, five maybe more ideally read this, think differently about something and causes them to do something a day, a week, a month, a year earlier than they might otherwise, then that may actually change the success for that individual or the individual’s corporation. That’s the inspirational piece for us to put the book together.

[0:33:51] Charlie Hoehn: So Gregg and Warren, can you leave our listeners with a brief challenge, something they can do maybe even today to get them moving in the direction you think they ought to be moving in?

[0:34:04] GG: I can go and the general challenge and then I will make them more specific, the general challenge is be brave and we say this several times. It is really be brave as a leader and I don’t think many people will ever be disappointed if you do things bravely. Maybe the more immediate challenge is don’t wait and we talk about this but I will unpack it a little bit that it’s not just rushing and start jamming all kinds of technology into your products happens. It’s if you really get this perspective, if you really believe as the market is starting to indicate that the world is connecting, you don’t need to wait for your product team or your IT team or your digital team to prepare all of your offerings to be able to go to market. Can you mirror it? And the example I give is again, from the auto industry an easy one for us, if you think autonomous is coming, how can you bring the autonomous experience to the future? We talk to car dealerships and OEM’s that have relationships with them and say, “If in the future you’re going to need to service a vehicle that might drive itself to the dealership, be serviced and then drive away, how are you going to get payment? Can you do remote payment today? Can you imagine that in the future you might need to get payment in the future that way? Why don’t you start that today? It is actually not unlikely, it’s positively going to impact your customer today, so why wait?” Why wait until the autonomous era to do that? So those are my two messages to the listeners, be brave and don’t wait.

[0:35:27] WR: And for me and this is really more targeted at large corporations that have maybe multi-decades of operation. They were founded by individuals so there was a founder somewhere in their history and the founder had an intent and that this person was an entrepreneur and they were great to Gregg’s point and they were making investments and they had a purpose for their corporation and if several decades later when the world has changed. When industry is evolving and there is a technological discontinuity and it has the potential to disrupt current industry that the founder created this company in, what would the founder’s message be? And I’ve got to believe, the founders would say, “You’ve got to get ahead of this. You’ve got to get out and get moving. You’ve got to start thinking about this.” They did it way back when and found that something that became a very large corporation. Well that’s just from my founder. I think all these decades later is got to be dawning him in the example I am using in the small sample of the firms that I am using is they are not around to do that and so it’s the question of starting to rethink new purpose for your organization. If the organization isn’t able to keep pace with the thinking that the individual is doing then what you do is you’ve got to start thinking about, “How do I compete in the future for place that it is connecting that disconnecting world?”

[0:36:46] Charlie Hoehn: Powerful words, what are the best ways to get in touch with you two to connect with you to maybe even work with you?

[0:36:56] GG: So you can get to us on our corporate website is one way which is www.cgsadvisors.com, that’s got all of our contact information out there. Of course, we’re both on LinkedIn and Twitter and all those places but I think the corporate website is probably the easiest to get everything consolidated.

[0:37:15] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent, well Gregg and Warren thank you so much. This has been excellent. Many thanks to Gregg Garrett and Warren Ritchie for being on the show. You can buy their book, Competing in the Connecting World, on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.