Deborah Hopkins: Revolutionary Transformations in Business

The thing that's also happening here and why we really, I think this revolution comment is not just for fun. It really is what is going on. There is a revolution happening in corporate America for sure. It is a recognition that as those factors come together, you no longer can think about how you're having that dialogue with your customer. They are telling you how you're going to have the dialogue with them. We are seeing this advent of big data and the digitization of information. You really have to think about as sitting there as a CEO, that I have a very different challenge on my hands on how to have this interactive conversation with my customers and how to be able to pivot based on that information. When I used to have these very long design cycles and I could come back a year, a year and a half later and, and think perhaps I had presented something differently by then you could be absolutely out of business. So it is a real, real revolution because not only do you have to think about perhaps new skills and capabilities of the people that are going to deliver these types of change services and increased rich customer experiences, but you have to then turn around and say, the entire way I run my company, very old, it's very vertical. It thinks in hierarchies where somebody on top would speak and the message would come down. And even email, which you could argue is a modern, I don't know, sometimes I think it's a real pain. But email, when you think about it, is very vertical, it's very connected. You decide exactly who's going to see what. And it really is, frankly, frank, email is going to go away and it won't be that long because it really no longer serves the way we choose to communicate because all of the way corporations run is very vertical. And now, yes, people have matrix organizations and so forth, but it's an extremely siloed way of doing business. The challenge of this new world is none of it works vertically, it all works horizontally. It all is networked. So you're going from vertical hierarchies to, to very dynamic, ever changing networks and it really challenges everything you do inside a company. So this revolution is big and it's happening. And we know because we're ending up talking to a lot of these companies who are trying to understand some of the things and steps that we've taken on that front. But the revolution is really here and it's a big deal because frankly, without trying to make that change and react to those impacts, there are huge opportunities here. And really think about really the competitors that are also knocking at our door. It used to be when you were sitting there and running a company, first of all, we all got used to cycles, and we thought, well, the cycle's going to. Well, no, this is not a cycle. This is a fundamental shift. And then when you were sitting at a bank, you'd say, oh, gee, what's J.P. morgan doing? I better find out what those guys at Wells are doing. Forget that. We better worry what Jack Dorsey's doing up in San Francisco. We better worry about what Bezos is working on up at Amazon, and we better think about those guys down in Cupertino, because that is where the competition's going to come from. And that, again, will happen horizontally and through partnerships. So all these things come together to say a revolution is at hand.