Disruption at work

'Disruption' seems to be the word of the year.  Many people I talk to - from bright-eyed future multi-millionaire start up junkies to CEOs - are grappling with the challenges brought by the emergence of new technologies.  It seems that talk about disruption, if not disruption itself, is reaching a tipping point.

On the one hand this is all new - the invention of smart phones and tablets, GPS, 4G, new platforms and private capital all make this an exciting time to be building a business ready for the future.

But on the other, it's not new at all.  From Luddites breaking cotton mills in the 1840's, to Dan Dare comics from the 1950's there have always been futurologists predicting a brave new world.  So is it different this time?  Well maybe.  But I'd argue that our world has been being disrupted around us for years - certainly right through my working life.  From laptops to email to mobiles to Blackberry to smart phones to Twitter to VR to 3D printing to visualisation to Blockchain our working world is constantly changing.  It's a matter of recognizing what's happening, seizing the opportunity and resisting allowing 'business as usual' to kill the new.

I'd highly recommend a read of 'Flash Boys' by Michael Lewis for a perfect example of the confluence of the unintended consequences of new regulation and ever faster processing speeds fuelled the exponential growth in High Frequency Trading.  I'm not a banker and can't pretend to understand all the technical details, but it's a perfect example of technological change and other exogenous factors (in this case regulation) changing a market for ever.

So what's the lesson?  Be curious, explore the new and think laterally about the future.  Change has come, more change is coming - don't keep your head buried in the sand.....

All views my own.