Bob Collymore on preparing for current and future disruptions

“Digital disruption is no longer a novel phenomenon. It impacts each industry and economic sector in myriad ways,” said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore in his speech at the United States International University Africa during the first Chancellors public lecture on June 7th.

Collymore added that every sector has experienced upheaval in one form or another and disruption is currently transforming the business world in myriad ways.

The lecture saw industry leaders, policy makers, government, researchers, academia, civil society and students discuss how to leverage on the current digital disruptions and design the preferred future.

The Chancellor’s Public Lecture was designed to inform, educate, catalyze conversations, and lead to solutions and action. The public lectures will be an annual event from which leaders in government, private sector, media, civil society and universities will provide direction and strategy for solving the many challenges that we face as a country.

Below is Collymore’s full lecture on disruption.

The Sound of Disruption

If I was to ask you what you did first thing every morning I would probably get the same response from each of you: you check your phone.
If I had asked the same question 20 years ago, or even 200 years ago, the answers would have been very different, and probably unique to each one of you here today.
Our lives are being disrupted – one second at a time.
Life today is influenced by science and technology more than it ever has been in the past – and yet the way we react to change has largely stayed the same since the age of the cave man.
Once change arrives, we first fear it, then we examine it, and then slowly, we adapt it or to it.
But what if we could control the disruption that is coming? Harness it to our own will and timing?
In tomorrow’s world, this is more likely to be the norm.
Smart technologies will start to evolve on their own and resolve challenges that have plagued humankind since the beginning of time.
But to get there – we need to figure out: what is disruption?
How do you prepare for it?

The Original Disruption

A salesman checks a customer's iPhone at a mobile phone store in New Delhi, India, July 27, 2016. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

But before we talk about some of the forces that are influencing us today, allow me to take you back the beginning of time.
Let’s revisit the world’s biggest disruption.
The Big Bang specifically.
For those who believe in science, the Big Bang is the genesis of our origins – the moment when forces collided, gases merged and our world was formed.
I want you to imagine that moment in time.
Picture what change looked like, felt like, or even sounded like.
According to NASA and the theories of physics, if we were to look at the Universe one second after the Big Bang, what we would see “is a 10-billion degree sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons, and neutrinos”.
That’s science talk for a lot of activity.
What it means is that, even seconds after major forces have impacted our world, there are new organisms that have already adapted, and are already hard at work conforming to new normal.
Amazingly, despite being called the ‘Big Bang’, this event took place in almost complete silence.
The Big Bang was supersonic change at a whisper.
I use this example to remind you that often change does not announce itself, it comes silently.
This one event – that took place over 13.7 billion years ago – continues to influence us today.
If you want to understand disruption – you must learn to respect that it is defined by very silent but impactful forces that are constantly shaping our world.

The Great Spark

Another major disruption just a little bit noisier when it arrived.
Fire.
It brought with it a myriad of advantages that enabled the human race to become the dominant species on our earth.
Around 400,000 years ago, the first evidence that humans could control fire started emerging.
Archeologists have found evidence of controlled fire in ancient campfires, or “hearths,” where carbonized materials have been found in places where natural fires wouldn’t usually burn.
Fire allowed those early humans the ability to extend the hours of light – allowing them to harvest or hunt more efficiently.
It provided the ability to cook their food, allowing for harmful bacteria to be eliminated and driving the growth of larger populations.
It forced people to gather and live in groups – the very basis for human culture today.
Some scientists even say that fire inspired people to start learning from each other, the basis for the very first schools.
Around these warm hearths spread knowledge of which crops would succeed, which areas were yet to be explored, or which leaders were suitable to run the clan.
The discovery of fire demonstrated the use of a new technology to improve our lives, and those early fireplaces shaped our culture and history in ways no other technology has done since.
Fire disrupted life as humans knew it, and inspired the crackle of change.

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One Second After the Big Bang

When we think about disruption today, we often think about companies like Uber or Air BnB, who have upended traditional business models by reshaping the way businesses are run.
But let’s look at the case of two companies who had very different reactions to disruption.
Blockbuster used to be the most famous video store in America.
At its peak, it operated 9,000 stores nationwide, bringing in $6 billion in annual revenues.
In 1989 – just four years after it started operations – the company would open a new outlet every 17 hours – there was one on every corner.
But in 2013, something happened.
Another company, Netflix, began to gain popularity.
Consumers no longer had to go out and rent movies, they could simply stream them from the comfort of their homes.
Logically, Blockbuster should have the seen this coming. The signs were there.
Increased data availability, the staggering growth of video content and the decreasing cost of connectivity were all signals that people would stop visiting their stores someday.
In fact, the CEO of Netflix approached Blockbuster in 2000 to explore a possible partnership: he was thrown out of the room.
Blockbuster just couldn’t imagine what disruption the big bang of internet would have on their business.
While Blockbuster confined itself to its cocoon and refused to acknowledge the wave of change coming its way, another well-known CEO saw those same forces start to impact his business, and made the decision to sell what was then one of the most profitable music labels.
20 years ago, Polygram had grown so big it had names as diverse as Bob Marley and Def Leppard on its books.
But they had grown during a different era – when the LP and the music cassette were king.
In 1998, Polygram’s CEO came across some research showing that consumers were using a new technology known as the ‘CD-ROM’, which allowed them to store and listen to more music in better definition.
(For the younger ones in the room, that’s what we used to play music on before MP3’s came into being).
Based on that research, he sold his company and saved Polygram the indignity of a slow and painful death due to disruption.
In short, he reacted within a second of the Big Bang that was transforming his industry.

The New Big Bang Theory

I mentioned that change does not announce itself, it comes silently.
I would add that it also comes very quickly.
We are currently undergoing one of the biggest transformations in the history of mankind.

Every day, we create 2.5 Quintillion Bytes of Data.
For perspective, in 1992, the world was creating 100GB of data per day.
Some of you can create more than that in a year.
By next year, the world will be producing 50,000 GB per second.
Every year we create 8 million new songs, two million new books, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 products.
Many are calling this the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is set to fundamentally shift the way we work and play.
Technologies such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, Big Data, the Internet of Things, 3-D printing, biotech, and quantum computing are all leveraging this explosion in data to create the basis of a new way of living.
And everything is getting connected.
Today, your fridge can talk to your phone to tell you when it needs restocking.
Fitbits are already going beyond tracking steps to monitoring sleep and heartbeats, feeding that information back to doctors who can monitor their patients in real time.
Plane engines speak to their manufacturers and update in real time so that the right fixes are made once they are back on the ground.
I know people in Kenya who are using their phones to control the lighting in their houses, or monitor who is at the door in real time.
Industry researchers IDC project that by 2020, 220 billion connected devices will be in use.
This truly is the era of the Internet of Everything.
What it means is that opportunity is only a connection away.
In today’s world, in the time it takes to create an app, whole business models can created, while others will collapse.
We are now a limitless planet, tied together by technology.
Technology has democratized access to markets in ways never imagined.
Today, the world is a single marketplace; we are one.
With a simple internet connection, a honey trader in Kitui can trade with an Australian buyer, and vice versa.
All signs are that we are heading towards the “Big Bang” moment for technology.

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Understanding Disruption Today

But let’s bring this closer to home.
Where does Africa sit in this story of evolution?
Are we equipping our people with the right skills?
Or are we force fitting the mindset of an era that came to its end long ago?
The biggest challenge we have today is to ensure that we start to look for the spark – or the fire – that will define our future.
Given the remarkable shifts now taking place, the question then becomes: how do you succeed in this new world order?
Because of the pace of evolution, the answer to this can change on an almost daily basis.
For instance, today’s MBA students have probably spent their lives learning about business models that are about to go the Blockbuster route.
We are currently sitting in a university that has built its name over nearly 50 years through its network of professors, its investments in infrastructure, and its commitment to delivering ‘education that takes you places’.
What happens when students realise that they can get customized curricula at a fraction of the fee from the world’s best universities from the comfort of their homes?
The doctors that will graduate from our universities today are likely to have to re-learn how to manage medicine in an age where computers will start to diagnose and offer treatments.
The ‘Uberisation’ of the taxi field is already becoming a thing of the past as self-driving cars start to rollout more commercially.
Who is equipping these taxi drivers with skills so that they can survive these kind of shifts?
Who is building the knowledge base for our doctors so that they can get the best out of tools like Fitbits?
Who is equipping our teachers with the skills to lecture in a data rich environment?

Managing Disruption Tomorrow

The answer to these questions holds the key to managing disruptive environments.
We must manage disruption by harnessing these new technologies to our needs.
Remember the story of the cave men and the fire?
When we think about managing disruption, we must look for that single spark that will inspire change in our business.
This is not a problem for tomorrow’s leaders; it is an issue we must all address now.
A recent survey by New Vantage Partners finds that nearly half of the top executives of the world’s biggest firms believe that their firm may be at risk of major disruption in the coming decade.
These leaders are envisioning a future where “change is coming fast” and it may be “transform or die”.
The study finds that disruption will come from a range of emerging capabilities, including Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, digital technologies, cloud computing, Block chain, and new Fin Tech models.
I can almost guarantee that none of us in this room has ever studied or prepared for any of these technologies.
How can we prepare for these changes?
For universities like USIU, it may mean a move towards a more individualized curriculum that adapts to the student, rather than reliance on a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
For industries such as banking, it may mean a complete overhaul of how they operate.
Cash may not be king much longer.
Many industry experts believe that crypto currencies provide more inclusive financial systems and drive wider competition in the finance sector.
In China, it is possible to transfer money through Alipay, a mobile payment app used by more than 120 million people, using only your face as credentials.
Machine intelligence is helping companies make better decisions, by putting bots and robots in charge of identifying the next big trend.
Bots are being used by fashion companies to examine photos uploaded to social media to determine the next big fashion trend.
Nano-Manufacturing is creating big developments out of the smallest of resources.
It can be used to manufacture products as small as proteins that can be modified to either carry or become drugs in order to treat disease at a molecular level.
In agriculture, aeroponics is becoming a trend to watch.
It allows any space (even this room) to become a viable farm.
The innovation replaces sunlight with LED lighting, and uses a minimal amount of water to spread a mist around plants.
No soil, no sun, no land – what would this mean for the big ranches we have in the Rift Valley?
And these massive changes are not limited to big industry.
What will your cleaning lady do once companies like TaskRabbit come into town?
The App links freelance workers with jobs, from handymen to movers to assistants.
It’s growing so big that it is already on the verge of a sale so it can expand into emerging territories like Africa where unemployment is a huge concern.

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Harnessing Disruption

The truth is, we can’t anticipate what is going to happen in this new universe.
What we do know is that we are in the middle of a Big Bang moment that will fundamentally change the way we work, live and play.
So how do we prepare for this coming wave of change?
What we can do is create the right type of individuals and businesses that can succeed in this era of change.
A recent Deloitte and MIT SMR survey finds that the biggest threats facing companies and individuals in this era of disruption is being inflexible and ignoring the signs of change.
To put in some context, just 12% of the Fortune 500 companies from 1955 are still in business.
Almost all of them were affected by the fact that they were too stubborn to change – they refused to embrace disruption and became victims of the Big Bang.
It is worth noting that disruption does not always mean adopting the latest technology – sometimes it means simply re-using existing technology for new purposes.
Apple has been notoriously famous for their ability to recognize the signals before they become trends.
But their introduction of the iPod in 2001 was not particularly revolutionary, as MP3 players had already been in the market for over 10 years.
But as Steve Jobs termed it – the existing options were “crap”.
So what he did was create a stylish device with increased storage.
We all know how that worked out for Apple.
But the true success of the iPod lies in its role as the origin of the digital music wave.
Today, Apple Music is the company’s only growing revenue stream and its second biggest profit driver – simply because the decision that Apple made 17 years ago has revolutionised how music is bought today.
This is a great example of how to harness the power of disruption – by using technology to develop new business models and reinventing the customer experience.
Using technology, Apple positioned itself as the middleman and dematerialized the process of buying music so that the customer –and their revenues – benefitted.
This type of thinking is easily applicable to any other industry.
Before I close my comments, I would like us to think about how this works at a more personal level.
Perhaps Barack Obama put it best in his farewell speech when he said: “The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that will make a lot of good jobs obsolete.”
How will you compete in a job market where the robots are not only taking up more of the workload, they are learning how to do your job better than you, at exponential rates?
For me, the biggest lesson is that disruption does not wait for you to prepare yourself; it swoops in silently, but quickly.
You might not know exactly when or where it will happen, but you can read the signs and just like Netflix, you can use these signs to position yourself to ride the wave of disruption.

We must remember that what we do next, and how we do it, will define our evolution in ways that no technological disruption has done yet.
It starts with you, and it starts now.

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