LONDON SPEAKER INSPIRE EVENT FOR PULL AGENCY - SEPT 2018
Fireside chat. On the one hand they are quite general (and inspired by the list you gave me) so they give you plenty of scope to cover a lot of topics. On the other, they are designed to provoke answers that help our audience from all sorts of businesses learn on a practical level what they should or could do to make innovation and change happen back at the ranch.
Tell us a little bit about your life story and work to date.
Clearly you have been a huge catalyst for disruption, change and innovation in your working life. You're not a ‘tech’[ so what do you think equipped you to play this role?
You say in your book that "organisations are designed and built to be resilient, to resist change", so how do we actively promote and provoke disruption in our workplaces? What have you learnt about encouraging disruption, change and innovation in businesses that are culturally designed to resist those things?
One of your modus operandi seems to be to immerse yourself in what you see as promising technologies until you can work out what the implications are. And then go and make things happen. That's pretty unusual for a non-tech person. Can you tell us more about that and what we might be able to learn from it?
We've touched on purpose, ethics and empathy. One of your favourite themes seems to be transparency. You seem to have been very adept at just telling people how things are in your work life. Most people tend not to say what they really think. How do you operate?
When we think of the most innovative companies at any one moment in time, we tend to think of relatively new businesses that have created massive disruption like say Tesla and Uber. But what about long-established companies? We have folks from BMW here for instance. BMW's world is being turned upside down. Their new competitors are actually Apple and Google. What can they do to be disrupters rather than disrupted?