Disruptor or Disrupted

Disruptor or Disrupted.

About two months ago, one of our finance people came to me and he told me he was really worried about his job security because AI can automate so much of what he does. And he's absolutely right about the first part of that, and he's completely wrong about the second part. See, he was confusing the tasks he performs with the value that he provides.

I think it's not so much that AI is going to take everyone's job. I think the question is how much of what we do today can be automated. And if it is automated, then what value do we provide from that point forward?

And of course companies have the same concerns. Although here's the thing: I think that companies are making the same mistakes that employees are making in some cases, in that just as employees confuse the tasks they perform with the value they provide, I think in some cases companies confuse what they make and sell with what their customers are actually buying.

So before I get into the conversation I had with our finance person, indulge me for a minute or two while I go back in time and we look at some examples of technology being disruptive.

The first example is with newspapers. In the '90s, they were really disrupted by the internet, and a lot of them went out of business. And I would say that many of them saw their value as being very efficient at putting ink on paper and getting that paper distributed to houses.

But other papers, like The Wall Street Journal, saw it as an opportunity, and they took real advantage of the internet and they took real advantage of digital. There are so many things you can do now with video and interactive.

And as a matter of fact, I don't read the newspaper anymore. I have it read out loud to me while I'm running or biking in the morning. So again, are you selling ink on paper and a distribution system, or are you selling really good news and analysis that people will value consuming wherever they happen to be?

Of course, there's the example of Blockbuster. For many, many years, I would spend a Friday night browsing the VHS or DVDs, finding that perfect video for that night.

And I remember it was the late '90s when I was working at Oracle, and I actually visited a company called Netflix outside of Santa Cruz. They had this great business model where they would mail you DVDs. And again, look at what happened to each company.

I think Blockbuster saw themselves as providing a warehouse where you could rent media of movies. Netflix understood that people wanted the convenience of having it sent to them. They wanted recommendations to be made for them. They understood that DVDs were going to be going away with technology and that it would become streaming. They understood that if they're streaming, the importance of content.

And so they started producing shows. They built studios, and voilà. Netflix is now a giant, and unfortunately, Blockbuster is just a memory.

The thing that's interesting about this is it's often the behemoth, the giant, the gorilla in the industry who gets disrupted by the tiny company that saw technology differently and understood what people really wanted to buy, and used technology to make that happen and really leapfrog the bigger companies.

Obviously, no one knows exactly what's going to happen. But I don't think we're going to have a job apocalypse. What I think is going to happen is AI is going to disrupt things, and it's going to create industries and jobs that we never even thought of.

I know that when I was at Oracle, early on, I went into a company that was implementing an accounts payable system, and we looked at hundreds of people in this big company who were just stapling receipts to invoices. If they matched, they stapled them together. If they didn't, they put them in a pile for a manager to review.

And we were talking about how automation was going to make all of that go away, because it would all be done automatically. And I thought, oh my God, look at these 200 people. These are great people, and they're going to lose their jobs. What are they going to do?

Well, obviously I didn't follow those people, but I would bet that they got jobs that were a lot more fulfilling than stapling pieces of paper together.

So now that brings me back to my conversation with our finance person. I said, you know, I have realized for probably three years now that so much of what you do I could automate with scripts, but I don't think you really understand what I value you for.

I told him that I don't see him as somebody who just enters transactions and reconciles accounts. I see him as somebody really smart who is looking over our business, noticing trends and not just spotting things, but having that sort of human intuition and understanding that says, "This isn't right, even though it looks right. I need to raise this and we need to do something about it."

He said, okay, fine, that's fair. But what happens when, you know, I'm spending 20 hours doing a certain task and all of a sudden with automation it's now only taking me ten? Does that mean that my hours get cut?

And I said, no. First off, figure out how to automate it so you can turn those 20 hours into ten. And then with those other ten hours, do something valuable for the company. Leverage it. Give us something that we didn't have that will make us more competitive. It's more than just operations and finance.

So I was really excited when he came back later with this great dashboard. He was able to show us, in a way that we could drill down, trends and something that we really had not paid any attention to before, which was our non-project-related costs—things like subscriptions and other things that we just sort of took for granted.

We could actually see trends and see when they were getting out of control or when something needed to be managed. That was a perfect example of him making himself even more valuable, and largely because of the technology.

And the same applies to us. Yes, we make corporate videos. But our clients aren't really buying just videos. They're buying clear, compelling communication of complex products to sophisticated business audiences.

So the question becomes not, how do we protect ourselves from the disruptive technology? It's, how do we use that technology to give our customers something they'll value so much more?

So inspired by him, I went ahead and created what I thought to be the three commandments of how companies and employees can successfully not only navigate, but thrive in this new era of new technologies.

One: Know your real value.
What does the customer actually value about what you provide?

Two: Use technology to multiply that value.
Don't protect the old way of doing the work. Use technology to make the valuable part better.

Three: Move before you're forced to.
Don't wait for your customers or your competitors to tell you what's possible. Figure it out yourself.

So don't confuse the task you perform with the value you provide. Know your real value. Use technology to multiply it, and move before you're forced to.

So finally, I return to the opening question: disrupted or disruptor? The thing is, technology doesn't make that decision for us. We make it.

So I ask you: which one will you be?