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Editor's Notes

• #2: I can’t tell you how excited I am to have this opportunity to share with you this evening. I’m even excited to be going first because then I get all the fresh energy in the house. Can I get a HooHa?   My topic tonight is digital disruption and what it means to young hustlers like you and me.
• #3:  The effects of technology on media and society has been my favourite topic since I completed my honours in Media Studies at Wits in 2006. I could see how the web was opening up a new public space where we would share and receive our news and info from each other, instead of from the capitalist machinery of the mass media. That was back in 06 before Facebook was a real thing, but If you think about how you get your news today, you’ll see my predictions were bang on the money!
• #4: Later, I witnessed digital disruption rip through the PR industry in my early career. Where we were just getting to grips with the basic elements of PR: press release, the media list and the press conference, almost overnight it became all about the social media, video and online reputation and we had to sink or swim. I wasn’t about to take that risk so I jumped ship.
• #5: I went across to Quirk, one of the first purely digital agencies in SA and joined a very young team who were learning as they went along. We literally wrote the textbook for what was becoming known as digital or e-marketing. If you’re interested in this subject, and every entrepreneur should be, I recommend you download it for free from redandyellow.co.za. The Quirk textbook is now the definitive guide in more than 200 universities around the world.    So that was the beginning of my crash course in Digital Disruption. But by no means the end.
• #6: Digital Disruption is, Like Lord Shiva here, both destructive and creative and it is one of the greatest forces restructuring business and society today.   Harvard Business School professor and the guy who coined the term Digital Disruption Clayton Christensen back in 95 defines it as something that “displaces an existing market, industry, or technology and produces something new, more efficient and worthwhile
• #7: In the last decade we’ve seen countless “disruptive” innovations pop up, making the old ways of doing things near redundant.   For instance, we’ve all seen how Uber has disrupted the taxi industry and AirBnB is toppling hotel operators around the world. And every business is being forced to take notice.
• #8: In fact. this year, when asked to assess the future of business, 74% of CEOs said technological advances were the #1 worry keeping 74% of CEOs up at night.
• #9: But despite the fact that they are aware of the threat, one of the most consistent patterns is the failure of leading companies to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change.   But as I like to say. It’s no problem for me, it’s a problem for you!
• #10: Me? I am working on my disruptive concept because I see opportunities everywhere. Blame it on the internet, the mobile phone and social media combined, but suddenly the playing fields are level, or even tilting in favour of the agile small business. We now have an unprecendented opportunity to reshape our industries, transform our country and power a better quality of life. You just need to think like a consumer and identify their typical gripes, and then think about how you would do it better, differently, by leveraging the new digital tools available to you.   So my question is: Which industry are you ready to disrupt?
• #11: You don’t have to invent something as ambitious as Facebook to win in this rapidly changing world. You can leverage other disruptive ideas to build your own. Just Like I Know A Guy. A Facebook page is not disruptive, but a page that overhauls the recruitment industry by cutting them out entirely. That’s disruptive.
• #12:  And the best part of it all is, the consumer is on our side!   Did you know that Amazon's top-selling cereal right now is not Cheerios but a gluten-free brand of oats called Bob's Red Mill?  
• #13: And you just need take a look at how Craft beer is threatening SAB, or in the US example, is matching budweiser barrel for barrel, and you see the shift in consumer tastes towards favouring the small players. The number of neighbourhood markets popping up recently is another good sign that consumers are leaning towards small-scale and locally produced goods over mass-produced products from big corporations. So In invite you to join us - an insurgent group of digitally-enabled micro-entrepreneurs gnawing away at the dominance of multibillion-dollar brands and their giant marketing budgets. The time to make your move is now.
• #14: If we don’t use technology and changing consumer behaviours to our advantage, you can be sure another crazy bunch of upstarts will. I thank you.