Interrupting Disruptors
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Streaming here
What if disruption wasn’t a destination, but the byproduct of a worthwhile journey? On this week’s episode of Commerce Chefs, Kyle and Tom chat about what disruption actually means and how leaders can use it to their advantage… without going overboard. They sit down with two incredible guests: Geoff Cottrill—marketing legend and previous exec at Converse, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and even the Grammy Foundation—and Khaleed Juma—former Creative Director of Shopify and now fractional CMO at various brands, including General Assembly Pizza. Together, they come to the conclusion that disruption is not about where you’re going, but how you get there and can better everything from your big picture mission to simply sending emails to your colleagues.
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EP. 6 TRANSCRIPT
Kyle So where are we headed, El Capitan?
Tom Yes.
Kyle Interesting, but for real, where are we going.
Tom Kyle, it's not about where we're going.
Kyle OK?
Tom It's about how we're going.
Kyle Aren't we going in a car on the road with a marginally annoying navigation system named Siri?
Tom Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's what everybody's doing. We're going to do it differently. We're going to head out there. No fixed point on the map, driving backwards on the wrong side of the road. Oh, people are going to take notice of us Kyle. Road trip.
Kyle This does not sound advisable. Are we there yet?
Tom We need to be different man. Disrupt the status quo.
Kyle I feel like this isn't the right application of disruption, Tom, but are we there yet now?
Tom Does it look like we're there? We're in the middle of a cow pasture.
Kyle Oh, that reminds me of a joke. Knock, knock.
Tom Who's there?
Kyle Moo.
Tom You're supposed to let me say who's there, and then you... Interrupting cow and like... it's a knock knock joke.
Kyle Moo.
Tom Get out.
Kyle Yes.
Tom Welcome to Commerce Chefs, a quirky and thought-provoking show for future focused commerce leaders. We're going to pit the world's most brilliant, inspiring and driven D2C visionaries, the commerce chefs with riveting questions to uncover their secret ingredients at the intersection of passion, performance and leadership and practice.
Kyle For the past decade, we've led teams of designers, strategists and digital wizards at one of the leading eCom agencies in the country to help brave brands become enduring classics.
Tom And we're here to indefinitely borrow strategies and pro tips that will make us all better leaders and make the brands we lead better moo.
Kyle Did you say lead better moo?
Tom I meant lead better too. It was a mistake.
Kyle Did you say a moostake? This is the best.
Tom Don't milk it.
Kyle Today, we're taking on one of the world's biggest, largest, ginormous, most talked about,.
Tom OK Kyle get to the point.
Kyle Disruption.
Tom Not to be confused with destruction, which we'll get to later.
Kyle What did I tell you about jumping ahead?
Tom Anyways, we want to know what it takes to be a disruptor and whether it's worth striving to be one in the first place.
Kyle To start off we chatted with an old friend.
Tom You just met him for the first time in the interview, man.
Kyle I know. I just want him to be an old friend. He's like the Tony Hawk of marketing.
Tom One day, buddy, one day.
Kyle So we chatted with new friend Geoff Cottrill, former CMO and marketing exec at a few little brands you may know Converse, Starbucks, Coca-Cola and even the Grammy Foundation. We talked about what exactly disruption is and the impact it needs to make.
Geoff That disruption is not the goal, disruption is the result. I have had conversations hundreds of times with people that I've worked with over the years and I've said in meetings, what is our goal? And oftentimes someone will say well, six percent growth. I will always say six percent growth is a result. That's not our goal. Our goal is to understand our consumers and to serve them with the products we make in meaningful ways. That's our goal. Our result should be six percent. So I think the same thing applies to the idea of disruption. Disruption for disruption sake is, I think, oftentimes a waste of time. And it's funny, when you use the word disruption, it automatically paints the picture of destruction. And those are two different word. But people think disruption means I'm going to destroy whatever is front of me and I'm going to redo the whole thing. Disruption is not necessarily destruction. I often find when people use that word, they're confusing it with something else.
Kyle So from Geoff's perspective, disruption isn't the goal. To Geoff's point, tom, why do you think disruption or DISRUPTION is often confused with destruction?
Tom I'm just going to breeze past what you're doing with that word and your voice. But-.
Kyle We also should.
Tom I feel like- we really should. I feel like it's because we often equate what happens with disruption by what we see, which can really easily, you know, with these large scale global brands that are absolutely disrupting an entire market or industry or economy even. You know, they are changing things at such a massive scale that we might be inclined to look at it as as destroying what's there. But that change, that effect, that byproduct shouldn't be confused with disruption.
Kyle Yeah, that's good. I kind of see in a way where it's like a a boat displacing water. I mean, you can look at the ripples and you can see all the stuff that's been displaced. But I mean, the real focus is the actual ship. It's not the ripples.
Tom So to get a second opinion on this, we brought in Khaleed Juma, the former creative director at Shopify and now a fractional CMO at various startups, including General Assembly Pizza. He framed disruption in a really different way. Rather than destruction, disruption to him is all about motivation.
Khaleed I started having kind of this conversation myself, and it starts with a definition. How do we define disruption? And I think disruption in its most basic form is a disturbance to the norm. It's something that disrupted, something that was already happening. So if you take normal and you change normal, that is disruption. I think my definition of disruption and the definition of disruption that we all get excited about is disruption that's motivated by a better outcome. And I think that's the way that we talk about disruption today, because I think disruption for the sake of disruption leaves the motivation question up for debate. And I think that that shouldn't be the case. In my opinion, if you're disrupting without a better outcome or better intention for a better outcome, that's when you kind of step into a space of differentiation. Differentiation doesn't necessarily require you to be motivated to make something better. It's the motivation there is to make something different. And then you kind of leave it up to the customer to decide whether it's better or worse. My favorite example of that is Coke and Pepsi. Coke and Pepsi are differentiated products and it is up to me to decide which one I like better, which is different than something that is innately motivated to make a process, a system, an interaction better.
Kyle So differentiation is about features and character, but disruption is the underlying motive of actually building those.
Tom So does that mean that disruption is then more important than differentiation?
Kyle Here's what Khaleed had to say.
Khaleed Undoubtedly for me, disruption is more important as long as the motivation is better. I think that there is an important role for differentiation to play in a sea of perfect competition. I think that when you're building a car, for example, that as far as specs go, we'll sit side by side with another car that has the exact same spec, differentiation is going to be important because that's how your business will make money. It'll stand out next to the thing that is in direct perfect. What I love about disruption, again, fueled by this motivation of being better is it begins to build the world that I want to live in forever. If people are always striving to make something better, the output of striving to make something better is something disruptive. Fuck yeah, let's disrupt things. Let's make them better. Let's all be motivated and view the world with a lens that allows us to see something, to build something, to see an opportunity to make it better and be motivated to do that.
Tom Khaleed mentioned an interesting point here about how disruption should be motivated by making something better.
Kyle But that's not always the case. There are so many companies today, especially in the tech scene, that are disrupting to simply disrupt.
Tom Everybody wants to be the next Uber or Airbnb without actually having a clear and necessary motivation behind it. Kyle, why do you think so many companies disrupt, just to disrupt?
Kyle Because it's cool. I mean, I genuinely think there's like a certain what do you say?
Tom Sex appeal. Street cred.
Kyle Sex appeal? Yeah street cred, that's better. I also think because it's maybe more fundamentally, because it's easier, right, to just do it for the sake of doing it is easier than using disruption as a tool to make something better, to have to connect your disruption back to a purpose or back to a why is a more difficult challenge. It's a lot easier to just say we're going to disrupt and do it way differently than it is to have a reason to that disruption in the first place. I have a question for you.
Tom I'm ready.
Kyle Why do you think disruption is so often glamorized?
Tom I mean, it really has to come down to the attention, the money and the power that is, I think, often equated to those that, you know, that are in the public eye as as big disruptors, as people like we just have this this need to look at others or outside as this ideal and whether it's celebrities or influencers or anything of that nature, we see this kind of pristine glamorization of something that looks idyllic, but we get honest and we get real. It's because that's appealing, because there's power and attention and money behind it.
Kyle That's interesting, and we actually asked Geoff what his opinion on this was as well.
Geoff Disruption is only glamorous when it works, right, and oftentimes, I think, I mean, disruption associated in the marketplace is often driven by ego. I could be that dumb CMO that fires the agency and tells the team I need a new team. And I was like, no, that would be the wrong way to disrupt this place. The right way would be to disrupt it from the inside with the people that already know what they're doing and to go from there. So disruption can often be ego driven. The CMO is the most disposable senior executive in the company. Right. You know, a lot of times people come in, you're on the clock as a CMO, you know, you're told by your recruiter you're not going to be there very long. So a lot of them come in and try to make a name for themselves immediately and to disrupt the way they're thinking and have a completely different point of view of what's already been done. And I think a lot of that's driven by ego to try to prove themselves versus really stepping back and taking yourself out of it or your ambitions out of it and putting the consumer back in the front and thinking about ways, new ways to serve and to connect with them.
Tom Glamorization, feeds, the ego. But like Khaleed says, it comes down to your motivation to disrupt if it's purely ego driven, like Geoff mentioned, you're not serving your customers.
Kyle But if you're motivated to disrupt in order to make the world a better place, disruption becomes more than a buzzword. It becomes a useful tool. And here's how Khaleed sees it.
Khaleed A disruption, in my opinion, is a byproduct of constantly striving for better if you are constantly motivated to get better. Sometimes that will be disruptive. Other times it'll be a marginal increase. But for the most part, it'll be net new than what you were doing previously, which is a disruption to the norm. That begs a bigger question, which I think about all the time, which is what are people who are trying to be disruptors doing? And is their motivation trying to be better and if their motivation is trying to be better then disruption will be the outcome or the byproduct of what they do. If they're out there trying to disrupt, will we get something better? Right now, we might be veering towards a world where the byproduct of disruption, which is can be monetary success, which can be industry recognition, is actually the motivating factor to disrupt versus, I think the world that we talked about a second ago that I want to live in where the motivation is better and disruption is the byproduct. We can make being better, wanting better, pursuing better the norm. It's no longer an outlier and disruption becomes the norm. And I think that all of a sudden takes away the sex appeal.
Kyle So the goal of a disruptor is to firstly understand your customers and be passionate enough to solve their problems. Then the next step, as Khaleed mentioned, is to understand how your disruption can become the new norm.
Tom And to become the new norm you need to understand what the norm actually looks like and question whether it really even needs the disruption to begin with.
Tom Kyle, do you know what's better than a cup of coffee?
Kyle No idea, Tom, what ever could that be?
Tom Silly, Kyle. Obviously, it's a healthy round of commerce curiosities. This is where we pick a curiosity of the day and see who can come up with the most interesting facts or answers.
Kyle We get to keep the coffee, though, right? Because I really need it.
Tom Yes. We went over this in episode one. We get to keep our coffees.
Kyle Yesssss. All right, so our question today is, what are the most impactful byproducts or happy accidents that change the world?
Tom Bring it on, big guy. Let's do this.
Kyle Here we go.
Tom Number one. Journey back with me to the 1960s, a chemist by the name of Dr. Spencer Silver is attempting to create the world's strongest adhesive. And what happens? He actually makes the world's weakest adhesive, which was absolutely useless at the time and could really only stick light things together for a temporary period of time. It sits on the shelf for decades, 1980s, boom. What comes of it? The Post-it note.
Kyle Well, that's pretty good. I think you lose this round because mine is pretty amazing. Here we go. Bubble wrap wasn't bubble wrap. It was supposed to be wallpaper.
Tom That's-
Kyle Yeah, that's I mean, spoiler alert didn't work out so well for them and they pivoted into packaging.
Tom Speaking of rooms, did you know that the Marriott Hotel and restaurant chain did not actually start out as a gigantic hospitality chain? They began selling root beer on the street. Rags to riches, my friend.
Kyle That is. I'm just going to go into the next one, which is speaking of food. Tom, did you know that Wrigley gum was just an afterthought? The actual product they were trying to sell was baking powder and they're just giving away is a freebie. Yeah. So the chewing gum was a literal byproduct of the sale, just like here by baking powder. Get some Wrigley's gum. And guess what? It's it's still here. Baking powder is not. So guess who won that round.
Tom All right. Well, bringing out the heavy hitter on this one, the makers of Transformers and GI Joe, the toughest of the tough toys, Hasbro, they didn't start as a toy company. They actually started as a company that sold textile remnants, the stuff that, you know, other people didn't use. And from there, they graduated into school supplies before making the leap to toys.
Kyle Interesting. Surprised they didn't move to bubble wrap.
Tom I think I win.
Kyle Yeah, well, you do. Except I've got the big, big kahuna right here. You ready? Taco Bell. The Taco Bell used to be a hot dog stand.
Tom Mooooo! sorry I didn't hear you.
Kyle Taco Bell used to be a hot dog stand, hot dogs.
Tom Bologna.
Kyle But just think about a hot dog stand that became Taco Bell, I don't know who who knows if this is real Tom.
Tom We might fact check that. But for the sake of this. Well, well done. Good, sir. And cheers. Thank you.
Kyle Yeah. Here's a hot dog for you.
Tom I'm the wiener.
Kyle OK, so we talked about what disruption is, but how do you decide whether or not you need to create this new norm?
Tom Khaleed had a pretty big truth bomb on this.
Khaleed I don't believe that everything we create that is good has to be disruptive. There's lots of good things we create in the world that don't have to necessarily make something that existed better. And I think theater and literature are great examples of that. Music is a phenomenal example of that. And all those creative outlets and all the spaces we are creating new things which are not going to be measured. At least I hope I'm the same. I hope that we're the same way in this. But I don't necessarily measure every book against the book that I read before it and say, was that better or worse?
Tom Kyle, do you think that everything that we create needs to be disrupted or using Khaleed's definition, motivated to make something better? And why or why not?
Kyle It's a good question. I would like to ask Jackson Pollock this question and see what he thinks. But since Jackson Pollock's not here, I would say like, no, not everything needs to be disrupted. But I think under the definition of what Khaleed saying is we should always be striving to make something better. So in that scenario, then by the by product of if you're doing stuff that's making things better, you're always going to be disrupting. But to go to kind of like what we're really uncovering here is if you go into it, just trying to disrupt it, you're missing the point. Tom, do you think there are specific scenarios where disruption always applies versus scenarios where it doesn't?
Tom I think the interesting thing to look at is, I mean, spring boarding off of what you were just saying and what Khaleed said, to make something better that has some objective quantitative elements behind it. You know, there are ways we can see if something is better and we see that a lot in the business space, a better process or a better product. I think there are scenarios where disruption doesn't necessarily apply in that manner. And I think if you look at the art world, for instance, visual arts or music, better is is subjective, but disruption is not the point. Evoking something is making a statement saying something. That's the point.
Kyle Yeah, well, and Geoff, talked to us about this in a business leadership context.
Geoff Disruption in your everyday business. You're typically at a company that's been there for a while. They've got their their practices in place. They've got their product in place. They've got their idea and core concept in place and it becomes a little bit more difficult. So you do need the degrees of disruption, small, medium, large. And sometimes disruption is a series of a lot of little things, not just one giant thing. If you get too focused on the disruption itself and don't pay attention to the fundamentals of what your business is or what it could be. And there's a lot of disruptors that have come in place. There's a lot of tech startups that get all this amazing attention. And then when you really dig in, they don't make any money and they don't necessarily have a long term ranged ability to make money. And you're like, wow, that's an amazing disruption. But like, no one's going to pay for it. So that's not really a big idea. It shouldn't prevent us from still trying. But you do if you're in business or you're trying to build a business, you have to have a business model, not just a good idea.
Tom What are some examples of disruptions or even small disruptions that you feel that leaders can make on a day to day basis that impact their organization in a positive way?
Kyle There's lots of ways that we can go about in small ways, making positive change. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is mindset and how we approach a situation or how we think as leaders or how our team thinks about something. So like reframing a problem, coming at it from a different angle, whatever that might be. The mindset of the day or the mindset around a problem is a really small but impactful way that we can make catalyze even further disruption.
Tom And so if we're able to use disruption in these small ways or incremental ways, like you're talking about, like Geoff mentioned, can we then use disruption as a tool? Like how how do we go about doing that?
Kyle Well, if you're going to disrupt, you need to define what your principles are.
Tom Right. And when we talked to Geoff, he outlined four principles that have guided his career so far.
Geoff The first one is celebrate your consumer, not yourself. Like, how do we serve them in a new way? How do we surprise them? And and oftentimes marketers don't look around their office and realize that, like, you know, or their vacation that they just took to the Caribbean. They don't realize the consumers that they serve paid for that. And if you have a sense of gratitude towards your consumers, then you're going to disrupt in ways that benefit them first. And that will benefit you second. Second be useful. OK, whoa, that's a big one, and then the third one was something we called own don't rent, meaning create your own marketing platforms, you know, don't borrow other people's equity, create your own things like a Nike Plus or Nike Running Club. Those are their assets. And then the fourth was when it comes to people, it was about understanding diversity and celebrating the differences in people, not the similarities. If we distill it all down to what makes us all the same, then somehow we're all the same, but we're not. We're all different.
Tom Now, how do we take these guiding principles as we scale and apply them to different ecosystems?
Kyle Khaleed gives a really great answer on this.
Khaleed Way number one, the duration of the project is not done until we have made modifications to it. So you build into the project cycle a feedback loop that says that better isn't complete until we've done Better 1.0 and Better 2.0. I've seen other organizations work where you create a shadow and that shadow is responsible for optimization. So you have builders and you have optimizers. And that model I've seen work quite well because you have a generalist skill set that's able to move a bit like a free radical across the organization. Two you've got to look at where your priorities are and where your customer priorities are and focus that energy. And three that I think comes from like a bit of focus. I think you have to focus across the organization with the kind of organization you're going to be. And if you are a one product organization, then that feedback loop will allow you to continue to implement across that one product. But if you're building a multitude of products, you have to understand how your products are going to interact with one another and where the need for better will have the most impact for that user. And I'm a firm believer in prioritizing impact over over everything else.
Tom In our pursuit of disruption we can so very easily lose sight of the motivation behind it. If the motivation is to make something better, then that needs to be the focus.
Kyle Disruption is not the destination, and for so many, disruption can be a distraction from the destination. Your why, the impact you're actually trying to make?
Tom So let's start focusing on the destination, the change, the betterment that you're seeking. And if disruption happens along the way, then so be it. But it isn't something to chase. And it shouldn't be the pitch that we're throwing around like a wiffle ball at a little league barbecue.
Kyle Making things better is disrupting. That will often be the result of true betterment. And the level of disruption is more than likely equated to the scope of the change you seek to make. But the change, the impact, that's the real thing.
Tom Don't get so caught up in getting a better hockey stick that you forget to score goals on the ice.
Kyle Sports!
Tom Don't get so caught up in getting a better guitar that you forget to make great music.
Kyle Arts!
Tom And just like the interrupting cow.
Kyle Moo!
Tom If you go right for disruption out of the gate, you're going to miss the punch line.
Kyle And the opportunity to make something that is intentionally and genuinely.
Tom Moooooooving.
Kyle Nice.
Kyle There you have it. That's episode six of Commerce Chefs. Thanks so much for listening.
Tom We hope you've gained some insight and perspective and maybe even feel a bit interrupted on whether or not disruption should be your focus.
Kyle And if you're looking for more interruptions to your day, make sure to join the Commerce Chefs community by following us on social @CommerceChefs. Ask us questions, send in requests. We want to hear from you.
Tom We're currently cooking up the next episode of Commerce Chefs, so tune in on April 1st for some top shelf April Fool's shenanigans.
Kyle Tom, can can we promise shenanigans?
Tom Absolutely.
Kyle Lastly, if you like this episode and want to support us, make sure to hit the subscribe button and leave us a five star rating and review. Until next time, this has been a pinch of Kyle.
Tom And a dash of Tom. We'll be cooking with you in two weeks.
Britt Awesome. Let's do one more take. Can you do it like your moo, like a more, like a more heftier, moo?
Kyle Like a, like a beefier moo?
Britt Yeah. Yeah. Like a beefier moo.
Tom A beefier moo Kyle.
Kyle Moooo.
Tom More like moooo.
Britt Yeah. More like. More like. Yeah.
Kyle Mooooooo.
Tom Yeah, that was better.
Kyle That sounds like a whale, though.