First impressions of the Emerging Leaders Program

Photo: BOSS AFR Emerging Leaders

I was largely unaware of the Emerging Leaders Program until I was kindly offered an invitation by the Business School to attend the most recent networking event, which centred on an interactive Q&A session with Sue Cato – one of Australia’s top-tier corporate communications experts.

Sue Cato’s reputation as one of the most influential businesswomen in Australia promised a fascinating Q&A session. Sue’s talk was engaging and interesting, and it was invaluable for someone such as myself, right at the beginning of my career, to have the opportunity to listen to Sue explain how she became who she is today, and why she made the choices she did along the way.

Prior to the event, I assumed that there would be quite a few students like myself there, but once I’d arrived, I quickly realised that the vast majority were established professionals. In fact, a couple of people saw my University of Sydney Business School nametag and assumed I was an academic, not a student!

It’s quite rare that I get to attend a networking event that isn’t full of students or new graduates, and I therefore found the opportunity to talk to more experienced professionals both refreshing and interesting.

Nobody minded that I was a student, and they were eager both to impart their wisdom, and to talk to me about today’s student experience. Perhaps because of the nature of the people in the room, everybody was also highly approachable and eager to meet one another, which made for a comfortable networking experience.

One of the strongest insights I gained from the evening was that it’s very rare for people to be able predict what they’ll be doing one or two decades down the track, in terms of their career. University students are particularly prone to plotting their future career paths within the context of their current studies and immediate ambitions, and it was really interesting to talk to a wide range of people at varying stages in their careers, and learn about their career paths and how different their jobs are to the expectations they had five, ten or even twenty years ago.

The highlight of the evening, though, was definitely the Q&A with Sue Cato. To get the opportunity to listen to and ask questions of someone who has been so successful and influential throughout their career was fantastic.

Hearing her talk about the various decisions she’s made throughout her career, and what drove her to make those decisions was incredibly interesting. What was particularly valuable from my perspective was being able to gain a little insight into how someone such as Sue sees the world. She talked quite a lot about her early childhood and the remarkable things she achieved from a young age, and what really spoke to me was the clear drive, energy and confidence that informs her world view and personality.

Overall, I came away from the Emerging Leaders event extremely impressed. The program is a unique opportunity to meet and hear from experienced professionals, who will help you clarify and shape the direction you want your own career to take.

As a young person at the beginning of their career, this is an invaluable opportunity. Attend the events with an open and positive mindset, meet as many people and take as much knowledge from each as possible, and the sky’s the limit. I would highly recommend the Program to any ambitious young professional.

Author: Rory Aston James
Graduate of Master of Management (CEMS) and scholarship recipient at the University of Sydney Business School

What is Digital Disruption? (Part 2)

What is disruptive about digital change?

Our observation is that disruptive change is change that disrupts our understanding of the world.

Digital disruption changes the basis on which we make sense of, give meaning to and understand our business and work-life practices.

An example might illustrate this. The emergence of devices such as the iPad has changed fundamentally not only how we consume data and documents, how we communicate, how we learn and how we perform various business practices but also more fundamentally our understanding of what a computer or phone is, what counts as a workplace, or what an appropriate business meeting looks like. In consequence it has also brought about new professional identities such as that of the modern tech-savvy road warrior manager.

The nature and magnitude of these changes was hardly predictable when the iPad was released (it is worth googling and reading the commentary at the time). Rather, they are the result of continuous social sense-making and adaption processes.

We argue that digital disruption does not simply change markets, or present innovative business ideas (although that is one result).

Digital disruption is not merely the digitisation of an existing business model or the replacement with a digital alternative, such as putting University lecture content online or selling products through online shops. This is a far too limited understanding.

How to understand Digital Disruption?

Disruptive change cannot be grasped by merely extrapolating into the future what we know today. Such an attempt at forecasting leaves out that actors within traditional business practices innovate using digital technologies, they do not merely stand still and wait to be disrupted by some mysterious force.

More importantly, as these business practices change so does our understanding of what counts as meaningful, valuable, and the right way of performing these business practices, which brings about further changes.

Consequently, the main argument is that some digital innovations disrupt the very basis on which we understand the concepts by which any extrapolations into the future are made, such as ‘business value’, ‘communication’, ‘what counts as a transaction or content or a product’, ‘ ways of working’, ‘what counts as a workplace’ and so on.

Forecasting the impact of digital disruption becomes impossible when the disruption occurs to the very basis on which we create a predictive model. When what counts as a fact changes, any attempt to build a prediction on the known facts of today will fail. All data collection, even big data, involves some data selection and interpretations which are always based on these notions of self-evident fact.

What can we do then?

What is needed instead is a better understanding of how to cope with and shape disruption, how to engage in productive sense-making processes in order to advance our understanding of industry processes, business value etc. and thus to innovate and adapt as digital disruption unfolds within a particular sector or industry.

As a consequence, we need more:

1. foundational research into the particular nature and structure of disruptive change processes and
2. applied research initiatives as part of an ongoing sense-making and adaption process in order to shape the disruptive processes as they occur in particular sectors and industries.

Author : Associate Professor Kai Riemer
Chair of Discipline of Business Information Systems, University of Sydney Business School
Kai's research covers the areas of Enterprise Social Media, Digital Disruption, Technology Appropriation and Sense-Making, Virtual Work, and the Philosophy of Technology. You can read more at his blog. Also follow Kai on Twitter.

What is Digital Disruption? (Part 1)

Digital disruption refers to changes enabled by digital technologies that occur at a pace and magnitude that disrupt established ways of value creation, social interactions, doing business and more generally our thinking.

Digital Disruption can be seen as both a threat and an opportunity:

• ICT-induced change happens at a pace and scale that impacts on existing business practice in disruptive ways, threatening and invalidating existing business models. 
• Digital technologies offer new opportunities for the creation of innovate business models for entrepreneurs to compete with established business practices in a wide range of industries. 

Digital Disruption can occur on various levels: 

1. Disruptions to individual life practices (example: Mobile connectivity disrupts established work-life boundaries) 
2. Disruptions to work practices (example: Narrating work via microblogging in the workplace changes what counts as (valuable) work)
3. Disruptions to business practices (example: Workplace social media disrupts the way information travels in the organisation and induces shifts in power relationships) 
4. Disruptions to industry structures (example: Digitisation of media content and user-generated content disrupts traditional value chains of content production and delivery) 
5. Disruptions to societal systems (example: Social media participation disrupts traditional practices of public opinion making) 

While the above examples point to profound changes to established business practices, they do not fully illustrate what exactly makes these changes truly disruptive.

Have you came across digital disruption at your business or workplace?

Stay tuned for more discussion on this topic next week.

Author : Associate Professor Kai Riemer
Chair of Discipline of Business Information Systems, University of Sydney Business School
Kai's research covers the areas of Enterprise Social Media, Digital Disruption, Technology Appropriation and Sense-Making, Virtual Work, and the Philosophy of Technology. You can read more at his blog. Also follow Kai on Twitter.