ROCKETS AND TSUNAMIS

Colleen Ryan on business transformation in 2017.

When the Marketing Awards were announced this year and TRA decided to get involved as a sponsor, a couple of categories held appeal for us. Anything to do with innovation was always going to appeal to our restless and curious minds, but thinking about how many of our clients were engaged in various forms of transformation, this category piqued our interest so we opted to not only sponsor it but also do a bit of digging to see what insights we could uncover about transformation within New Zealand businesses.

In the last month or so we’ve interviewed a number of New Zealand’s leading companies and we’ll be sharing these individual case studies over the coming weeks. Meanwhile, there are some common themes emerging and it’s interesting to see how they relate to what’s happening in the global business community. As a bonus, one of the key things to emerge is that properly executed transformation programmes are very powerful drivers of innovation. A mindset of doing things differently fuels creativity across the organisation, so business leaders talk about innovation no longer being seen as the sole domain of product development, but instead becoming an enterprise-wide force that affects everything – from marketing and media to legal and talent management. So, although we opted to sponsor the Transformation Award, innovation invariably played a role in determining the winner.

The world has always been in a state of change but our business leaders told us that what is different now is the speed of change and, by that, they mean the acceleration rate that kicks in when technology reaches a tipping point that makes alternative products, services and delivery options widely accessible and usable. This rocket-powered version of change comes in the form of a disrupter that creates the fear that you may be obsolete in a very short period of time.