The new agents of disruption

“You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right
all right, all right”

…. The Beatles (the ‘White Album‘)

Change and Disruption

‘Let’s start a revolution,’ the mantra that became a reality over the last several months as North Africa and the Middle East exploded with revolutionary fervor, as a new generation of tech savvy Millennials made use of disruptive internet technology, via multiple social networking platforms, to press for social change. I just wonder if Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes sat in their Harvard dorm room and said ‘let’s start a revolution.’ If they did, I’m sure they were thinking of a social networking revolution, not a disruptive, ground-up, all-out nation rebuilding exercise. But then again, the story of the unintended consequences of disruption is hardy new. A short list of disruptors of the existing order includes Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein, who asked questions that challenged the conventional wisdom of their times, then developed solutions that have had significant long tail impact on social, cultural and business behaviors. For meaningful models of agents of disruption we need to look to the contemporary subset of disruptors, the new agents of change:  Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen, Steve Case, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Tony Hsieh, Mark Zuckerberg and Ev Williams.

The New Disruptors

A key attribute of change seems to be, that while sometimes it’s planned, it’s often the confluence of events, social and technological, that result in what Malcolm Gladwell termed The Tipping Point. This balancing act on a teeterboard that we call change has many well documented examples in the history of wine business marketing, exemplified by  the pioneers of the modern wine marketing era, John Daniel Jr, Ernest and Julio Gallo and André Tchelistcheff, soon followed by market-makers Robert Mondavi, Jess Jackson, and Peter Granoff. A short list of the new innovators who are now impacting markets should include Paul Dolan, Jean Charles Boisset, Joel Gott, Gary Vaynerchuk and Paul Mabray et.al. New crops of marketers continue to emerge. In the coming weeks, the Agents of Disruption™ vlog will provide a platform for these new agents of disruption to tell their stories and showcase their individual contributions to the wine business. Narratives, that when viewed as a whole will help brand owners model the future of wine marketing.

I’ll be out capturing, on my iPhone 4, a series of Agents of Disruption™ iMovies in the upcoming weeks, but if you’d just can’t wait any longer, here’s a preview of a short  YouTube video featuring an agent of disruption.

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