 Ladies and gentlemen with that we'll be moving on to our second keynote address which we'll be talking on designed for disruption. So please put your virtual hands together as I welcome Mr. Rahul Velde, EVP Digital Transformation and Digital Business Unilever. Mr. Velde has been with Unilever for 30 years, started in India at HUL and moved across various roles in Singapore. Currently he's based in the UK in the global Unilever headquarters. He has expertise and leadership in digital, in media and in transformation. He has been speaker at many international events and even at Howard Business School and we're delighted to have him here on eTechMunch. So very warm welcome to you Mr. Rahul Velde and Mike and join us on screen. Very warm welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks Cathy, thanks for the warm introduction and thanks for having me on this platform. It's a pleasure to speak with you and I think it's a very broad theme, right, designed for disruption and pretty much this is one of those themes in which we can talk about several different subjects. The way I thought of sharing with you some insights and perspectives along three anchors, what's happening in the consumer world and what's the impact of that disruption on businesses as a what's happening in the channels world and really how the channels are getting disrupted, whether they're communication channels, whether they're commerce channels or indeed any other form of dialogue. And lastly, the impact of all of this into what I call as the commercials and we look at all of this from the lens of technology. And the way to sort of frame it for me is quite simple that technology has been on an acceleration curve for the last several years and it is in the last two, three years that specifically after the pandemic that it's had a virtual takeoff on many different aspects. So I think the first and most profound impact on consumers lives, it's fair to say that in the last few years has been really technology and what it's done to consumers lives is just amazing in balance. It's been fantastic progress. As a consequence of both the technology change, the change in the entire ecosystem, the landscape, what has happened is that consumers are spoiled for choice. Now, this has always remained true. Perhaps you could argue that it was true that consumers were demanding five years back, 10 years back and sequentially it's always been the demanding consumer. But what technology has enabled through a multitude of different interventions is to really be able to service and cater to almost hyper segmented needs. So we talked of segmentation in the previous world, but today if you really think about it, you know, whether it's the concept of a high level of personalization or expectations of consumers, they go all in the space of hyper segmentation or a great deal of segmentation. Connected with this idea of segmentation is also that we see more and more that the consumer world keeps getting polarized and getting stretched between different sort of vectors. And as it happens, then you know, to be able to service and to serve the needs of consumers which have varying needs as often very, very diverse is a big opportunity as well as a challenge. And lastly, I think the interface and the interaction which the consumer landscape has had with technology and with channels. And when we think of channels really, let's, you know, if you were to button it down, it's really down to two fundamental things, the way consumers are interacting and spending their time on media. And very broadly, the way consumers are engaging with commerce and transactions. And if you look at what's happening in the entire space of disruption when it comes to channels of communication, channels of dialogue, no doubt that those have transformed very dramatically in the last few years and indeed continue to transform even now as we go forward. I think many, very often we think of disruption as something which happens an event and which completely changes things. And the way it's actually been working out is what I consider as more transformational, which is it's going fast along a particular line. And occasionally there are some very disruptive forces which come into play, but really speaking it's technology which is transforming the way we communicate, the way we consume content. More specifically, if you think of the entire landscape of the amount of time that is now spent on social media. And if you really think of mass media, the shift which is taking place to OTT or over the top platforms, for sure, one of the biggest impacts on consumers' lives has been this area of communication and area of content consumption. And as a consequence of which all of us are consuming, by and large, much more content than we've ever had, much more is available to all of us. And therefore, from a business standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, to be able to actually tap into that vast reservoir of content, bringing it to life, producing great stuff in a creative manner is again a very important challenge and opportunity. And the second point about channels is about the channels of transaction. I'm going to loosely call it channels of transaction because it's not only about e-commerce or commerce as we know it in the consumer good space, but it is transactions and commerce everywhere. So the channels through which we were engaging with consumers and having the transactions that changed very, very dramatically. The most obvious one is of course e-commerce. And as it is popularly said that what happened in the last 10 years in e-commerce pretty much happened in a period of 10 weeks during the pandemic. And every across pretty much all the countries we've seen that e-commerce has been accelerating very fast. But it's not only about e-commerce in the consumer good sense or in the apparel sense or in the physical good sense. It's also commerce and transactions in the digital sense of whether it is digital, banking and fintech, whether it is educational technology or any other form of a transaction interface has been disrupted in a very, very significant way by technology. This event itself is a great example actually. It's almost the pandemic disrupted the wonderful event that the group used to have live and where a few hundred people would attend and suddenly when you take it on the virtual platform like this, it has now moved on to several, a few thousand people, two, three times more than what would have attended the physical event and in a very different way across geographies without the need to travel. So the channels of exchange of value, whether it is a commercial transaction where people are buying goods or services or whether they're consuming content either paid or unpaid whichever way you look at it is very, very big impact and there isn't actually any industry which we could say has not been impacted positively or in a different way because of this entire transformation that's taking place in the channel landscape. Now both the combination of what's happening in the consumer landscape, the channel ecosystem has huge implications for all businesses on the commercials and the entire commercial model of all businesses in many ways is actually therefore undergoing a change. In most cases, if not all, technology is enabling similar things to happen at a much cheaper cost so definitely a cost and the value equation is changing in the favor where technology is impacting costs in a favorable way and whether it is when we talk of disruption what's important is for us to recognize that this is not only the marketing landscape as we popularly talk about it or in the communication landscape that disruption is there in supply chain is in research and development, it's in HR in the way we manage employees. Just as an example, if we think of what's happening with the gig economy and the emergence of a number of platforms whether it is Uber, whether it is Ola, whether it is Swiggy, whether it's Romanto, a large number of people have now been employed in the gig economy as it's popularly called thanks to technology and the interventions that technology has actually been able to make in what otherwise was a very different ecosystem. So if you sort of take a step back and look at this picture, you really have on one side consumer and the consumer world is being disrupted pretty much every day. The channel landscape is changing very dramatically whether it is transactions and commerce or whether it is consumption of media and then you've got the entire commercial model, whether it is the cost, whether it is the finances, the margins, the price you pay changing very, very dramatically. I mean just to illustrate sort of this point on the commercials, you look at the commercial model of free content which is consumed by a large number of people, a platform like YouTube on one hand and you look at the subscription led platform like Netflix on the other and both of these not only coexisting but both of these growing very dramatically and their revenues, their entire time that people are spending on these platforms is going very, very high and think about them conceptually, these are fundamentally very different commercial models both think of the top line YouTube generating large parts of it through advertising and Netflix generating almost entirely through the area of subscriptions and the cost models are being very different. So these three things really means that businesses have an imperative to understand all these dimensions very well and then to be able to create responsive systems, responsive changes which is what very loosely we could call it about is design for disruption and in the designing of the new systems we have to continually think of what is it that we can do to actually serve the consumers and customers better by all means, that has to be the number one sort of objective where consumer centricity or customer centricity is absolutely the number one sort of thing to think about and therefore to creatively service customers to creatively serve their needs to make sure that we create brilliant products and services which serve them become very important. Data and information plays a very important role in this kind of designing the new business systems simply because there is a vast row of data which is available to all of us now to actually leverage and to make sure that we find pretty much that one great idea which we can actually help to serve the underserved. What is important is that data is definitely something that is a science and to that extent it is a core capability that all organizations have to start building or indeed have started building over the last few years and if we were to project in the future whether it is a number of jobs a number of people who do analytics data and you know in those spaces is going to be dramatically higher than what it is today. So if you were to think of a superpower which companies need to have and you know if any company were to be asked what is the new superpower or the superpower that they envisage for sure you know data and the entire space of data is a superpower which has super critical to have in the context of designing for disruption. The second part which relates to the idea of communication channels content channels or indeed commerce channels is the space of creativity and especially as it relates to content creativity has to be absolutely put right at the front and center of the thinking. One of the ways big shifts are taking place in the world is from the one to many kind of communication that used to be there there will be brilliant news channels or brilliant entertainment channels are producing great content whether it was movies or shows and then showing it to the large world and shifting that to what you can call as a participation economy where people are increasingly producing vast rows of content and therefore being able to actually surface them up whether it is through platforms like Instagram or platforms like TikTok or indeed many of the user generated sort of content which is becoming way more popular and we live in a world where there is a paradox almost where on one hand we have these brilliant commercials shows and movies which are made with high definition cameras we watch it on a big screen or a big theater and on the other end consume hours and hours of content on a mobile phone which is short form which is quickly which is pretty much been done actually short on a mobile phone perhaps and becomes very popular so creativity and managing this in the context of the pop culture managing this paradox making sure that we are actually able to creatively surface break the clutter becomes very important and much the same way designing for the new channels of commerce for the new channels of transactions is absolutely a new skill and that has to be developed by all organizations so if you think of it in the context of education for example there's a big difference between a live lecture and a recorded lecture or a virtual sort of a lecture if you think of it in the context of fashion apparel it has a completely different meaning because now a lot of commerce is actually generated through you know whether you call it a virtual try on or different interfaces very different from you know the sort of changing rooms or trial rooms that would be there in physical stores so how do you get this idea of everything that used to have physically which provided value to consumers but bring them into the technology in the virtual world and leverage it for the new channels of commerce across sectors I mean the obvious one is of course e-commerce where we all know all the goods from whether it's Flipkart or Amazon or whatever the platform is very very dramatic change and then for business leaders but I when I say leaders over here I don't necessarily mean only people who are at the top of the organization but through the organization one of the biggest things that one has to address is how do we actually address the value chain dynamics so that the value exchange and costs are managed in a fashion where they still drive growth they still drive profitable growth and fundamentally we start looking at aspects of the line on the PNL to see how they deliver great value there was a nugget I picked up in the conversation previously which was around this idea of performance and making sure that the performance is great being able to measure it I think there was a mention of vanity metrics and how the metrics of performance are changing very dramatically and because there is a high level of measurability and data science that can be applied to pretty much actually across the lines of the PNL it becomes really important to think of the value exchange and what cost value equations work through the entire PNL so when we think of this idea of designing for disruption the very obvious one to look at is across these three dimensions but more specifically for a lot of conversations certainly the previous panel talked a lot about aspects related to marketing I think one of the big changes that's taking place is the impact of technology and marketing whether it is creativity and how content is created whether it is how that creative content is distributed whether it is then the distribution of that content what effect and what results it gives to the business all these aspects are now impacted by marketing technology in a very big way which was initially incidentally the topic which is very close to I'm sure a large number of people in the audience and there you know we have thousands of options today pretty much if you think of the Lumascape of what is the ecosystem if somebody were to ask it is almost impossible to answer that question and define because any diagram that you draw has hundreds of boxes and arrows and circles and therefore an extremely complex system and therefore what becomes important is that in order to sort of consider this complexity of the changing consumer landscape the changing channel landscape the dramatically changing commercial dimensions is to really put science behind all of this in terms of the evaluation and bringing in new skills new ways of working new ways of thinking into the business so look in summary really and I'm conscious that the previous session and overall we're running out of time and there could be potentially a number of questions with the audience may have but I wanted to summarize it by really saying that if we were to think of designing for disruption there are many lenses to look at it from what is important over here is again managing a paradox where on one hand in order to design for disruption and because the change in the world is so fast all of us have to be extremely agile nimble fast fleet-footed goes without saying that you know we have to be absolutely on top of the game by being fast but even as we are being fast we have to manage the paradox of also being thoughtful also being taking planning and understanding and applying the science to a very different level both are looking at sort of not just where the puck is but where the puck is going what's the view of the future and how do we design actually for that future that we envisage and therefore sort of being able to make the short sprints in direction of you know that long-term journey most businesses we know today certainly you know we always think of speed as absolutely the new currency I think it applies to just about every business on the planet and equally you know doing it in a manner which is planned thoughtful and resting on the fundamentals of evidence and science becomes very important in all of this if I were to sort of put a circle around it is the culture that we build in companies culture that organizations have and there are many dimensions of culture which are stand out certainly innovation creativity we talked about a few of those themes but one of the most important aspects which is coming to life in the last few years and will perhaps gain more and more prominence as we go ahead is what is summed up by many great leaders as a learning culture and the ability of both the individual the organization to learn and to continuously therefore iterate out of that learning and improve to be able to continuously pivot by far is the most sort of important aspect of culture which we are seeing in all new age great organizations and promoting that learning culture in the context of technology in the context of disruption is absolutely the number one sort of dimension by the way you know again there is no such thing as there needs to be only one aspect about culture that is prominent but if I were to think about what's happening really right now in the last few years because of technology and disruption and what is likely to play an important role in the future I think this aspect of learning continuously and bringing the learning culture would be very important so to summarize really there are multiple dimensions of disruption that are taking place whether it is consumers whether it is channels or the business models and in order to ensure that we are able to actually be on top of this game and design and run businesses in the change them transform them in this sort of world which is changing very dramatically all the time it becomes important to apply the culture and the talent dimension more specifically start sort of building a learning culture within an organization learning both from experiences but learning from data and ensuring therefore that each of those elements are more responsive to changing customer and consumer needs so Kathy in summary really therefore that's what I wanted to share with the audience I'd be very happy if there are any questions or any other discussion points that I want to amplify earlier I was speaking with Priyanka and I said look you know I want to make sure that there is a dialogue rather than just me doing the keynote because you know as I speak there would be things which come up and I'm therefore I'm curious actually to learn through the questions as well I know what's on your mind what's on the audience mind and what people have to ask or say yeah so back to you thank you thank you so much