Chapter One
1.We Will Learn from the Past to Escape the Present
It’s 2007. A man known for his jeans and black turtlenecks steps onto the stage and introduces his company’s new product: the iPhone.
This revolutionary piece of technology combined three different tools in one. Yes, it was acellular phone, but like his earlier breakthrough, the iPod, it was also amusic player—and most transformative of all, aninternet communication device (as it was called at the time), with email, web browsing, and more.
The moment this man stepped on that stage, it changed forever the way we communicate with one another.
Communication is at the heart of marketing and sales—and is the key to the future of growth for any financialbrand.
It was only a dozen years ago Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Think of all the exponential changes we’ve experiencedsince that time. Not only has technology evolved at an exponential rate, but so have consumer expectations. Meanwhile,competition—to keep up with those technologies and the changing consumer demands around them—has gone through the roof.
Take, for example, the music industry. Certainly, there were changes already happening before 2007, but in retrospect, the iPhone might have been its death knell. Jobs’s innovation sped up the rate of change enormously and on a macro scale.
This pattern can be seen across industries.
The financial marketplace is being transformed and disrupted by changes in technology, consumer expectations, and the competition.
Digital Disruption
When any industry experiences disruption, as Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler share in their bookBold, a series of six events occurs. As the authors explain, “Th
