Employee Benefits: The Disruptors Have Arrived – Part II | SelectPath

Employee Benefits: The Disruptors Have Arrived – Part II

Posted by Jeff Cox

Jul 28th, 2017

Did video REALLY kill the radio star? Or – was it an incremental change simply moving the radio star to a new media platform? Rather than being a DISRUPTOR, maybe video just made the radio star a little bit better.

In business, DISRUPTORS create seismic shifts rather than incremental changes.

Incremental changes are always happening. Everyone (well, loosely everyone) is trying to get better, get ahead, beat the competition. At the very least most businesses can easily see opportunities to improve what they do and how they do it.

However, the very thing that helps business make incremental improvements - a deep understanding of their business, industry and customers) – also prevents most of them from becoming DISRUPTORS who dramatically change the landscape in one fell swoop.

The business that ONLY has its head down, focused on getting better cannot see there is another way than just better – different.

For many industries – incremental improvements can help businesses survive and thrive – sometimes for generations.

And then they don’t.

Eventually, DISRUPTORS will come along and change the game. It’s inevitable.

We now live in an age where technology has broad applications – dare I say – to all industries. While new ideas (i.e. a new product that solves an old problem differently, instead of better than old solutions) can be DISRUPTORS, technology almost certainly will be a DISRUPTOR and at a far greater frequency.

If you didn’t read my first blog (link here) – stop and do that now. We’ll wait until you’re done.

In that blog, I made the case that the DISRUPTORS for the Employee Benefits industry have arrived. It is a very old, traditional industry – begging for DISRUPTION but guilty of the status quo – which by the way is very, very successful (for now).

I purposely avoided revealing what I (and others) feel the DISRUPTORS will be. I wanted people to stop and think about it. Hopefully it worked. It was one of my wider read blogs so at the very least I’ve piqued some interest.

Apologizing profusely, I am going to drag this one out further because a) I want people to continue to think about DISRUPTION in the industry and b) it gives me awesome content for at least 3 more blog posts. I’ve also found that writing a blog post like this one causes ME to think A LOT about the topic. That thought process creates deeper, richer content. Since writing the initial post (find it here) I’ve come across all kinds of articles and insights that have confirmed and massaged my opinion and thought process.

So, without further ado, but also without any further explanation (you’ll have to wait for the next post to get my detailed thoughts) – here is what I THINK the DISRUPTORS are:

DISRUPTOR # 1: DATA

DISRUPTOR # 2: Artificial Intelligence

DISRUPTOR # 3: Personalized Health

That’s it for now. I’d love to have your comments, opinions and speculations – or your own ideas. Drop me a line, add a comment or call me with your own rant. Please engage.

And of course, stay tuned for the next post!

Questions? Contact me at chad@selectpath.ca