Disrupt your own business, fail often, says GHD

Good Hair Day global technical solutions manager Spencer Hudson discusses his firm's decision to embrace disruption

Organisations need to challenge and disrupt themselves, and be prepared to fail quickly and regularly.

That is the advice of Spencer Hudson, global technical solutions manager at premium hair products firm Good Hair Day (GHD), speaking at today's Rackspace Solve event in London.

"Disruption is important to the company. Performance comes in two flavours. You have performance that you rinse and repeat; that's a process you have documented. You need to carry on repeating it, and you can look for marginal gains on that process," he said.

"On the other side, you have the innovation team looking to create new opportunities. There's a paradox there; these two things are separate. So you have performance, repeat performance and innovation.

"And ideally you really want to disrupt both at the same time."

Drawing a parallel with the industrial revolution with its roots in the 18th century, Hudson said that where once jobs changed with the advent of machines such as the Jacquard Loom, today robots and AI are having similar effects on roles and processes.

"Today we're interested in digital disruption. We've got a number of things coming together: mobile, social, connectivity, and the technology to leverage and do them together. That creates new marketplaces," he continued.

"Today we can create unicorns really easily. The cycle time of the ability to create great companies is far quicker. Look at Tesla. The car industry used to take 20 years to research and design a new car. Tesla did it in two years."

Hudson explained that the first step to disruption is to be a good listener, and a critical observer. Taxi service Uber was probably inspired by the founders being frustrated by their own experiences of existing taxi resources, he said, leading them to look for a better way.

"So listen, observe and be critical. What questions can you ask about what you've just experienced?," he said.

"How many times have you been in an organisation where a job gets done in the same way all the time? No one knows why it gets done in that way; it just does.

"You can't accept the status quo. You must challenge the status quo. You operate with a particular mindset, you do your routine, and you need to question that critically and don't blindly accept what has happened."

He argued that this could happen with small steps, such as commuting to work in a different way, or trying a new email client or mobile ecosystem. But it is also important to sell the idea of disruption to the board.

"You have to sell the challenge. Being disruptive is not normally considered what a company wants. So how do you sell it to management? You need to get significant management buy-in because the risk of failure is high. You want to be able to do little projects that fail quickly. [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg says fail fast, fail regularly; if you're not breaking things, you're not doing it right."

Disrupt your own business, fail often, says GHD

Good Hair Day global technical solutions manager Spencer Hudson discusses his firm's decision to embrace disruption

Describing his firm's journey into cloud, Hudson explained that GHD started 15 years ago with a co-located hosting space.

"The challenge was having a website with e-commerce functionality using open source software. But we had performance problems at peak times and we didn't know why. So we wanted to change things, looked a various vendors and went with Rackspace, and stayed on the platform we chose for five years," he said.

"Then we saw what the cloud had to offer, and decided to replatform five years ago. We went back to our engineers, and chose infrastructure that would work for us. It worked well, but when we had all our infrastructure in the public cloud, there were certain nuances in the way it worked which we weren't entirely happy with."

The next decision was to move to a hybrid cloud model with dedicated public and private clouds.

"We can now build out a solution at scale in a couple of hours," Hudson added.

But it wasn't all plain sailing. Hudson discussed GHC's investment in the ill-fated Powatag app, a service which would supposedly redefine e-commerce. It worked by enabling users to scan a QR code on the side of products in any shop, then the Powatag app on their phone, which had their credit card details and address already stored, and would process the transaction and have it delivered seamlessly to their home.

"It didn't come to anything; the uptake wasn't there. Companies were invested, it looked good, but it just didn't happen. The idea was if that disruptive company had hit big, we'd have been a leader, and it would have opened up an unfeasible number of opportunities."

But that failure hasn't stopped GHD from experimenting, with employee satisfaction service The Happiness Index the latest solution it is trying.

"We don't know if it's going to work, but it is critical that we go out, identify possible solutions, then explore how we might bring them in."

Hudson finished with a few words of advice.

"Observe critically what's happening around you and question your assumptions. Be prepared to fail. I like failure because it teaches me to not do things in that way, and to look for something different. Failure isn't an ogre," he said.

"Always challenge yourself. When was the last time you did something completely new? I don't mean just trying a different way to walk to work, but something completely out of your comfort zone; that's when you discover new territories."

He concluded on a lighter note with an example of the last time he tried something new.

"One of my friends challenged me recently to watch an episode of The Only Way is Essex. I also ran two marathons consecutively. I'll leave you to work out which was the more painful."