Be Disruptive: Highlights From WIRED’s Business Conference

This coming week is Creative Week in NYC, which includes the One Show for advertising, design and interactive, the UnConference, and lectures and events around Manhattan and Brooklyn. Creativity is often about disruption so it feels quite appropriate to, just a week before some big award ceremonies, to have attended Disruption by Design, the annual Wired business conference.

With just a few hundred participants, far more intimate (and elite) than SXSW, it was a well-curated series of lectures around businesses that disrupt our culture. The publisher provided a link to the lectures, so I thought I would share a few of my favorites. If you browse among them, several of the speakers are worth watching, including executive editor Thomas Geotz who opened by sharing WIRED’s criteria in how to spot the future. Right after, there’s an all-star line up of Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Dick Costello of Twitter, and Yancey Stickler of Kickstarter. Stickler was humble yet proud about Kickstarter, Costello was hilarious about Twitter, and Andreessen took the wind out of the myth of the bubble. James Dyson later talked about his company’s engineering culture. Interviewed on stage, Dyson provocatively said that he doesn’t believe in brand (although having once worked on their business and following their strict guidelines, I’m not sure if I completely believe him).

Many were thought leaders who I didn’t know. Mary “Missy” Cummings is a former Navy pilot who moved to MIT and covered progress in robotics. Another conversation around breakthroughs you might like is when New York editor Jason Tanz interviews Sebastian Thrun of Google (and Stanford), especially around 8:06, when they show a film with a demo of the Google self-driving car.

I’m optimistic about who will take gold at The One Show and about the industry’s revitalization in general. Even the word “disruption” itself seems increasingly popular. Agency TBWA/Chiat/Day just announced a new consultancy built around its long-running “Disruption” marketing approach. At one of its divisions where I was a creative leader, I got to work with “Disruption” and found it both powerful and simple to solving tough problems in a fresh way. We should enjoy this type of thinking challenging the status quo. Products talked about at the Wired conference and innovative marketing celebrated during Creative Week are more connected than ever and both intentionally seek to do new things—fearlessly.

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