SHEARED, Shedding Your Coat of Conformity in the Age of eCommerce - Episode 224

INTERVIEW WITH OSKAR KASZUBSKI AND CHRIS PERRY

DESCRIPTION

In today’s podcast, we are talking with Oskar Kaszubski and Chris Perry about their new eBook called SHEARED, Shedding Your Coat of Conformity in the Age of eCommerce. Their goal is to help first movers free their organizations from the herd mentality and accelerate go-to-market change and omnichannel leadership.

Make sure you tune in to find out more!

Oskar Kaszubski is Chief Growth Officer at firstmovr and a global eCommerce leader with 18 years of experience leading digital transformation for global, mid-size and start-up companies. Prior to co-founding firstmovr, Oskar held various digital transformation leadership roles across Kellogg's, Mondelez, Kimberly-Clark and multiple start-up manufacturers.

Chris Perry is Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr on a mission to help empower first movers — both people and brands — to win in a disruptive marketplace. As a CPG eCommerce practitioner, executive educator and advisor, he has led eCommerce and digital transformation at Reckitt, WellPet and Kellogg’s and was most recently VP of Executive Education at Edge by Ascential.

“We want to draw awareness not for why ecomm matters, but how we respond to the fact that ecomm matters.”

— Chris Perry

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Chris and Oskar just launched a new eBook called SHEARED, Shedding Your Coat of Conformity in the Age of eCommerce. The idea is to help first movers free their organizations from the herd mentality and accelerate go-to-market change and omnichannel leadership.
Both have a lot of passion for ecommerce and immense respect for people who lead and work in the space. Especially since COVID happened, ecommerce and digital have been a disruption for a lot of companies.
Sometimes the ecommerce leaders are being forced to conform back to the herd because that’s how they have to operate within the corporate constraints. It is important to figure out a way to help people change their behavior and be more effective as leaders. Chris and Oskar wanted to lay out an actionable approach to how you can actually drive digital transformation and change management.
Often ecommerce professionals think about whether to stay and “fight the good fight” and change behaviors/opinions within their company, or whether to cut bait and move on to a company that embraces innovation.
Assessing the company culture is a big part of this - are they going to be receptive to changes? Are you going to fit in? Without that initial traction it’s going to be difficult to impact the company. You have to be good at listening and attention, networking and maturity.
There are a lot of people progressing rapidly in ecommerce, jumping from company to company. Also, there are a lot of experts in ecommerce competing for the best assignments, so the decision whether to stay or go is not easy.
You need to embrace disruption and stay the course. It takes education, building trust and relationships to change people’s minds. You may be the first baton carrier, and that’s okay. It’s okay to move on and take what you’ve learned and move on.
In the eBook, Chris and Oskar identify the behaviors “fencing” us in and the 8 change factors that enable our organizations to “hop the fence” of change for long-term growth.
Within the industry, we are underestimating the rate of change and how technology and data-centric this world has become. Organizations are slow to adapt to change. They need to be taught to build capability consistently across every single division and then work on de-siloing.
There are 8 factors of change, but probably the most important one is Organizational Enablement, the 8th one. If we fix the KPIs almost everything else will unravel in a positive way.
One of the tactical actions that ecommerce professionals can take to evangelize internally: there are a finite number of leaders in your organization that you need to get to your side, and you need to communicate with them.
Oskar and Chris are excited about personalization in the online store, the potential of embedding ecommerce in online games, the meta-shelf and ecommerce in the metaverse, as well as having ecommerce platforms embedded in our houses using smart fridges, smart pantries, etc.
Firstmovr uses three key approaches: explain (concept of education, sharing experiences), train (hands-on in the organization, helping upscale everyone) and sustain (helping assess strategies, performance, capabilities; recommending paths forward and partnerships)
Check out the free eBook in the link below as well as the webcast on February 1.
You can register for Bobsled’s webinar and check out the research report in the links below.