PETER O'CONNOR
Gutsy Genius Thinker
“We talk all the time about the fact that digital is important, but we don’t actually invest the resources in digital to actually be able to take advantage of it.”
PETER O’CONNOR – Chaired Professor of Digital Disruption at ESSEC Business School, Paris
Peter O'Connor
Paris, France
Peter is a world-renowned expert on e-commerce and online marketing. He has over thirty years’ experience in educating the managers of tomorrow. As you might expect from a GGT, he is sought-after as a speaker at industry events, where he specializes in challenging companies’ inaction regarding the digital revolution. We have seen Peter at his best, asking the tough questions on stage, challenging many of the leaders across the Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality space to justify their digital approach to revenue generation and automation. He knows no fear. To compete at similar speeds with other industries, ours needs that level of clarity and energy to drive adaption and innovation.
His insightful views into the effect of “operational inertia” in businesses (a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged) inspired us to label this term as the “POC Filter.” This notion is explored in chapter four – Looking Toward Tomorrow.
According to Google Scholar, Professor O’Connor has been cited 6,874 times because of his prolific publishing through books, academic and industry-focused articles, and his Coursera MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), a large online learning network site.
Peter’s Adapters Tips
- Take a start-up attitude to your business. A Singaporean bank started hackathons with groups of students and required their managers to participate in developing fresh thinking. As a result, they started a digital bank in India.
- Read this book – Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- You need to have a brand that means something, that develops a real relationship with consumers
- Make it so easy for them [customers/users] to do business with you that they won’t think about doing business in any other way