CHARLEMONT — From business to politics to social life, the status quo everywhere has been disrupted by changes in technology — and the changes are only getting faster, says Frits van Paasschen, an international business manager and the featured speaker of this week’s Charlemont Forum.
This is the first event of the Charlemont Forum’s 2020 season, and will be held online via Zoom, due to the coronavirus crisis. The talk is Thursday at 7 p.m. Viewers can register at bit.ly/30TwbZf.
In the last two and a half decades, van Paasschen noticed a paradox in the acceleration of new technology: that it was creating opportunities for new types of businesses, but was not being used by existing businesses to improve themselves.
The biggest wake-up call, he said, came while working as president and CEO of Starwood Hotels from 2007 to 2015 — the period in which online services like Airbnb encroached on the travel industry.
“We almost literally woke up one day to recognize that the online travel agencies … were actually worth far more than the hotels themselves,” van Paasschen said.
The episode led him to rethink many of his ideas about business. What he settled on was an idea of the nature of disruption and how to cope with it, which he says applies equally to politics, culture and the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. His book on the subject, “The Disruptors’ Feast,” came out in 2017.
Established organizations, such as large companies, tend to deny change, defend their established habits and, even if they recognize change, struggle to adapt, van Paasschen said.
In his book, van Paasschen teaches organizations to focus on their purpose rather than to defend their existing working methods, and to allow themselves to question their beliefs and to continuously learn and adapt.
“In my view, disruption is what happens when you wake up and you realize you’re in trouble,” van Paasschen said. “You either didn’t see the change coming, or you saw the change coming and you didn’t do enough about it.”
In that sense, he said, the coronavirus pandemic is an “object lesson” in disruption. Rather than address an emerging problem, he said, leaders in government and business denied the problem and defended the status quo, which ultimately worsened the problem.
“Disruption is not just a problem for a bunch of shareholders,” van Paasschen said. “Disruption is a challenge for all of us.”
Van Paasschen’s talk Thursday night will also be recorded and posted to the Charlemont Forum’s Facebook page.
The Charlemont Forum’s second speaker of the season will be Karenna Gore, an adjunct professor at Union Theological Seminary, on the global implications of climate change, on July 9 at 7 p.m.
Reach Max Marcus at
mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.