Reimagining Work

CHAPTER 10The Rules Do Not Apply

The Disruption was coming. That much we knew. And not just because we were willing the disruption with this platform we were building. It wasn't just us. New technologies that enabled collaboration, sharing, and messaging, for example—unrecognizable from a mere decade ago—were rapidly penetrating the workplace. Our little venture just happened to tap into one vital cog in the wheel, the one that embraced and empowered the flexible workforce. Great idea!

However, being in the right place at the right time was not enough. Old‐school companies were locked into ironclad ways of doing business that had barely caught up to the twenty‐first century, much less the year 2017. Planning and budgeting, procurement and the legal frameworks that followed, training and the HR function—they all were cloaked in departments that still boasted dated IT and prehistoric databases. If you looked hard under the hood at some of these corporations, you could still find landlines. Printouts. File cabinets! We may have had the ear of some of the great strategists and visionaries of the new age, but checks would be written by hand, not heart. That meant we had to demonstrate that Catalant couldn't just solve your day‐to‐day problems but change the way you do business.

One of our most sacred internal manifestos we call our Key Account Journey, and it is our fervent belief that if we can convey it to potential customers, we can grow our business and change theirs. There are ...