Successful companies operating in mature industries that embrace incremental
change find themselves on a path that gets narrower and narrower. Eventually,
they reach the end of the path, and by then, their customers have forsaken them
for a new offering that nobody saw coming. In cases where companies do take
disruptive risks, it’s often because they’re backed into a corner and there’s no
other choice.
But companies that try to differentiate themselves by focusing on incremental
innovation instead of game-changing, disruptive innovation will differentiate
themselves right out of business. They simply cannot afford to wait until they get
backed into a corner. Companies need to be consistently making bold moves, even at the very peak of their success. It is an essential skill for anyone in
business, from a small start-up to a global corporation, with the desire to
transform organizational processes and behaviors, and ask, “Why hadn’t we ever thought about our business and industry this way before?”
What does it take to be a disruptive leader? Do you need to be a brilliant agitator
like Steve Jobs? A driven workaholic with a passion to change the world like
Tesla’s Elon Musk? Sure, CEOs like that get a lot of press, but there’s more to
success than being loud and charismatic. Truly disruptive leaders are like Master
Chefs on a cooking show, always looking for ways to take existing ingredients—
the same ones everyone else has access to—and combine them in unique ways.
Those new recipes are a type of investment capital: the more you have, the
better. Of course, not all of them will succeed. But disruptive thinking and
leadership is less about the success of any one idea and more about putting your
business in a position where you have more new ideas to spend than your
competition does. Most importantly, being a disruptive leader is about creating a culture where everyone values new recipes. Because if you want to build a
disruptive organization, you first have to build more disruptive leaders.
As much as we might desire it, the future we face will not be predictable. We are
living in a fast-changing and uncertain time and we are entering this new global
order with a way of seeing and thinking better suited for a world now several
centuries behind us. A world that could be explained in simpler terms, when you
could expect and carefully plan for gradual shifts in the status quo.
But the scale of the challenges we face and the accelerating speed of innovation
in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Biotechnology
demands a new way of opening minds to unconventional strategies. Winning
organizations in the next decade will need to incorporate a steady stream of
disruptive technologies to stay ahead of the game—technologies that will force
them to rethink the habits that have made them successful in the past, and
challenge the conventional wisdom that has defined the competitive dynamics of
their industry.
