Business Disruption Quotes

when your predictions are accurate enough—something happens. You cross a threshold where you should actually rethink your whole business model and product based on machine learning.…

The business landscape is a constantly evolving ecosystem. Changes in the macro environment, such as technological disruptions or changing consumer preferences, can rapidly alter the competitive landscape. A high-performing board needs to be adept at strategic foresight.

The business environment is constantly evolving. Economic fluctuations, technological disruptions, regulatory shifts, and competitive pressures demand that companies be able to adjust their goals and strategies.

Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.

No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.

The value of intangibles derived from intellectual property rights and trademarks from brands, inventions, software code, and programs has never been higher.

An organization, its business, sector, or purpose do not exist per se. Reality becomes its perception.

Uncertainty is a prerequisite to our agency and freedom.

For businesses to survive, they will need to build organizational resilience for climate change, cyber, technology, and space as part of a broader existential risk management strategy.

Technology has always been and will always be a disruptive force in business. And it will always be the case that businesses that are rigid and stagnant and unimaginative will die. And businesses that are adaptive and resilient and imaginative will continue on living.

Looking forward, the question is not how much machines will augment human decision-making, but whether humans will remain involved in the process at all.

Climate intelligence enables action-oriented, climate-aligned decisions to mitigate risks, build resilient adaptation, and identify emerging opportunities.

Incremental climate adaptation needs to shift to exponential climate adaptation.

For those intent on business as usual, the scope of value destruction is growing.

There is an inverse relationship between predictability and uncertainty, and an increasing cost of assuming a predictable world.

Withstanding systemic disruption requires effectiveness over efficiency.

Systemic disruption will continue to drive significant shifts in business models, value creation, and value destruction.

Tomorrow’s beef and dairy industries may face the same existential challenges as today’s fossil fuel industry.

The current boundaries, definitions, and clustering of separate and clearly delineated “industries” or “sectors” are disappearing.

The only way to reinvent a business model for today’s complex world is to approach it like a system.

The world is not made up of isolated controllable parts. And so the strings, wires and controls used to manage this illusionary world are obsolete.

Anything that can be automated, cognified, decentralized, digitized, disintermediated or virtualized will be.

Human and intellectual capital may be the most important intangible assets.

Once achieved, maintaining relevance requires constant listening, questioning, prototyping and testing.

Disruption is no longer a single or recurring event, but a steady state expanding its impact.

Trend analysis can be useful, but trends only describe our past, implying some degree of continuity.

To create truly novel breakthrough innovations, you must discard your hard-held beliefs.

The impacts of disruption depend on your perspective, preparation and response.

The Zen Buddhism concept of shoshin (the beginner’s mind) is a reminder of intuition’s importance. Ultimately, the beginner’s mind offers humility as a place for learning.

Improvisers are unaware of what is about to happen until it occurs, spontaneously creating as they go along.

Failure is a necessary ingredient to invention.

Certainty is fleeting, but through experimentation, systems innovation and trial-and-error, instructive patterns emerge as guidance.

The accelerating pace of change is now the norm.

Ecosystems blur the lines of fixed business models. In a digital, dematerialized, disintermediated world, there are no direct competitors.

Once we acknowledge the complex nature of the world, the notion of dissecting and reassembling entire industry constituents like Lego is illusory.

Disruption’s impact can vary greatly depending on (i) your perspective, (ii) degree of preparation and (iii) the nature and timing of your response.

Science fiction anticipated many of today’s existential questions... Science fiction provides an ethical platform for debate, to anticipate what might arise.

Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system.

To drive innovation, it’s a good idea to have bad ideas, and many of them.

Imagine navigating uncharted waters with a compass calibrated for the unpredictable.

When manipulated, personalized information becomes even more convincing, and truth evades objectivity, morphing into a subjective reality for every individual.

Healthcare is shifting from diagnosis to prevention and augmentation, blurring the line between human and technology.

Humans operate on millennia-old hardware. We can comprehend linear relationships, but have trouble processing accelerating rates of change.

Education is a constant, lifelong process of learning, unlearning and relearning - from the playground all the way to the boardroom.

Intuition is neither a luxury nor a shortcut; in deeply uncertain environments, intuition is a necessity.

Relying on probabilities, certainties or crystal balls will fail us. Put simply, there is no data on the future.

We need to become ‘perfect imperfectionists’.

The future is unmapped; you can’t rely on modelling uncertainties to deliver certainty.

Decision-makers have more information than ever before, but the speed of change means they have less time to make decisions.

The bar to become and remain relevant is higher than ever. You need to run faster to stay in the same place, or even likely end up behind. There is a new premium on staying relevant.

Some things will constantly emerge; others may disappear or change at different rates. Ultimately, we have agency to determine our future. We have choices as, above all, we are human.

The true impact of innovation isn’t in its disruptiveness; rather, it lies in its ability to ignite hope, unlock new possibilities and catalyse positive transformations across systems.

At any point, the information available for decision-making is historical... The single most dangerous mistake is looking at disruption as isolated cases or independent episodic events.

More often than not, that was a tough sell. If you go to a business and tell it you can save it $50,000 per year in labor costs if it eliminates this one job, then your AI product better eliminate that entire job. Instead, what entrepreneurs found was that their product was perhaps eliminating one task in a person’s job, and that wasn’t going to be enough to save their would-be customer any meaningful labor costs. The better pitches were ones that were not focused on replacement but on value. These pitches demonstrated how an AI product could allow businesses to generate more profits by, say, supplying higher quality products to their own customers. This had the benefit of not having to demonstrate that their AI could perform a particular task at a lower cost than a person. And if that also reduced internal resistance to adopting AI, then that only made their sales task easier. The point here is that a value-enhancing approach to AI, rather than a cost-savings approach, is more likely to find real traction for AI adoption.

With limited accountability, misaligned incentives, and lagging legislation, today’s governance systems and structures do not align with the sustainability of humanity or the planet that hosts us.

Today, AI seems to be the answer to everything, irrespective of the question. If technology is determining outcomes on our behalf, our agency is curtailed and our choices may be beyond our control.

We don’t overemphasize the future at the expense of the present, because the present is our only tangible reality. We imagine the future as a tool to inform today’s actions and short-term decisions.

The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.

The current boundaries and definitions of clearly delineated ‘industries’ or ‘sectors’ are disappearing.

The permission to wander around, imagine, ask questions and challenge assumptions makes the magic happen.

Big data does not predict anything beyond the assumption of an idealized situation in a stable system.

We need the humility to acknowledge that we may not fully understand the net impacts or timing [of AI].

Storytelling sells a vision of the future.

Relying on assumptions does not quantify the unquantifiable or make the unknowable known.

Nothing is permanent but impermanence. At the same time, everything is in constant change.

Metaruptions cause widespread and self-perpetuating effects that extend beyond their initial disruptions.

Everything in our world is constantly evolving - except our organizations, strategies, and governance structures

Uncertainty is an inherent trait of the future.

We are not helpless victims unable to make decisions - we have the power to shape our own futures.

Our Disruptive Thinking Canvas provides a streamlined six-step process, consolidating the foundational principles of our work in one location.

Foresight does not hold a crystal ball. It prepares you for the swerves. The future of prediction is imagination.

In truth, neither volatility nor change have an inherent valence.

In an unknown situation, humility about one’s knowledge is paramount.

In a VUCA world, if you’re not consciously confused, you’re ignorant. If you’re not preparing, you’re negligent.

Be empowered to overcome challenges and seize new opportunities for success and growth.

This is a guide to embracing the futures with resilience and foresight.

The whole is not merely different from the sum of its parts - the whole lacks a clear relationship to the parts’ sum.

The Red Queen Race necessitates being fast and astute. Speed alone is insufficient.

Similar to living organisms, these living BMaaS (Business Models-as-a-System) have an innate capacity to change creatively within their ecosystems, as they emerge and unfold. Change is expected, organic, and constant.

I’m probably the only sixteen-year-old girl in a three hundred mile radius who knows how to distinguish between a poltergeist from an actual ghost (hint: If you can disrupt it with nitric acid, or if it throws new crap at you every time, it’s a poltergeist), or how to tell if a medium’s real or faking it (poke ‘em with a true iron needle). I know the six signs of a good occult store (Number One is the proprietor bolts the door before talking about Real Business) and the four things you never do when you’re in a bar with other people who know about the darker side of the world (don’t look weak). I know how to access public information and talk my way around clerks in courthouses (a smile and the right clothing will work wonders). I also know how to hack into newspaper files, police reports, and some kinds of government databases (primary rule: Don’t get caught. Duh).

Entire industries, including strategic consulting, are built on selling you frameworks for defining, tiering, and quantifying levels of uncertainty, but these calculated bets or residual risks tend to be modeled on assumptions that make them useless, or even dangerous.

Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.

Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

No exploration of the past should be confused with a prediction.

How the West reacts to China’s rise will be an epoch-defining driver of disruption.

Ecosystems have the power to positively disrupt economic systems. BMaaS (Business Models-as-a-System) harness open ecosystems as a complex set of interacting relationships and networks. The stronger these relationships, the more resilient the systems.

Inflection points are moments when major shifts from one stage to another take place. They can be seen in social movements, technological innovations, and business transitions. Regardless of context, one cannot merely continue the same behavior after an inflection point.

At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.

Technology consultancies that design and sell these advanced AI systems may have difficulty being objective about the potential job displacement caused by those very tools. - Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable Wold

Physically agile, this squishy strategist and tentacled tactician uses its intelligence and agency to intuit situations, anticipate outcomes, invent solutions, and improvise, remaining relevant for nearly 300 million years.

The world’s consultants spend their time advising on restructuring, optimizing processes and inventories, finding every possible source of cost savings and cost synergies. At the same time, the greatest cost of all is ignored: the cost of assumptions. The cost of relying on assumptions is going through the roof.

To contrast Naisbitt’s megatrends, the Disruptive Futures Institute coined the term “metaruptions”. A metaruption is a multidimensional family of systemic disruptions.... Metaruptions cause widespread and self-perpetuating effects that extend beyond their initial disruptions.

Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.

AI won’t replace humans, but people who can use it will.” This sounds reassuring, but it oversimplifies the complex future of work and AI integration. Experts predict a surge in opportunities, but the intricate interplay between cognification, mass automation, and how we work remains uncharted. The net effect of AI on employment is unknown - we have no data on the future.

The term metaruptions is an abbreviation of disruption with the prefix “meta.” A metaruption is a multidimensional family of systemic disruptions, including shifts in the notion of disruption itself. Metaruptions are characterized by the dynamic interactions of subordinate drivers of change.

Metaruptions cause widespread, self-perpetuating effects that extend beyond their initial disruptions. As early changes spill over, impacts combine, propagate, and modify other elements within the system. Imagining the interplay of metaruptions is a creative endeavour, not a number-crunching exercise.

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.

Metaruptions are constantly evolving. The signals provide feedback loops that help appreciate how dynamic futures may take shape. However, we need to pay careful attention to compounding forces, which could spill over into irreversible tipping points. To comprehend disruption, we need to decipher its fundamental drivers, forces, and influences. Identifying these drivers, and their synthesis as metaruptions, can inform decision-making.

I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure -- that would be merely frivolous, or even for exercise -- which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project I like a walk which takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people into my eotechnical world view. ‘How was your journey?’ they say. ‘Not bad,’ I reply. ‘Take long?’ they enquire. ‘About ten hours,’ I admit. ‘I walked here.’ My interlocutor goggles at me; if he took ten hours to get here, they’re undoubtedly thinking, will the meeting have to go on for twenty? As Emile Durkheim so sagely observed, a society’s space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the business meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I’d appeared stark naked with a peacock’s tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.