Digital Disruption Quotes

Today, even tangibles are intangibles - cars, planes, and computers rely on software. They are essentially digital assets under the disguise of a mechanical body, and much of their value is intangible.

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

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

As sustainability is the new digital, every company needs to be an energy company.

Today, when routine cognitive tasks are digitized and automated, and multiple lifetimes worth of information are accessible at our fingertips (much of which rapidly becomes obsolete), the focus of education must shift.

Anything that can be automated, cognified, decentralized, digitized, disintermediated, or virtualized will be. These shifts will radically transform every aspect of the economy, including industries, sectors, professions, jobs… even the meaning of work itself.

The future is closer than you think. You can pay attention now or watch the transformation happen right in front of your eyes

Some people think Elon Musk bought Twitter but what he actually bought is DATA. Whoever has the best information wins. Data is the new oil!

A shift in mindset is required to thrive in the current era and this cannot be achieve at an academic level, social latitude or political sphere but at a personal level.

Innovation, creativity and an ability to solve real life problems remain the most prized skills in today’s economy

Digital disruption and the impact of coronavirus will bring the 2030 technological advancement earlier than predicted

Value comes from seeing what customers need and delivering it. Digital disruptors will do all of this at lower cost, with faster development times, and with greater impact on the customer experience than anything that came before.

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

Digitization + ubiquitous connectivity + consumer empowerment = enable an environment for disruptive innovation

The only source of competitive advantage now is a focus on knowledge of and engagement with customers.

Today, only companies that partner promiscuously can accelerate the delivery of their innovative ideas.

Dissatisfaction with status quo is the psychology behind creative disruptions.

costs further down the line. CIOs need to act now to close the gap. And it is not just an act of self-preservation; having

R&D teams have a tendency to confuse product features with customer benefits. They assume that more features equals more benefits. This is not true.

True disruption comes from redefining business models, not business processes.

Embracing innovation and understanding how to navigate the digital era is the key to unlocking new opportunities and staying ahead of the curve.

The current education system does not need changing, it is ripe for disruption, it need transformation. The education system needs a revolution.

The strategists need a game theory view for a game-changing strategy in our platform world

Today, disruption is the ultimate value generator, knowledge is a commodity and innovation a way forward.

in a digitally enabled world, all businesses are global

6Ds: Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize and Democratize. Any technology that

Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

Lesson One: To avoid the pitfalls of local optimization, focus on the end-to-end value stream.

Never be mean to someone who can hurt you by doing nothing.

There’s a very real cognitive and spiritual burden of having to carry so many unfulfilled promises forever into the future, where anyone can ask at any time “Where is my feature?

Thanks to technology, we now have access to the entirety of human knowledge from a device that fits in our pocket. The internet is humanity's greatest gift.

There is no such thing as job security. Winning or losing is now happening faster than ever before.

Personal disruption is the vehicle through which success and economic growth travels

Instead of the education system banning ChatGPT from schools, the focus should be geared towards educating students on how to properly use AI tools. Schools should be at the forefront of innovation and technological progress NOT a place for preserving obsolete learning methods and clinging onto archaic practices that are no longer relevant for the world we live in.

that e-reading resulted in poorer comprehension, as a result of the physical limitations of the text that forced readers to scroll up and down, thereby disrupting their reading with a spatial instability

Trying to get a Phoenix build going is like playing Legend of Zelda, if it were written by a sadist, forcing her to adventure far and wide to find hidden keys scattered across the kingdom and given only measly clues from uncaring NPCs. But when you finally finish the level, you can’t actually play the next level—you have to mail paper coupons to the manufacturer and wait weeks to get the activation codes.

to compete. And then there is the hype. Vendors, analysts and the media talk up new technologies and trends making them sound like the ‘next big thing’, something that every company must adopt if it wants to stay

Every single industry that had been disrupted by the internet had claimed special status. Publishing was no different—first in dismissing the threat and then in demanding protection from the very threat it had once dismissed—

While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

We think it’s time to refocus on what’s healthy for the vast majority of workers, for the businesses that aren’t at the cutting edge of digital transformation, and for all of us who don’t want to be subject to the whims of a few out-of-touch billionaires.

Deception. What follows digitalization is deception, a period during which exponential growth goes mostly unnoticed. This happens because the doubling of small numbers often produces results so minuscule they are often mistaken for the plodder’s progress of linear growth. Imagine Kodak’s first digital camera with 0.01 megapixels doubling to 0.02, 0.02 to 0.04, 0.04 to 0.08. To the casual observer, these numbers all look like zero. Yet big change is on the horizon. Once these doublings break the whole-number barrier (become 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.), they are only twenty doublings away from a millionfold improvement, and only thirty doublings away from a billionfold improvement. It is at this stage that exponential growth, initially deceptive, starts becoming visibly disruptive.

Achieving clarity can be uncomfortable. It can disrupt. People tend to want to avoid conflict, be collaborative, and basically accept all the ideas and all the wording. This tactic does not demand the best thinking and avoids the sensitive topics in the spirit of “getting along.

By some estimates, there are 250 hacker groups in China that are tolerated and may even be encouraged by the government to enter and disrupt computer networks,” said the 2008 U.S.–China Security Review. “The Chinese government closely monitors Internet activities and is likely aware of the hackers’ activities. While the exact number may never be known, these estimates suggest that the Chinese government devotes a tremendous amount of human resources to cyber activity for government purposes. Many individuals are being trained in cyber operations at Chinese military academies, which does fit with the Chinese military’s overall strategy.

In 1996, Eastman Kodak was a hundred-year-old powerhouse with one hundred forty thousand employees and a valuation of twenty-eight billion dollars. Yet a mere sixteen years later, the company was filing for bankruptcy, a T. Rex dinosaur that had failed to fathom the disruptive power and game-changing impact of the digital photography revolution.

The human domination of nature has caused nature to escape human control, threatening our flourishing through runaway climate disruption. The more people with whom we’re able to connect digitally, the worse the loneliness epidemic gets; and the more vigilance parents exert over their children’s comfort, the more anxious and uncomfortable they are.

Organizations that manage IT delivery as projects instead of products are using managerial principles from two ages ago and cannot expect those approaches to be adequate for succeeding in this one. Visionary organizations are creating and managing their Value Stream Networks and product portfolios in order to leapfrog their competition in the Age of Software

In the same way, hybrid models of blended learning are not noticeably simpler for teachers than the existing system. On the contrary, in many cases they appear to require all the expertise of the traditional model plus new expertise in managing digital devices and in integrating data across all the supplemental online experiences in the teacher-directed rotation.

Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money. An invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization. That changes it radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal. Where transaction has no state or context other than obeying the consensus rules of the network that no one controls. Where your money is yours. You control it absolutely through the application of digital signatures, and no one can censor it, no one can seize it, no one can freeze it. No one can tell you what to do or what not to do with your money. It is a system of money that is simultaneously, absolutely transnational and borderless. We’ve never had a system of money like that.

They started by cutting out the bottom of a bottle and attaching an old webcam Harry literally had lying around in his office to the bottom of the bottle. They secured the camera inside a plastic bag to make it waterproof, then affixed the whole assembly to the body of the bottle and put water in it. Then they recorded Harry taking a drink, viewed from the unique vantage point of being inside the bottle.

I wonder sometimes if we need the opposite to agile. We need sudden leaps forward and then periods of stability. We need systems and processes designed in tandem with each other. We need to leap to create brand new entities based on the latest thinking and software, and periods of calm where we change little. It’s a bold new way to think about change, it’s countercultural, but it’s interesting to ponder.

Resist Proxies As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.

Business and National leaders who lack the ability to come up with the visions of the future for their organizations and countries, with wishful thinking that the world will go back to normal, will lead their businesses and countries to Digital Extinction. Digital transformation is not an event, it is a series of disruptive events and any leader, business or national that thought, after the pandemic things will go back to normal, such thinking leaders have a perfect recipe to lead their organizations and countries through the shortcut to digital extinction.

become accustomed to seeing life as something we can pause in order to document it, get another thread running in it, or hook it up to another feed. We’ve seen that in all of this activity, we no longer experience interruptions as disruptions. We experience them as connection. We seek them out, and when they’re not there, we create them. Interruptions enable us to avoid difficult feelings and awkward moments. They become a convenience. And over time we have trained our brains to crave them. Of course, all of this makes it hard to settle down into conversation.

Rather than making generalized assumptions about what WIP limits should be for each value stream, the Value Stream Network provides the data to determine and tune flow load over time. At Tasktop, we have witnessed this effect by putting too many features that crosscut our architecture on the Hub team. While all of those large and crosscutting features were deemed critical by the business at the time, doing more than one of them in parallel across the teams within that value stream resulted in a lower flow velocity over the course of a year than the flow velocity of taking on one crosscutting feature at a time.

Currently, the Metaverse has become real. Millions of people are waiting anxiously for this digital world to materialize so they can move in and stay. If we aren’t already distracted, exhausted, and disembodied, this major disruption to a physical world could be yet another violent piece to the traumatizing culture of grinding. As a person totally focused on our Spirits, souls, minds, and bodies, I am worried about the role the Metaverse will play in an already sleep-deprived and disconnected world. There are too many ways to ignore the deep inner knowing, intuition, and divine wisdom that exists in us from birth already. To exist daily over time in a space of increased virtual experiences will have a lasting effect on our

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort. Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.

System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth. People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort. Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.

Gilbert proposed that understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it. The initial attempt to believe is an automatic operation of System 1, which involves the construction of the best possible interpretation of the situation. Even a nonsensical statement, Gilbert argues, will evoke initial belief. Try his example: “whitefish eat candy.” You probably were aware of vague impressions of fish and candy as an automatic process of associative memory searched for links between the two ideas that would make sense of the nonsense. Gilbert sees unbelieving as an operation of System 2, and he reported an elegant experiment to make his point. The participants saw nonsensical assertions, such as “a dinca is a flame,” followed after a few seconds by a single word, “true” or “false.” They were later tested for their memory of which sentences had been labeled “true.” In one condition of the experiment subjects were required to hold digits in memory during the task. The disruption of System 2 had a selective effect: it made it difficult for people to “unbelieve” false sentences. In a later test of memory, the depleted participants ended up thinking that many of the false sentences were true.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.

NO! That’s not for you! Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing.

Dr. Seuss books, Oh, the Places You’ll Go. The book describes the dreaded Waiting Place, where people wait for the fish to bite, wind to fly a kite, for Uncle Jake, for pots to boil, or a better break …

Creating software should be a collaborative and conversational endeavor—individuals need to interact with each other to create new knowledge and value for the customer.

Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else’s.

Maxine loves coding and she’s awesome at it. But she knows that there’s something even more important than code: the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality code quickly and safely, freeing themselves from all the things that prevent them from solving important business problems.

Maxine appreciates these reminders about their customers—when engineers think of “the customer” in the abstract instead of as a real person, you rarely get the right outcomes.

If you don’t find problems quickly, you end up finding them months later. By then, the problem is lost in all the other changes that every other developer made, so the link between cause and effect disappears without a trace.

Everyone around here thinks features are important, because they can see them in their app, on the web page, or in the API. But no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.

if we all want our developers to be productive, they need to be able to perform builds on Day One.

I want to bring back the days when a developer could actually create value for someone who cares, easily and quickly,” Cranky Dave says. “I want to build and maintain something for the long haul, instead of shipping the ‘feature of the day’ and dragging all this technical debt around.

why does everything feel like I’m dealing with a government bureaucracy or an uncaring vendor? Maxine ponders. Maybe it’s because when friends do favors for friends, we don’t require them to open a ticket first.

Without automated testing, the more code we write, the more money it takes for us to test.

I’ve finally found my tribe, she thinks. And this is what an effective network is all about—when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart.

Locality in our code is what keeps systems loosely coupled, enabling us to deliver features faster.

what’s the plural of ‘developer’?” says Maxine. “A ‘merge conflict.

a joke: “A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a ‘sfdeljknesv.

The church was never meant to be a derivative of the cultural moment but, rather, a disruption of it.

call the 6Ds: Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize and Democratize.

Take charge of your own digital Upskilling. Digitize yourself!

we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it’s easy to create problems.

consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.

Here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car. A car that pays for its Toyota lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. A car that is a corporation. A car that is a shareholder and owner of its own corporation. A car that exists as an autonomous financial entity with no human ownership. This has never happened before, and that’s just the beginning. Audience member gasps: "Oh shit!" I can guarantee you that one of the first distributed autonomous corporations is going to be a fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-based ransomware virus that will go out and rob people online of their bitcoin, and use that money to evolve itself to pay for better programming, to buy hosting, and to spread. That’s one vision of the future. Another vision of the future is a digital autonomous charity. Imagine a system that takes donations from people, and using those donations it monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook. When a certain threshold is reached and it sees 100,000 people talking about a natural disaster, like a typhoon in the Philippines, it can marshal the donations and automatically fund aid in that area, without a board of directors, without shareholders. One hundred percent of donations goes directly to charitable causes. Anyone can see the rules by which that autonomous altruistic charity works. We are beginning to approach things we have never seen before. This is not just a currency. Now, let’s look at how the bitcoin community is addressing this incredible potential with their design choices and metaphors. Oh boy, it’s a mess.

Let’s face it: your best customer probably doesn’t need what you are selling. And you are not likely to be the only company from which they can buy it. For this reason, it is often far better, as leadership guru Simon Sinek suggests, to start with why.

In the Hype Machine, everyone is a digital marketer, whether we’re fighting for ideas or for consumer dollars.

Six Ds of Exponentials,” or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization

The First Ideal—Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal—Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal—Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal—Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal—Customer Focus

Great QA requires a perverse and sometimes sadistic intuition for what will cause software to blow up, crash, or endlessly hang. Maxine once heard a joke: “A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a ‘sfdeljknesv.

In BOLD, we introduced “the Six Ds of Exponentials,” or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization.

The associate dean of libraries was talking about “innovation” again, tossing around terms like “digital humanities,” “digital transformation,” and “virtual reality.” The library staff had grown numb to these speeches, in no small part because the talks were usually accompanied by a lack of follow-through. The associate dean would get all hot and bothered when some new project came around, only to stop giving it attention and resources when he got bored and hopped onto the next new thing. The library had completed three strategic plans in about as many years. The staff eventually realized that performing being innovative was the way to reach their boss and started keeping a lexicon of terms that would be more likely to sway him. Wouldn’t your project be better with virtual reality? they would suggest. Meanwhile, the work of keeping the library going and providing services was often ignored. This library tale—an amalgam of stories we’ve heard from professional librarians around the country—highlights how maintenance work can be overlooked and under-resourced in professional settings.

We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8 When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why.

There’s a misconception sometimes that digital disruption is all about developers. It’s not. Yes, companies need developers to build software. But really it’s about the successful collaboration between all the functions, and the software developers who actually write the code. It takes a village.

In a graph often cited by the late Clayton Christensen, a noted expert on disruptive innovation, in 1981, 50 percent of the average investment of profits was allocated to research and development and 50 percent to shareholder dividends. Today, 50 percent of that investment is allocated to stock buybacks, 49 percent to dividends, and a meager 1 percent to research and development.

Having only one skill or holding only to your academic qualifications in an era of exponential change makes you economically vulnerable.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is creating a demand for new competencies and the need for upskilling, un-learning, re-learning and re-training has never been more severe than now.

The issues surrounding technological advancements cannot be left only to tech experts, governments or business executives to address. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here and is completely transforming the way we live and work. These unprecedented technologies require youths from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to join the conversation and become part of the revolution!

But in reality, when developers work, they’re usually staring at the screen, deep in concentration, trying to understand what the code does so they can safely and surgically change it without breaking something else as an unintended side-effect, especially if they’re working on something mission-critical

Trying to slow progress or demand is foolhardy; but leaving the economy to a handful of digital monopolies will be problematic for our companies, our staff, and our social systems. If we do not turn this tide—the increasing amount of wealth in the hands of tech giants, and the network effects of technologies making effective government regulation difficult at best—the consequences could be more dire than the mass company extinctions that we witnessed in the four previous ages.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.

As Gordon’s book The Rise and Fall of American Growth went to press in early 2016 (its publication facilitated by digital technologies), the internet continued to disrupt countless industries while the media fanned fears of an impending ‘second machine age’, in which robots replace human workers. Gordon’s Northwestern colleague Joel Mokyr suggested that a ‘shortfall of imagination [is] largely responsible for much of today’s pessimism’. Mokyr listed a number of revolutionary new technologies then under development, including 3D printing, graphene and genetic engineering, to which might be added autonomous cars and clean energy.19 Finance writer William Bernstein accused secular stagnationists of conflating what they couldn’t conceive with that which was not possible.20 Hansen made the same mistake. The most reliable prediction, Bernstein concluded, is to assume that past economic trends continue.

Good morning, and I’d like to just answer the question that you’re probably thinking. The answer is, yes, we’re the team that built the current mobile apps—both of them. We’re not proud, and we’re just glad users can’t rate an app with zero stars.