“
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.…
”
”
Ajay Agrawal (Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence)
“
Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.
”
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
An organization, its business, sector, or purpose do not exist per se. Reality becomes its perception.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
The value of intangibles derived from intellectual property rights and trademarks from brands, inventions, software code, and programs has never been higher.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
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.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption)
“
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.
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”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Tomorrow’s beef and dairy industries may face the same existential challenges as today’s fossil fuel industry.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
The current boundaries, definitions, and clustering of separate and clearly delineated “industries” or “sectors” are disappearing.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
Withstanding systemic disruption requires effectiveness over efficiency.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
Systemic disruption will continue to drive significant shifts in business models, value creation, and value destruction.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
The only way to reinvent a business model for today’s complex world is to approach it like a system.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
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.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption)
“
Climate intelligence enables action-oriented, climate-aligned decisions to mitigate risks, build resilient adaptation, and identify emerging opportunities.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
Incremental climate adaptation needs to shift to exponential climate adaptation.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
For those intent on business as usual, the scope of value destruction is growing.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
There is an inverse relationship between predictability and uncertainty, and an increasing cost of assuming a predictable world.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
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.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
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.
”
”
Ajay Agrawal (Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence)
“
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.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
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.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
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.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
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).
”
”
Lilith Saintcrow (Strange Angels (Strange Angels, #1))
“
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.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
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.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
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.
”
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Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.
”
”
Jay Samit
“
Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.
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Jay Samit
“
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.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
“
Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.
”
”
Jay Samit
“
You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Adaptable companies turn disruptions into opportunities.
”
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
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.
”
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
“
To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.
”
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
The most important tool you have on a resume is language.
”
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Jay Samit
“
No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.
”
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Speed to fail should be every entrepreneur's motto. When you finally find the one idea that can't be killed, go with it.
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Jay Samit
“
Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure
”
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Jay Samit
“
It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.
”
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
I built success in business when I stopped focusing on me and started focusing on helping others.
”
”
Sharon Pearson (Disruptive Leadership: Four Simple Steps to Creating the Winning Team)
“
Change management through business paradigm shifting minimizes disruption and maximizes benefit.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Starting each day with a positive mindset is the most important step of your journey to discovering opportunity.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
The difference between civil servants and private businessmen is that when a central planner makes a mistake, he is likely to disrupt the whole economy and not just a single business.
”
”
Paul A. Cantor (Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (LvMI))
“
Disrupting yourself is critical to avoiding stagnation, being overtaken by low-end entrants (i.e., younger, smarter, faster workers), and fast-tracking your personal and career growth.
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”
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
“
With few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms’ managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.
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Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
“
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.
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”
John Steinbeck (America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction)
“
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.
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”
Will Self (Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place)
“
The majority of people are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
A career is just a longer trip with a whole lot more baggage.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Our world's future is far more malleable and controllable than most people realize.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go farther than a genius idea no one gets.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
A disruptor finds opportunity and profit from his misfortunes.
”
”
Jay Samit
“
Problems are just businesses waiting for the right entrepreneur to unlock the value.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Data has no ego and makes an excellent co-pilot.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Smart entrepreneurs learn that they must fail often and fast.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Data may disappoint, but it never lies.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Be the best at what you do or the only one doing it.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Entrepreneur, take a bite out of Apple's innovation so in turn you can bear fruits of creativity.
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”
Onyi Anyado
“
A permaculture economy is a resilient system that can continue to thrive through significant hardship and disruption.
”
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.
”
”
Clayton M. Christensen
“
There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
A negative mind will never find success. I have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
A dream with a deadline is a goal.
”
”
Jay Samit
“
Accepting that the odds are against you is the same as accepting defeat before you begin.
”
”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
You will have more regrets for the things you didn't try than the ones you tried and didn't succeed at.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
THE MORE FOUNDATIONAL A TECHNOLOGY IS, the more impact it can have. Blockchain technology is not a process improvement technology. At its fullest deployment potential, it is rather a disruptive technology; therefore it must be given that potential when being implemented.
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William Mougayar (The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology)
“
The Premier League is a timeless tale of boom and bust, no different from all those other bubbles they warn you about in business-school textbooks. Except, that is, in one crucial respect. In football, the bubble never burst.
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Joshua Robinson (The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports)
“
The key point here is that large companies typically fail at disruptive innovation because the top management team is dominated by individuals who have been selected for delivery skills, not discovery skills. As a result, most executives at large organizations don’t know how to think different. It isn’t something that they learn within their company, and it certainly isn’t something they are taught in business school. Business schools teach people how to be deliverers, not discoverers.
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Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators)
“
About us holding hands in Dr. Wiese’s clinic…” I was feeling brave, but then he stopped, turned around, and looked at me seriously. “Yeah. Wasn’t thinking. Won’t happen again.” “No,” I said, stopping, too. We were now the only people standing in a busy promenade, disrupting the rest of the people, and not giving much of a damn. “I was wondering if we could do this again sometime. Not, like, in a weird capacity or anything. I just want to know that I, uhm.” I swallowed, glancing around. “Can.
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L.J. Shen (Bane (Sinners of Saint, #4))
“
They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation. By approaching a disruptive business with the mindset that they can’t know where the market is, managers would identify what critical information about new markets is most necessary and in what sequence that information is needed.
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Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
“
Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Disruption isn't about what happens to you, it's about how you respond to what happens to you.
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”
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
If life, you get what you believe you deserve.
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Jay Samit
“
If you don't know where you want to be in five years, how do you ever expect to get there?
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Jay Samit
“
You can truly have it all, just not all at the same time.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Plan for ways to get more enjoyment into your life and you will get more joy out of it.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Building a career or a company is about living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life living at a level most people can't.
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Jay Samit
“
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
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”
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
“
There’s this saying, “The moment you move to protecting the status quo instead of disrupting the status quo, you put yourself at risk.” That’s the challenge for businesses, and that’s the challenge for individuals: understanding the point at which you are protecting what you know and defending what you know, instead of looking at what else you can learn and how you can grow.
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Jocelyn K. Glei (Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (99U Book 2))
“
The first real threat it faced, today’s ridesharing model, only showed up in the last decade. But that ridesharing model won’t even get ten years to dominate. Already, it’s on the brink of autonomous car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-anywhere decimation. Plus, avatars. The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next ten years.
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
“
Disruption has become the norm in business. But this doesn't always mean massive and world-changing disruption. Sometimes, it just means that the world is a bit more open to conducting business the way you'd prefer to do it these days.
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Chris Brogan (The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators)
“
Many people believe that problem solving is the source of innovation. However, problem solving is by definition focused on addressing what exists and attempting to make it better. True innovation comes from reaching for the potential in something: its possible manifestations that don’t yet exist. Bringing entirely new things into existence is what makes innovation so disruptive, and this is precisely what gets shut down when thinking is defined or circumscribed by problems.
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”
Carol Sanford (The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes)
“
Unfortunately, many give lip service to the concepts of diversity and inclusion but confuse the two and fail to implement them effectively. These are two different but related ideas. Diversity is the recognition that we are unique in our combination of physical attributes and our life experiences. Each of these differences matters because they help provide unique perspectives for problem-solving. Diverse perspectives, versus a homogeneous group, will bring forward a broader range of potential solutions and more “out of the box” thinking. Inclusion is proactively bringing a diverse population together—whether a community or business organization—and enabling these differences to coalesce in a positive way. Making a diverse group feel welcome and valued is the essence of inclusion.
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”
Reggie Fils-Aimé (Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo)
“
The academic literature describes marshals who “‘police’ other demonstrators,” and who have a “collaborative relationship” with the authorities. This is essentially a strategy of co-optation. The police enlist the protest organizers to control the demonstrators, putting the organization at least partly in the service of the state and intensifying the function of control. (...)
Police/protestor cooperation required a fundamental adjustment in the attitude of the authorities. The Negotiated Management approach demanded the institutionalization of protest. Demonstrations had to be granted some degree of legitimacy so they could be carefully managed rather than simply shoved about. This approach de-emphasized the radical or antagonistic aspects of protest in favor of a routinized and collaborative approach. Naturally such a relationship brought with it some fairly tight constraints as to the kinds of protest activity available. Rallies, marches, polite picketing, symbolic civil disobedience actions, and even legal direct action — such as strikes or boycotts — were likely to be acceptable, within certain limits. Violence, obviously, would not be tolerated. Neither would property destruction. Nor would any of the variety of tactics that had been developed to close businesses, prevent logging, disrupt government meetings, or otherwise interfere with the operation of some part of society. That is to say, picketing may be fine, barricades are not. Rallies were in, riots were out. Taking to the streets — under certain circumstances — may be acceptable; taking over the factories was not. The danger, for activists, is that they might permanently limit themselves to tactics that were predictable, non-disruptive, and ultimately ineffective.
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Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
“
Good morning, Mike,” I mumbled, making a beeline for the coffeepot.
“Oooooh!” he teased again. “Someone is getting married tonight! Woooooooo…”
“Yep,” I said, taking that first glorious sip of java. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Mike put his hand over his mouth and snickered. Then he asked, “So…are you guys gonna do some…some kissin’?”
“I certainly hope so,” I said. This only served to make Mike laugh harder.
“Ooooooh!” he squealed. “Are you gonna have a baby?”
Oh, Lord.
I took another hit of Gevalia and answered, “Not today.” Mike cracked up again. He was clearly on a roll.
“What’s so funny this morning, Mike?” I asked.
“Your s-s-s-stomach is gonna get so fat,” he answered. Mike was quickly approaching manic stage--the result of a large, busy weekend and his routine being disrupted. Soon the inevitable crash would come. I just hoped I was on the plane to Australia when it happened. It wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Oh, whatever, Mike,” I answered, feigning indignation.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
The age of centralized, command-and-control, extraction-resource-based energy sources (oil, gas, coal and nuclear) will not end because we run out of petroleum, natural gas, coal, or uranium. It will end because these energy sources, the business models they employ, and the products that sustain them will be disrupted by superior technologies, product architectures, and business models. Compelling new technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy industry as we know it.
”
”
Tony Seba (Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030)
“
But was the Newton a failure? The timing of Newton’s entry into the handheld market was akin to the timing of the Apple II into the desktop market. It was a market-creating, disruptive product targeted at an undefinable set of users whose needs were unknown to either themselves or Apple. On that basis, Newton’s sales should have been a pleasant surprise to Apple’s executives: It outsold the Apple II in its first two years by a factor of more than three to one. But while selling 43,000 units was viewed as an IPO-qualifying triumph in the smaller Apple of 1979, selling 140,000 Newtons was viewed as a failure in the giant Apple of 1994.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Disruptive Innovation: The Christensen Collection (The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, The Innovator's DNA, and Harvard Business Review ... Will You Measure Your Life?") (4 Items))
“
In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity.
Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.
Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.
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The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?
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Tamim Ansary (Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes)
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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
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.
Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers--obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.
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Jill Lepore