Disruption Business 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storytelling sells a vision of the future.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.

Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.

All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Adaptable companies turn disruptions into opportunities.

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

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

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.

Uncertainty is a prerequisite to our agency and freedom.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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].

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

Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.

You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.

No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.

Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.

Starting each day with a positive mindset is the most important step of your journey to discovering opportunity.

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.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

Speed to fail should be every entrepreneur's motto. When you finally find the one idea that can't be killed, go with it.

The most important tool you have on a resume is language.

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

Change management through business paradigm shifting minimizes disruption and maximizes benefit.

I built success in business when I stopped focusing on me and started focusing on helping others.

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

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

Failure is a necessary ingredient to invention.

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

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.

The accelerating pace of change is now the norm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.