Disrupt or be Disrupted: Disrupting Yourself

Growing by Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone  

We’ve all heard the mantra: Disrupt or be disrupted. But if it’s so obvious, why do so many established companies struggle to evolve? And what if the real secret isn’t just about disrupting your business, but about disrupting yourself?

Lessons from Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone  

Stepping out of your comfort zone. Not a natural thing for many of us to do.

Put me in front of an executive business audience and I do pretty well. I’ve learned and leaned on the power of stories to make things interesting. Put me in the C-suite of any organization and I can help them solve the key strategic challenges at hand. Thirty-five years of experience will do that for you.

As an author of two successful business books and a third out shortly, a tenured full professorship, faculty positions at Cornell, Yale, London Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a successful boutique consulting firm, my “swim” lanes, my competencies were clear.

And had become easy in time.

But what if we were to leave our comfort zone? REALLY out of our comfort zone. That’s exactly what I did – twice.

1. Business Writer to Fiction Writer. With David Edelheit, I co-authored Scarlett’s Revenge, a business thriller with an interactive website that unpacks the real-world strategy lessons behind every chapter. Think The Goal meets corporate intrigue. Here’s the twist: I’d never written fiction before.
2. From Ivory Tower to Industry. I joined the leadership team at Knapp Capital Management (KCM), an innovative, cutting-edge commercial real estate firm built from the ground up to exploit market inefficiencies. It is not uncommon for a business executive to leave business to take a “Professor in the Practice” or “Executive in Residence” position at a top business school; the reverse is much more unusual.

Both moves forced me to rethink everything I knew about disruption—from the inside out.

Disruption: It’s Coming for You 

So, I turned everything upside down, left “comfort” for significant new challenges. After decades in business schools and boardrooms, two truths stand out:

1. Everyone gets disrupted—whether they know it or not.
2. If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will.

Scarlett’s Revenge pits two once very close friends against each other: after a falling out, one character, Scarlett, vows to put her former best friend out of business from the inside. What would you do if a handful of your leadership team left your company to start a well-funded rival competitor whose central objective is to put you out of business?  Scarlett’s Revenge is based on real life occurrences: When one of the book’s characters vows to put another’s business out of business out of revenge, this actually happened. When a CEO ignores the warning signs and refuses to adapt, history reminds us of companies like Kodak and Blockbuster, once dominant but now relics of a bygone era, casualties of their own resistance to change.

Ten Commandments of Disruption 

Here are the ten lessons I’ve learned about disruption, on the page and in the real world:

1. Be paranoid.
   Andy Grove, legendary CEO of Intel famously commented, “Only the paranoid survive.” As a leader, you must assume that everyone is out for you, that everyone is trying to disrupt you. They almost certainly are. Better to disrupt yourself than have someone else do it. In Scarlett’s Revenge, one character, Victoria, the CEO of a major retailer, thought her firm was bulletproof. She was until she was attacked from the inside by a rival that knew her greatest weakness. What if your competitor knew your greatest weaknesses from the inside? How can you make your firm bulletproof?
2. Be humble.
   To “see around corners,” you must sometimes be aware that you can’t. If you can’t “See around corners,” you’ll need to find someone who can. Most blind spots are created out of a lack of humility. You must first realize that you have weaknesses – and we all do – to spot them.
3. Disrupt yourself.
   In the Scarlett’s Revenge, one of two main characters, Victoria, thought she was immune from competition. How often have you seen leaders, particularly leaders of incumbent firms, be so confident that their existing model will remain only to see it be disrupted? I often argue that we as business leaders have a “cocaine problem;” not a literal cocaine problem of course, but a metaphorical one. We become addicted to the revenue model, to the brick and mortar, to the physical offering, that we are blinded to anything else.
4. Customer first.
   Always. Needs endure; solutions are transient. The now cliched example of Kodak thinking it was in the film business when in fact it was in the memory business illustrates the point: How long have humans had the need to save memories? Since humans have existed on this planet. Hieroglyphics, the printed word, painting, film, digital, etc., all achieved the same objective albeit differently. Focusing on the need and the customer first, disruptors typically focus on and meet customer needs in a new, interesting and value-added way, often simultaneously reducing costs and shrinkage. Often customer first focus is a win-win to both the top and bottoms line.
5. Focus matters.
   If you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone. In contrast, as you disrupt an organization or industry, you typically have your sights set on one goal. You eschew everything else focused on that one objective. As an incumbent, you often serve multiple markets, segments, customers and stakeholders. It splits your time, your resources, your energy. In Scarlett’s Revenge, the main character, Scarlett, was 100% focused on one goal. The incumbent was resistant to change and never saw the disruptor coming until it was too late. Countless real life industry examples come to mind from Borders to Blockbuster to Sears.
6. Prioritization matters.
   Efficient use of resources mandates prioritization of customers, segments and cost. Prioritization is the analogue of focus. They work hand in hand and are pivotal to fending off sometimes more efficient, hungrier rivals.
7. Strategic Control matters.  
   In the book, The Carrot and the Stick, I write extensively about Strategic Control: something in the industry’s value chain that is in short supply or that if controlled by one party, provides the basis for leveraging to superior margins throughout and beyond the immediate industry value chain. Use it when you have it. You often have a limited window to use it, so move quickly.
8. Vertical Incentive Alignment matters.  
   Design with foresight. In The Carrot and the Stick, I also write extensively about Vertical Strategic Alignment: something that helped Oliver Williamson win a Nobel Prize in Economics. Vertical Incentive Alignment describes a joint investment short of a full-blown merger or acquisition that can align the incentives across the value chain. IoT supply chain or inventory control systems are oft used examples.
9. Create a “hamburger problem.”  
   Keith Williams, legendary (now retired) CEO of Underwriter’s Laboratory used to say that he wanted his people to have a “hamburger problem.” What he meant was that – as a startup for example – if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from (hence the hamburger analogy), you work harder, are scrappier. Incumbents are funded while disruptors are often working for funding. Create a “hamburger problem” in your own organization, for your own people.
10. Always have a “Canary in the coal mine.”  
    Be sure to heed the warnings. We all have ears to the ground. Keith Williams brought someone in just to spend time with customers and be the customer’s advocate. In Scarlett’s Revenge, a local franchisee saw the problem long before it became a bigger problem, but the CEO just wouldn’t listen. Who is your on-the-ground, go-to person to tell you what you can’t see from the C-suite?

David Edelheit, creator of EY-Parthenon’s The Toughest Opponent, leads clients through a transformative strategy journey anchored by a two-to-three-day immersive experience designed to do what most companies avoid—disrupt themselves. In this high-stakes simulation, leaders are forced to think like a relentless competitor set on taking them down. They surface blind spots, pressure-test assumptions, and ultimately learn to defend their business by reinventing it from within.

What I’ve learned over the years is that you had better.

Written by Dr. William Putsis.
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