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Creating Great Disruptive Business Ideas #6 – Is It an Amazing Idea or Just a Fantasy?

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:17:52 GMT

Just about everyone seems to have the next great disruptive business idea that will make them rich and famous and transform the lives of millions of people. As the 19th century French writer Victor Hugo once famously said: “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”

Unfortunately, however, many ostensibly brilliant business ideas – disruptive or not – barely get off the ground before they flounder and die. Often that’s because a lot of businessmen bite off more than they can chew. They’re not strategic thinkers who work through possible challenges and plot important moves and countermoves in advance of implementation.

On a practical level, thinking through potential roadblocks, regulatory actions, the arrival of new competitors, etc. and how you and your team will tackle them should be an important part of your investor presentation. Those details will make you and your idea that much more credible when talking to the guys with the money.

Most of the points below aren’t relevant just to entrepreneurs with big audacious ideas, but also to leaders of existing companies looking to disrupt one or many competitors, make a powerful impact on their industry or turn an organization around. There are also thousands of small businesses that are quite disruptive and successful by focusing their efforts on a very specific problem or activity like Sheila Lirio Marcelo who simply wanted to revolutionize how people get the right kind of medical assistance when they need it.

Choose the company or industry you’re going to disrupt carefully.

Fragmented industries with 10,000’s of small companies and just a few strong players are generally the most likely to be disrupted. Even better are industries that aren’t regulated or only slightly regulated. Industries that fit into both categories are gold mines for disruptive leaders and their ideas.

Jeff Bezos’ first big idea disrupted small book sellers that were barely eking out a living and a few of the larger chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders. In addition, the government had bigger fish to fry than to slap sellers and distributors of books with myriad regulations. No wonder Bezos was so successful so quickly.

On the other hand, Elon Musk took on not one but two extremely powerful industries – oil/gas and automotive – which are dominated by large incumbent corporations. powerful lobbyists and entrenched consumer buying habits. In addition, these are two of the most regulated (and unionized) industries that exist. No wonder Musk’s efforts haven’t been quite as successful as those of other great disruptive CEOs, even if he and Tesla galvanized the movement towards ecologically friendly vehicles.

Be prepared to overcome hurdles and frequent attacks.

Even if an industry isn’t highly regulated on the federal level, there might be significant state, city or foreign hurdles to get past. Even worse are new regulations put in place that could stop your efforts dead in their tracks such as changes to tax laws, licensing requirements, etc.

Lawsuits are almost a given as disrupted companies fight for their lives and government officials face political pressure to halt or slow down the dramatic changes your idea is causing and which they may not even understand. The media might go after you, often fueled by inevitable challenges to accepted cultural norms or beliefs caused by a highly disruptive idea.

Some of the biggest opposition can come from inside your own organization, especially in situations in which some or most employees will be impacted.

Make sure the idea has a high level of attractiveness.

We’re currently in one of the tightest labor markets ever. Although there are many ways to attract the best and brightest, your idea needs to be so compelling that your employees will do anything to help you achieve your vision and goals. In many cases, your idea and how well you present it will be the difference between failure and raising the money necessary to build the initial infrastructure and pay the bills.

In the end it’s all about making money.

If a disruptive idea can’t generate revenue early on, then it’s not an idea…it’s a fantasy. Profitability, on the other hand, is another issue. Some disruptive companies, (Amazon is the best example), can run at a loss for years if the story is good. If told well, narratives about using profits to grab market share or continuously investing the money back into the company can buy a new business the time it needs.

Creating Great Disruptive Business Ideas #7 – Other People’s Money

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:13:25 GMT

Every potentially successful disruptive idea faces one last big challenge: can it and its creator find the necessary capital to make the investments necessary to implement that great idea.

In the beginning, everyone – including the greatest disruptive leaders – bootstraps their company or sells a limited amount of equity to friends and family. They may even take advantage of more sophisticated investment groups for “seed” funding. Either way, the sums such activities yield are relatively small and a fledgling company can burn through this financing very quickly.

The fact is, in our advanced capitalist system—even with cheaper and readily available technology—nothing significant happens without money. And when I say money, I mean huge amounts of it.

There are many reasons why raising money from well-known financiers in exchange for equity—or convertible notes—can be a smart move, despite all the difficulties in getting deals done:

A first round of funding from well-known investors sends a signal that the successful company survived one of the greatest ordeals in business—convincing other people to give them money.
Smart entrepreneurs make sure initial lead investors are well-known within the ecosystems and communities in which the company intends to play. Such investors bring not only capital but relationships, experience, knowledge, and insights that the leadership of the funded entity might need going forward. These marquee names help attract additional investors and propel the company toward a successful IPO.
Rounds of early-stage funding are also key moments when a company’s value to an investor is professionally assessed, thereby answering one of the most important but difficult questions: If this company is going to make an impact, just how large and valuable will that impact be?
Investors’ singular focus on financial returns imposes accountability and discipline on the leaders of companies they support. Even if Amazon was not profitable for many years, Bezos’ success as a CEO was due in part to his experience in finance and ability to convince his investors that he was reinvesting his profits wisely and for the long-term.

Indeed, the numbers speak for themselves: In the period from 1994 to 1996 Bezos raised $9.5 million for his fledgling company, Amazon. By May 1997 he had turned that into $483 million when the company IPO’ed. Over the course of seven years (from 2003-2010) Reid Hoffman raised $85 million for LinkedIn which went public in 2011 at a whopping market capitalization of $4,500 million!

But these examples are more the exception than the rule. What most young entrepreneurs don’t realize is these companies were already producing revenue when their founders raised their first rounds of capital. Reid Hoffman quickly grew LinkedIn to $500 million in revenue and Amazon started making revenue from day one. Without some sort of a track record, it’s virtually impossible to attract any funding, although profitability is not necessarily a requirement.

While these days everyone with a disruptive idea seems to be preparing for a Series A round of financing, the truth is that often executives of a new company will waste so much time running after venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) firms to raise money, they lose focus and often have to close the business when nothing comes of the effort.

Going through a Series A, B, or C funding round is grueling, demoralizing, exhausting, and all-consuming. It’s a roller-coaster ride with more downs than ups. If the timing is off because the sector the company is operating in isn’t favored at the time, or if there are broader economic forces in play, even the best CEO or entrepreneur may not make any headway despite excellent efforts.

But private equity and venture capital funding are not the only options available to entrepreneurs looking to build disruptive businesses who need large amounts of funding to grow. An often better and much longer-term approach is to find a strategic partner who takes a significant stake to propel the growth of a company while providing additional benefits.

For one, investors don’t know much about running a business and are by nature risk adverse and myopic. They are also very short-term since most VC and PE firms look to sell their stake in a company within three to five years. If a founder doesn’t deliver the returns within the timeframe originally agreed to, their term will be up very quickly.

All of which can mean years of agony if an entrepreneur works with the wrong investors.

Strategic partners, on the other hand, know how to build and run a business, especially when the company they invest in is in their industry. They have a much longer-term horizon and often will slowly acquire the rest of the outstanding shares of a company over time. The biggest hurdle for most entrepreneurs, however, is the cultural fit with what are often very big, bureaucratic companies that are set in their ways and risk adverse.

Uber-Egos and Uber-Problems

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:35:12 GMT

Leaders committed to using disruptive management practices and techniques have to constantly assess every move they make. The ethical and legal issues they could get dragged into have the potential to derail their dreams and the companies they are leading.

In addition, disruptive CEOs face high amounts of pressure from investors, the media, their employees, families, customers, suppliers – and of course other players in their markets they are forcing to change or go out of business.

For these and other reasons, such leaders surround themselves with the skill sets and experiences they need to help them overcome obstacles and create great advances for their business and the world. However, they are happiest when they are working with like-minded souls who at heart live and breathe the same principals as they do. It’s not uncommon for such leaders to assemble a group of executives they know and trust that stays with them for decades.

Not unsurprisingly, Bezos has proven himself to be a master at understanding and implementing the basic building blocks to put together a champion team using what we commonly refer to as “core values” or “leadership principles.”

Even just a cursory look at Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles shows the extent to which Bezos’s values and beliefs have been codified, disseminated, and internalized by Amazon’s leadership team.

Some of Amazon’s core values such as customer obsession, thinking big, and delivering results may sound generic to any well-run business. But there are a few eye openers on the list that are rather unique to Bezos and Amazon. These include principles such as frugality, understanding how to be right as much as possible, and diving deeply.

It is these leadership principles that have contributed to making Amazon the huge success it is today.

But not all disruptive CEOs understand the importance of core values and a thought-through culture and organization. The most glaring case of the ramifications of not paying enough attention to the “softer” aspects of business is Travis Kalanick and the company he led until mid-2017, Uber.

Kalanick broke so many rules about basic organizational structure and culture as to call into question his ability to lead the company. Eight years after it was founded, the company was still operating without a CEO, COO, CFO, CMO or president. A cult of personality and ego which celebrated a highly aggressive culture had taken hold.

On June 6, 2017 it was made public that twenty employees had been fired over harassment, discrimination, and inappropriate behavior several days earlier. This was the first public sign that Uber was trying to contain the fallout from a series of toxic revolutions.

A week later Travis Kalanick was fired, although he still retained a seat on Uber’s board. His success and ego not only blinded him to the need to build a culture of accountability and ethics but also the need to adhere to local and state employment laws.

A report into Uber’s problems with sexism tied most of the problems to Uber’s deeply embedded culture of “stepping on toes” and “always be hustlin’”. While these behaviors might work for a small startup they can also be highly destructive for a nearly 12,000-person company.

Uber’s new CEO since August, Dara Khosrowshahi, faces a long list of challenges he rarely if ever faced as CEO of Expedia. Although he is rightly focused on creating a new culture and values system for Uber he also has to contend with an array of legacy issues and liabilities including multiple lawsuits.

One lawsuit that is drawing public attention involves Waymo, a smaller competitor, which is suing Uber for stealing trade secrets from them. After a federal judge on November 28th discovered Uber had been withholding important evidence in the trial, he declared he could no longer trust Uber’s lawyers.

Meanwhile, customers are choosing to ride with drivers of companies that might have grown slower such as Lyft but have also taken the time to build constructive and supportive corporate cultures. These rivals have been raising billions abroad and are banding together. In addition, important cities such as London and Montreal have threatened to either cancel or not renew Uber’s licenses.

Several large Uber investors recently marked down their investments in the wake of the company losing $2.8 billion in 2016 as Kalanick drove aggressive growth.

But the thing Khosrowshahi might have to be most concerned about it that with Kalanick on the board, he might just have a Steve Jobs’ type disruption on his hands if Kalanick makes a play to return to his old job of CEO.

Walls That Could Shut Down YOUR Business

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:53:40 GMT

Over a period of two years, a simple four-letter word has splintered our political system into a plethora of warring camps and even threatens to shut down the federal government not once but possibly twice.

Walls, both physical and figurative, are part of everyday life and, when erected properly, can be used by businesses to protect themselves from unwelcome competition or disruption. But if walls like the ones listed below are not dealt with properly, management’s ability to lead an organization can be impacted, putting a company’s very existence at risk.

1.Walls that hinder communication and good decision-making.

The most dangerous walls separate a company’s functions and business units into fiefdoms, damage cooperation between business owners and their investors and unravel relationships between senior executives and their staff. Like deadly diseases that go undetected for years, these walls silently insinuate themselves into an organization and often explode at the most inopportune times. Business leaders need to create and constantly reinforce cultures of listening and openness to keep them from forming.

2.Walls that separates perception from reality.

Story-telling may be a great way to communicate to a large organization dispersed around the world. But when leadership has lost its understanding of the marketplace and the all-important consumer of its products or services, a company – large or small – makes itself vulnerable to being disrupted. Don’t be the CEO who is the last to know.

3.Walls meant to “define” a company.

In the heady years of the 80’s and early 90’s, strategy consultants insisted that their clients stick to their core capabilities and assets and erect barriers to entry to their marketplace. While ideas and innovation are the life-blood of any business, make sure they don’t result in walls that lock your organization into a fixed way of being. They may hinder your company’s agility and prove too difficult to tear down before it’s too late.

4.Constantly shifting walls of overzealous regulators.

I’ve met too many small business owners who have been blind-sided by regulators who suddenly change the rules. As a business leader, you need to spend time attending meetings of your industry’s trade association, talk to your representatives on a state and federal level and anticipate disruptive changes before they occur.

Unproductive Mindsets and Behaviors

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:46:11 GMT

One of the aspects that I love most about what I do is getting to meet a diverse group of entrepreneurs and leaders of small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) on a regular basis. Many of them are based near where I live and have that unique New York City mix of earthiness, wiliness, and sophistication. While there are a lot of stubborn and frustrating—and a few truly crazy—people in this city, there are also many born storytellers eagerly waiting for an audience like me.

In early 2016, I met the owners of two prominent companies in New York City’s taxi and limousine industry who fit that description to a tee. One was a woman who owns and runs one of the city’s premier limousine services which is based in south Brooklyn. The other is one of New York City’s largest taxi medallion holders and brokers.

They had no trouble telling me how Uber, Lyft, and other disruptive companies—seemingly without so much as a shrug from NYC regulators—were devastating their businesses. And yet, for all their accomplishments and business savvy, I was surprised that both these entrepreneurs had allowed themselves to be stopped dead in their tracks. Revenues had plunged and formerly healthy margins had all but disappeared, threatening everything they had worked hard to build over their entire adult lives.

It was also clear to me very early in our conversations that they weren’t about to take advice from someone outside their industry, preferring instead to stick to what they knew. They are interesting examples of what can happen when perilous and unproductive mindsets like the few listed below take over.

I’m Always the Smartest in the Room

The Brooklyn-based businesswoman explained to me how she had always been at the top of her class in school and college. Like a modern-day Cassandra, she was constantly warning her colleagues and competitors about the dangers of Uber and Lyft with little effect. “I knew what was happening, but it was like talking to a brick wall,” she said.

But instead of taking the opportunity to make changes to her business, she had done nothing beyond forecasting death, doom and destruction. Six years later, she was in danger of literally driving both herself and her company over the cliff.

Although not quite as prescient as our Cassandra of the taxi and limousine industry, the gentleman who owns the largest taxi medallion brokerage in New York City is in fact originally from Greece. He had started his professional life in the city twenty-five years earlier as a taxi driver before he started building his business. He is charismatic and can talk a very good game; he also spent a lot of time telling me how smart he was.

But the kicker came when he said he was making $78 million in revenue annually but had racked up $100 million in debt buying and selling the medallions taxi drivers need to own and drive New York City taxis. In the previous five years, the value of these medallions had dropped to about one-fifth of the price they had commanded in the years before Uber, Lyft, and others entered the scene.

He had also taken no preemptive action to rethink his business model and allowed the situation to go on endlessly, thinking at some point he would be able to fix the problem—until it was too late.

He then explained with a flourish that he was working with Goldman Sachs—the smartest of the smartest—to solve the problem by restructuring his company.

These two business owners might have been smarter than me, but at least I had a business that was thriving and growing.

I’ll Wait until the Storm Blows over

Owners of businesses subject to back-and-forth swings in politics and regulations find it hard to commit to significant change when they can’t figure out what’s brewing in the halls of power. They often make do with a wait-and-see strategy. While this can sometimes be a reasonable and productive choice, it also can be simply an excuse for inaction.

Both entrepreneurs above were part of various organizations tied to the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission and were involved in efforts to convince regulators to make decisions that would help them. They hesitated to make too many drastic changes to their businesses, such as investing in mobile technology with similar functionality to that of Uber or hedging their exposure using more sophisticated financial instruments. They just hoped things would go back to the way they used to be once the regulators woke up and righted their wrongs. Unfortunately, that never happened.

I’m Just Too Nice

After an hour of frustrating conversation, the owner of the limousine service in South Brooklyn walked over to a cat sunning itself in the window of her office. She petted it, looked through a hole that had once been the window that allowed her to watch the garage where her people worked, and wistfully said: “You know, I’m just too nice.” This, after she had yelled at her people to shut up so she and I could hear each other talk. Maybe she was too nice. The situation clearly was so bad for her that she was losing sight in one eye, had been in the hospital for several ailments, and was struggling with a son who was addicted to drugs.

Perhaps if she hadn’t been “so nice,” she might’ve been able to enjoy her life more than she was.

I’ve worked through many other unproductive mindsets and behaviors with my clients, The most common are I’m just an imposter and everybody knows it, I’m not worthy and one of the hardest to identify and resolve: The Magpie Syndrome. This is a vicious cycle of always running after the next shiny object, Falling prey to this frame of mind often ends up in unhappiness in your personal life and failure or bankruptcy for your business.

Enjoyed this section of Owning Tomorrow: The Unstoppable Force of Disruptive Leadership? You can buy the book by clicking here.

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #2: Ideators and Visionaries, But Not Inventors

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:51:04 GMT

In the wake of the most disruptive invention in over 500 years – the internet – the kind of big, one-off inventions that we’ve seen in the past like airplanes, light bulbs, recording devices, etc. are no longer rocking the world the way highly disruptive ideas and applications are. Even inventions now considered highly disruptive such as electric vehicles were often created generations ago.

Electric vehicles were in fact disrupted and temporarily rendered obsolete a little over 100 years ago when internal combustion engines and the electric starter motor made cars using fossil-based fuels cheaper and easier to operate. That all started to change at the beginning of the 21st century when the urgency to lesson our dependency on dirty, politically charged and fast-depleting fossil fuels reached a fevered pitch. An old invention re-emerged as a new and disruptive idea whose time had finally come.

Likewise, today’s disruptive business people are decidedly not inventors. They are experts at combining existing technologies, business models and processes in new and unique ways.

Michael Dell, for example, did not invent the computer – he didn’t even make any major changes to the hardware or software of computers. Dell did something far more important. He developed a better manufacturing and distribution system that made computers cheaper, easier and faster to order and have delivered. In the process he turned many traditional slow, mistake-ridden and expensive distributors into dinosaurs.

Bill Gates is another brilliant ideator who personally never really invented anything. Instead he used his deep knowledge of technology and ability to not only spot but also create trends to change the face of the computing industry forever. He also used very aggressive business tactics to shut out or eliminate competitors.

Gates and his team didn’t invent, build or design the operating system (OS) that turned Microsoft into a highly profitable monopoly, they bought it from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), and then licensed it to IBM. It very quickly made every other OS for the PC – with maybe the exception of Linus – obsolete while generating immense wealth for Gates, his employees and investors.

Xbox, another pillar of Microsoft’s success, was a late comer to a category already saturated with play stations and video consoles. In many ways Xbox was just a more developed version of Sony’s PlayStation. It was only after funneling billions of dollars into developing and aggressively marketing Xbox that Microsoft was able to overtake Sony and other major players to dominate the category.

Even the legend of Edison as one of the greatest inventors has recently proven to be more of a myth than reality. While Edison may have invented a few things, he spent more time collecting patents, heading a team of developers, and creating companies. In this way Thomas Edison was more like our current successful disruptors such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Michael Dell.

Related reading:

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #1: Brainiacs

Strategy and The Effective Leader

Egos and Ethics

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #3: Stretchers of Limits

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:48:52 GMT

Many disruptive leaders not only radically transform businesses but are known to also push the boundaries of what is generally considered to be ethically and legally correct in order to achieve those goals. While the course of history has shown that yesterday’s moral frameworks are often swept aside by the next generation’s view of what is right and ethical, laws can remain in effect for many decades or longer.

The truth is, remarkable people – like great disruptors – are usually remarkably flawed. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk – there’s a long list of exceptional business disruptors who didn’t believe the rules applied to them.

Steve Jobs is a case in point. Not only did he accomplish extraordinary things because he was extraordinarily talented, but also because he believed he was special. That belief was at the core of his much talked about reality distortion field. Jobs didn’t think the rules applied to him. That also explains why he so often skirted ethical, legal, and societal boundaries.

Among other things, there were a number of court cases brought against Jobs, including one in which Apple together with a number of other technology companies was involved in an employee anti-poaching conspiracy.

While several embarrassing and damning emails between Jobs and his counterparts were used in evidence, no criminal charges were brought against any of the executives. Agreements to avoid poaching each other’s employees may be antitrust worthy, but they weren’t the result of criminal behavior.

There was also the e-book price-fixing conspiracy in which Apple and six large literary publishers planned to fix prices and break Amazon’s stranglehold on the e-book market. In many ways what Apple was trying to do was quite laudable given the monopoly Amazon had created so quickly.

Unfortunately, Apple lost the case.

But other CEOs not as prodigiously gifted as Steve Jobs have thoughtlessly pushed the envelope too far and have subsequently fallen from grace or worse. Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, is a high-profile example of a disruptive leader whose success and ego blinded him to the necessity of building a culture of accountability and ethics and adhere to local and state employment laws.

The company was sued, investors left in droves and many municipalities threatened to cancel their licenses. The problems were further compounded when competitors, especially Lyft, took advantage of the company’s situation and handily took away market share.

Related reading:

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #2: Ideators and Visionaries, But Not Inventors

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #1: Brainiacs

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #4: Hyper-Capitalists with a Mission

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:46:24 GMT

Many of the great disruptors have become multi-millionaires and, in the case of Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet. No one becomes that wealthy without completely embracing the capitalist system with all its opportunities for upward social mobility and large-scale transformation as well as the inequalities it can cause.

Bezos’ commitment to capitalism and his ambition fueled his years on Wall Street after finishing college. As a hedge fund manager, he saw the potential of the internet and decided it was the opportunity of a life-time.

In 1994 he decided to start own business, headed to Seattle and scraped together enough money from friends and family to fund his fledgling company. Using early and relatively primitive digital technology, he sold books over the internet and started making money immediately.

By 2000, Amazon had grown to $1 billion in revenue. It had also upended the global publishing industry by providing access to millions of books that could be shipped just about anywhere in the world, received within days of ordering and at a cost lower than ever imagined possible. He also made it easier for first-time authors to get published.

Bezos and his company went on to disrupt and dominate eCommerce and important segments of the consumer electronics and entertainment industries while pushing out many large and previously powerful companies who could not or did not want to take the threat seriously.

But at the beginning of 2019 the media’s attention was suddenly focused on another side of Bezos – his affair and subsequent divorce and the fact that Amazon had paid little or any zero taxes over the years. Indeed, one of the major building blocks of the Amazon strategy has been was that online sales were not subject to the same taxes as traditional bricks and mortar stores. This in turn allowed Amazon to offer deeper discounts that incentivized consumers to buy from them.

That’s because from day one Bezos understood the importance of two basic consumer-centric value propositions that have driven successful businesses from the beginning:

Give people what they want – even if they may not know they want it at first – when they want it, how they want it and at the lowest possible cost.
Eliminate or reduce the things in people’s everyday lives they don’t want, like wasted time, complexity, boredom, unhappiness, illness, poverty and on and on.

Bezos and his team then boiled them further down to a remarkably short, simple and very powerful mission statement – “to be the most consumer-centric company in the world”. This gives Amazon a lot of territory to work with.

Not content to rest on past successes, Amazon announced last year that they are going to work with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to disrupt and transform one of the most dysfunctional industries in existence – the U.S. Healthcare system. It is a chance for Bezos to achieve an even greater mission, not just as an entrepreneur and capitalist, but as a great transformer of the human existence.

Related reading:

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #3: Stretchers of Limits

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #2: Ideators and Visionaries, But Not Inventors

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #1: Brainiacs

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #5: Others May Lose, But Disruptors Don’t

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:44:40 GMT

Disrupting companies led by powerful entrepreneurs appear on the scene as if from nowhere and are often new to the industry they intend to disrupt. Existing and entrenched companies unable or unwilling to adapt fast enough find themselves suddenly in a defensive mode and forced to change direction, cut staff, and are often either acquired by stronger companies—including the disrupting entities—or go bankrupt. When enough companies are forced to change or close, whole communities can be decimated. And as technology advances at lightning speed, all of this is happening faster and faster.

While well-executed business disruptions have proven to be the best way to transform our lives by creating immense value, almost every meaningful large-scale disruption produces winners and losers in the short run.

And yet there are a handful of highly successful disruptive leaders and their companies who are always on the offensive and resist being significantly disrupted by another entity. Bezos and Amazon, Charles Schwab and his eponymous financial services company come to mind as well as companies like Toyota and Honda that disrupted the U.S. automotive industry in the 1970’s. Despite occasional missteps, they are perennial winners of almost any battle they start or are dragged into.

And then there is Reed Hastings, the man who founded Netflix in 1997. He is one of the few great disruptive leaders who almost disrupted himself and his company out of existence.

Hasting’s first big strategic – and very wise – decision was to focus exclusively on the DVD rental-by-mail business. Within a few years, Netflix had successfully disrupted the existing bricks and mortar video rental industry by putting thousands of smaller DVD rental shops out of business, although they still had Blockbuster to contend with.

Determined to stay ahead of Blockbuster and other erstwhile competitors, they started streaming videos. While that move finally made Blockbuster a distant memory, Netflix had inadvertently disrupted its own DVD rental model and essentially put that business out of business.

By 2013 Netflix was facing potential bankruptcy. With his back against the wall, Hastings stunned the world by integrating backward into the production of movies and TV series. This move not only saved his company but caused a major disruption to the established movie and TV companies. Since 2015 the traditional TV and home video market has steadily fallen in the U.S., and it is expected to decline through at least 2022 thanks in large part to Netflix.

Reed Hastings and his company reentered the pantheon of businesses with the power and knowledge to disrupt and transform whole industries while forcing slow-moving and uncompetitive companies out of business.

Related reading:

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #4: Hyper-Capitalists with a Mission

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #3: Stretchers of Limits

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #2: Ideators and Visionaries, But Not Inventors

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #1: Brainiacs

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #6: Master Organization Builders

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:40:32 GMT

We’ve all met them – those brilliant individuals, brimming with cutting-edge and original ideas to eliminate war, poverty, famine and a host of other earthly concerns forever. I think of them as the Don Quixotes of the business world, swinging at just about anything that moves or breathes. Unfortunately, most of these poor souls and their ideas vanish as fast as they appear.

The fact is that the best disruptive ideas and visions in the world mean nothing if there is no organization to implement them or if an organization is incapable of meeting the demands of a disruptive strategy.

Every company—disruptive or otherwise—lives and dies by the ability of its employees to consistently plan and execute on a daily basis as well as over much longer time periods. Strategic planning, accountability, and performance tracking as well as decision-making are a few of the organizational best practices that should be in place by the time a company begins operations. Work flow processes follow close behind, especially as they relate to receiving and making payments (e.g., AR and AP), product development, sales and marketing, etc.

Lou Gerstner became a highly respected leader with a deep understanding of organizations, especially in business, early in his career. And when he was brought in from the outside to turn IBM around in the early 1990’s, he had already successfully run two large, global enterprises.

Gerstner wasn’t an entrepreneur and spent his entire career as an employee – even if he was an extremely highly paid one. He had also never run a technology company before. That said, I include him on the list of great disruptive business leaders, because he was hired to dramatically change the course his predecessor had taken while at the helm of one of the world’s largest and most important companies.

This failed strategy had resulted in a vast array of products that were either mature or lackluster. IBM was hemorrhaging money and was perilously close to bankruptcy. The role that Gerstner accepted as CEO was very risky and success was anything but ensured.

Gerstner knew from his previous roles that the biggest problem major companies faced in 1993 was integrating all the separate computing technologies that were emerging at the time. He realized that IBM’s unique competitive advantage was its ability to provide integrated solutions for customers—a company that could represent more than piece parts or components. Like all great disruptors, Gerstner literally forced IBM to become a customer-centric company.

And like many other successful disruptions, there was also a lot of short-term misery. Gerstner laid off more than 100,000 employees which in short order killed one of IBM’s holiest cows: the promise of lifetime employment. Many other archaic organizational and culture artifacts were disrupted and discarded in short order.

Gerstner’s disruption of IBM was a resounding success, at least for a few years. From 1993 until Gerstner’s retirement in 2002, IBM’s market capitalization rose from $29 billion to $168 billion.

Related reading:

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #5: Others May Lose, But Disruptors Don’t

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #4: Hyper-Capitalists with a Mission

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #3: Stretchers of Limits

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #2: Ideators and Visionaries, But Not Inventors

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #1: Brainiacs

However, in disruptive environments where new ground is forged every day, and time and money can run out quickly, there are two additional factors that complicate decision-making: urgency and the high level of uncertainty about the outcomes of many important decisions.

CEOs who don’t have to rush to make particularly important or complex decisions and who have a high degree of certainty about the outcomes of those decisions are probably not living in disruptive worlds. In fact, they run a high risk of becoming complacent and being disrupted themselves.

It’s often very hard for a business leader to tell if his or her prior experience or fine-tuned executive judgment are of any help in highly disruptive environments. In high stress situations, where every decision seems important, complex, urgent, or uncertain, reverting to past paradigms can even be potentially harmful.

Related reading:

Disruption Starts with You

The Learned Skills of Successful Entrepreneurs (podcast)

Making Great Decisions in a Disruptive World™ SELF-ASSESSMENT (PDF)

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #7: The Real Owners of Our Tomorrow

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:37:37 GMT

Great disruptors not only build companies that transform the lives of billions of people, but they also use their fame and money to continue the transformation.

Jack Ma was an eighth-grade teacher in China before he founded his company, Alibaba, which quickly became the largest retailer in the world. When the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on September 19, 2014, it was the biggest IPO ever. Ma has become the face of the Chinese industrial juggernaut— possibly the biggest current disruptive threat to many American businesses in the twenty-first century.

Over the past 10 years Ma has dedicated much of his wealth to defending the environment, and recently he has become more vociferous about the need to use great wealth to have a positive impact on the world.

At the annual general meeting of shareholders for Alibaba.com in May 2010, Ma announced Alibaba Group would earmark 0.3 percent of annual revenue to environmental protection. But he also said that his company’s “challenge is to help more people to make healthy money, ‘sustainable money,’ money that is not only good for themselves but also good for the society. That’s the transformation we are aiming to make.”

Ma likes to make audacious pronouncements in public about transforming the world. Ever the disruptor, he sometimes starts them off quite provocatively.

When speaking at the Economic Club of New York in 2015, Ma said that the Internet and its various platforms will usher in a wave of global conflict. But, Ma insisted, it will not pit countries against each other. Instead, he sees the likes of China and the United States teaming up to defeat societal ills. “The third world war is going to happen, and this war is not between nations. In this war, we work together against the disease, the poverty, the climate change—and I believe this is our future.”

Jack Ma is one of many disruptive leaders who commit their time, intellect and resources to transforming the world beyond building and running disruptive companies. CEOs such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell are giving back by supporting young entrepreneurs, promoting environmentalism and education, and eliminating inequality and unnecessary health risks among the needy. Even Ray Kroc – another influential though not uncontroversial disruptor – and his third wife donated most of their fortune to charitable causes.

Early in their journeys, all great business disruptors learned a deep truth: As long as you embrace the unstoppable force of disruption and develop the right skills and mindset you will live a life of abundance, success and happiness, but more importantly, no one will own your tomorrow except you.

Related reading:

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #6: Master Organization Builders

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #5: Others May Lose, But Disruptors Don’t

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #4: Hyper-Capitalists with a Mission

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #3: Stretchers of Limits

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #2: Ideators and Visionaries, But Not Inventors

The Seven Traits of Successful Disruptive Leaders #1: Brainiacs

Related reading:

Disruption Starts with You

The Learned Skills of Successful Entrepreneurs (podcast)

Making Great Decisions in a Disruptive World™ SELF-ASSESSMENT (PDF)

CEOs Who Disrupt Themselves Will Never Be Disrupted by Others

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 19:54:21 GMT

Although some very successful disruptive business leaders never finish college, most of them have at least a bachelor’s and sometimes a master’s degree. Quite a few go on to earn PhDs. Not unsurprisingly, a large number attend some of the highest-ranked universities in the world and benefit from a more traditional education.

Traditional education is a relatively planned-out process that consists of discreet but well-defined steps or modules that makes it easy to measure an individual’s progress and needs and decide what the best next step should be. Such an education is usually the entry card to employment and a good career. It also provides us with our first experiences of learning to disrupt ourselves when we are prompted to replace less developed beliefs and mindsets with ideas that are more useful for creating the kind of future we want.

“Learning” on the other hand, is fluid and unpredictable and requires a high degree of comfort with and ability to disrupt oneself. If you’re truly committed to expanding your knowledge, capabilities and leadership style, you’ll find opportunities to learn and grow in just about everything, regardless of any formal education you’ve had. Your leadership team and staff will follow your example. It’s a mindset, not a series of planned-out steps.

It’s easy to see the difference between CEOs who are committed to continuous learning and those who aren’t. Learning CEOs often run businesses that grow and flourish. Those who are less committed tend to make the same mistakes again and again and seem to go from one crisis to another. They also…

Get overwhelmed with the day-to-day tasks of keeping often-under resourced companies operating.
Disregard the importance of good strategic planning, resulting in a lack of agreement internally regarding what their company is providing and how they are providing it.
Often ignore other companies which have figured out better ways to fulfill on a similar value proposition.
May intellectually understand the principles of providing outstanding customer experiences, but don’t know how to successfully translate them into products, services, or experiences and/or can’t communicate the value proposition.
Are too frightened by excessive or unreasonable risks and the potential for massive failure.

When a CEO isn’t growing, the organization he leads isn’t growing either. Inevitably, these CEOs make themselves and their companies prime targets for disruption by a competitor, a new entrant into their market, the government or the company’s own customers. A big and potentially devastating disruption will probably happen with little prior warning If the CEO isn’t out in the world observing, debating and learning. He won’t see or will simply ignore potential threats.

The problem gets further compounded because our brains have natural limits. Even the most knowledgeable of us have brains that are not wired to be objective, especially not about ourselves. In fact, our brains are much better at denial – a trait that counter-intuitively actually helps us to survive.

This results in a lot of blind spots. It’s virtually impossible for any individual to see signs that they are not progressing or making mistakes; to recognize them for what they are. Human beings misread events and signals all the time, they misinterpret them, or they literally just can’t see them.

Executives committed to learning often hire objective third-parties, usually a coach, to help them be more objective. A good coach has the permission to dig down deep, find out what’s going on and call into question certain things a CEO is doing, challenging certain mindsets that may not be appropriate or growth oriented. A coach makes sure that nothing gets in the way of the kind of learning and growth that keeps a CEO and his company from falling victim to hazardous disruptions.

Creating Great Disruptive Business Ideas #4 – Actively Look for Ideas and Inspiration

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 19:28:21 GMT

Maybe you have identified an industry segment that’s fallen so behind the times that it’s just waiting to be disrupted and transformed. Maybe you’ve even put a business plan together and you’re starting to generate excitement among potential investors. But have you determined if there are other recent launched (and potentially better) products or services on the market that could be a threat to business or other almost identical to yours? Or, conversely, have you developed a solution to a problem with so little interest that there’s a reason why the market has lain fallow for so long? And if your product still passes these and other proof-of-concept tests, are you sure you’ve thought through the risks and hurdles to implementation?

Most businesspeople tend to go back to the same places for inspiration and innovative ideas, either because those founts of wisdom have worked well before or they don’t know where to go for that kind of help. Large companies have formidable research and development facilities to develop new technologies, skunkworks to test how these technologies can be put together for new products, teams of strategists and management consultants to dream up new business models, and marketing professionals to tell them how receptive the defined set of buyers are to a new product or service.

However, these legions of well-meaning employees – including contractors and outside experts – often don’t have the necessary disruptive mindset and ability to think beyond what they’ve been doing for years.

The alternative for business leaders, especially disruptive ones, is to go out into the world in search of knowledge and inspiration. But this requires a significant commitment of time, energy and funds. The fact is that despite the ubiquity of every conceivable kind of data and information and increasingly easy access to that huge body of knowledge, a single human being can’t begin to comprehend more than a tiny fraction of what’s out there, let alone easily stumble on an idea for the next Amazon or Netflix.

Once you’ve started the journey, however, you’ll begin to find a lot of fascinating and potentially successful ideas in places you least expect to find them. They may come from industries other than your own, walks in nature, the performing arts and entertainment, literature, and so on. A few enterprising people have built successful organizations that provide senior executives forms to discuss new ideas, such as business schools, TED talks, the World Economic Forum, and so on. All worth getting involved with in some way.

Consultants can be a useful source of good business ideas as well — provided you pick the right one. Several consulting firms, for example, organize what they call “Innovation Safaris” to Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley. Generally, these trips are part of a larger transformation project and are intended to help client executives shift their conventional thinking to something more disruptive and bold.

Unfortunately, many of the resources mentioned above are either too expensive or not available to the average small organization. In addition, leaders of smaller businesses often find it harder than their big-company counterparts to arrange an already-packed schedule to go to many external meetings. They have to work harder to get the knowledge they need to identify and react to a disruption.

There are other resources available to SMB leaders much closer to home, and often, these are not very costly.

Despite what Steve Jobs said to the contrary, great insights and ideas often come from a company’s clients and customers. These key constituencies should always be represented in any internal strategic process, not only for the ideas and insight they generate but also because by involving them, you’re already enrolling them in the possibilities being created.

often do customer interviews as part of strategy projects I perform as a consultant. I always remind clients that I shouldn’t just interview their most loyal customers; I should also talk to those no longer actively purchasing from them. I find using in- depth customer feedback—both positive and negative—is the best way to focus a management team on what is most important. Often, simple tweaks or a few small disruptions based on the right customer feedback can lead to huge financial and market gains.

One thing Steve Jobs did advocate at Apple was studying art. The company’s internal training program, Apple University, teaches the same design lessons used by Picasso to create some of the most iconic and recognizable images in the history of art. One of the key concepts involves eliminating unnecessary details and boiling ideas down to only the most essential elements, as Picasso did in many of his most famous paintings.

Biometrics or biomimicry is the practice of studying nature to find ideas. More specifically, it is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving problems humans are faced with, many of which find their way into the business world.

Living organisms have evolved well-adapted structures and materials over geological time through natural selection. Biometrics has given rise to new technologies inspired by biological solutions at the macro- and nanoscales. Humans have looked at nature for answers to problems throughout our existence. Nature has solved such engineering problems as self-healing abilities, environmental exposure tolerance and resistance, hydrophobicity, self-assembly, and harnessing solar energy.

One of the clients even found the inspiration to a pricing problem for which he was trying to find a disruptive solution when he went to a hamburger restaurant that offers a variety of add-on options at different price points. After ordering a hamburger laden down with condiments, proteins, and vegetables, he suddenly saw the answer he was looking for. The interesting thing is that this client owns and runs a software business. At first glance, you might wonder what he could have found to inspire him at some ungodly hour in downtown Manhattan, but you never know when a light is going to come on. You just need to be open and ready for it.

It goes without saying that reading literature and books on business, leadership, and current events—really anything—is still probably one of the best ways to find ideas and inspiration. A good friend of mine with a fintech business loves to read about Michael Bloomberg’s start-up pains and subsequent journey to becoming one of the great entrepreneurs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This has helped my friend survive some of the greatest setbacks of his own journey and given him the inspiration to continue in even the bleakest moments.

Creating Great Disruptive Business Ideas #5 – The Power of Changing a Business Model

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 19:19:35 GMT

Can you imagine a day when the amount you – or your health insurance – pay for a surgery is based on how successful the outcome is? Or the cost of a doctor’s visit goes down the longer you sit in her waiting room before she sees you? Or even better, when all medical services can be procured through an auction process that lets the buyer negotiate pricing and terms using independent ratings of each provider’s level of abilities and service?

How about a world in which you can buy goods and services far off into the future like insurance, appliances, vacations and even houses using a forward contract at today’s prices? Or your museum membership includes showing off one of your favorite works of art in your apartment one month/year?

Sound crazy? Not at all.

You may be too old to remember the days when the only place you could get a hamburger, fries and a soda was at a greasy spoon diner. That simple meal cost most people the equivalent of one or two hours of work. That was before Ray Kroc applied the franchise model to restaurant ownership. His model also included rigorous guidelines for cleanliness and the kind of negotiating power that dramatically lowered the cost of ingredients because of the huge amounts of ingredients being bought, further helped by innovative shipping and storage ideas.

Suddenly the average consumer had access to hamburgers, fries and a soda at sometimes half or even a 1/3 of their former price at clean, friendly and efficient restaurants. You always know what you were getting because the quality is pretty much the same at any McDonald’s you go to.

Before Zipcar, you could only rent a car for a whole day not just an hour or two pro-rated to the amount of time you use their cars. The idea of staying at a house owned by someone you never met was strange enough to some people but the fact that you could actually exchange your home for that of a stranger free of charge was inconceivable until recently.

Gone are the days of endless talking to friends and “experts”, flipping through magazines and newspapers, visiting multiple showrooms or stores before finally having the information you needed to buy a car, lawn mower, appliance or a book.

Most large and well-established companies can’t shift easily to business models completely foreign to their usual way of doing business, even if none of the concepts are particularly new. (Indeed, whole businesses and industries have been built around models like auctions, franchising, futures contracts, renting, etc. for decades even centuries.)

Any business model that is the norm for one industry and applied to another will challenge industry incumbents because it forces companies to do things differently and, most importantly, faster and cheaper. When faced with these disruptive ideas most CEOs and their teams can’t even begin to understand how to run a company that does that, much less figure out to make money at it. Most of these “business model transfers” are then dismissed as being unrealistic, silly or even threatening.

That is until a Ray Kroc, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Antje Danielson and Robin Chase (the founders of Zipcar), the originators of Intervac International (a precursor to companies like Homeexchange.com and others) and many others come along. In addition to using franchise models, they took models like just-in-time manufacturing (Dell), licensing (Gates), short-term rentals (Zipcar) and barter (Intervac) from one industry and successfully applied them to a different industry thereby ignited a disruption that went on to excite millions, even billions of people.

Today’s Virtual Leaders

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 19:06:21 GMT

I’m finding that entrepreneurs in their 50’s and 60’s with significant business backgrounds are increasingly building companies with few if any employees while drawing on vast networks of partners, affiliates and independent contractors to get the work done. When asked about this phenomenon, many friends and colleagues in my age range talk about their exhaustion from having to manage complex employees issues in their former careers, the currently high costs of employee benefits, especially healthcare, and the ability to pick and choose the right expert with the right skill sets at the right time without having to carry lots of overhead. What was once a major logistical nightmare in managing disparate personalities with conflicting calendars around the world has been vastly simplified by the advent of email, social media and other electronic forms of commerce and communication.

To be honest this is not a new business model – as long as there have been employees there have been networks of independent contractors. The real estate industry is pretty much entirely staffed by independents working without traditional employee contracts. The same can be said for much of the entertainment industry. But I am surprised by the sophistication of many of the businesses run by baby boomers that are almost entirely virtual.

Interestingly enough, I’ve found that younger entrepreneurs who have tried to use virtual networks have often been less successful and tend more often than not to be highly motivated to build traditional organizations as the way to grow as managers and leaders. Are younger people strangely less advanced in these new organizational models than us older folk? Or are baby boomers too lazy to bother with the usual leadership headaches and are less interested in growing as leaders?

I believe that building and running a virtual business is actually the next step in the evolution of leadership and requires advanced skills to keep the network happy and productive, ensure clients are satisfied and make a good living for all those involved.

The fact is that after 20 or 30 years in an industry, experienced managers and leaders have developed huge networks of affiliates who we know, trust and can depend on to deliver excellent results without much hand-holding. All the years spent hiring, developing and managing fresh talent is no longer necessary. Many of us have gotten to the point that if we hire someone on a short-term basis we’ve never worked with before, we can usually spot within less than a minute whether there is a fit or not. And this goes for people we have never met face-to-face and may not actually ever physically meet, although most first-time relationships probably come through a referral or are preceded by reputation.

We have gone through gut-wrenching lay-offs so that if an independent contractor or an affiliated group is not working out as expected, our leadership experience has made it that much easier to have those difficult discussions. While ending a working relationship might threaten a decades-old relationship, maturity often allows both parties to rise above any hurt feelings or bruised egos, even though law suits are not uncommon.

I would say the older generation has most certainly not given up growing as leaders. Just the opposite, I believe we have not only embraced new technology as rapidly as our sons and daughters but have also met the challenge of managing vast networks of virtual teams head-on. Thus, we have continued learning and growing as leaders in ways we didn’t fully understand or appreciate earlier in our careers.

Ready To Make 2019 Your Best Year?

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 16:04:44 GMT

Who wouldn’t want the next twelve months to be their best year ever?

But what are you doing to make it a reality?

You’re probably very industrious and have spent lots of time planning, strategizing and making an “impact.” And yet, despite everything you do, it doesn’t quite come together the way you’d like it to.

It could also be possible that you haven’t mastered one of the most powerful tools successful people use to create exactly the future they want: disruption.

Unfortunately, the concept of disruption (especially in the business world) doesn’t exactly resonate positively for many people. Disruptions often bring about great upheaval – companies go out of business, people lose their jobs and whole communities can be decimated. Disruptions can divide the world into winners and losers.

And therein lies the rub. The short-term pain and potential for failure is so high that many people shy away from the very idea of disrupting anything or anyone, even if a situation becomes unbearable.

The fact is that the cycle of disruption and renewal has made getting food, clothing and many other goods and services we need easier, faster and cheaper. It has brought education to billions, enabled us to treat and eradicate many life-threatening diseases, travel more quickly and inexpensively, be entertained 24/7, and on and on.

But what has attracted attention more than anything else in recent years, is the enormous wealth well-planned and executed business disruptions create for the founders, investors and employees of a disruptive company.

I’d like to invite you to take a moment to explore my new website, read relevant articles and listen to podcast interviews in Tomorrow’s Corner, watch videos and assess your own disruptive capabilities by taking my Disruptive Leadership Diagnostic™. And don’t forget to order a copy of my practical, how-to book Owning Tomorrow: The Unstoppable Force of Disruptive Leadership and/or schedule a call with me to learn more about how me and my team can help you have the best 2019 ever!

And remember…as long as you embrace the unstoppable force of disruption and develop the right skills and mindsets you too can live a life of abundance, success and happiness. More importantly, no one will own your tomorrow except you!

Preparing Your Company for the Coronavirus Recession Five Things Every CEO Should Be Doing Right Now

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 15:21:48 GMT

By the time WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, millions of organizations around the world had already published guidelines to minimize their employees contracting and unwittingly spreading the Coronavirus.

In the wake of that announcement, many corporate and government guidelines added the requirement to work from home.

Governments are still quarantining cities, regions and even whole countries and are now considering shutting down restaurants and clubs. Large and small cultural institutions, performance venues, schools and universities around the world have closed indefinitely and 100’s of thousands of conferences, events, weddings, cruises and long-distance trips have been canceled. Groceries stores have nothing left to sell as people stocked up on food. China’s economy – the largest in the world – is slowing down and oil prices are in freefall.

These and other developments are already hitting the airline, mass transportation, travel, arts and entertainment, hospitality, education, oil and gas, automotive and brick and mortar retail industries hard. The impact on other industries, the nation’s workforce (especially part-time and contract workers), suppliers to these industries and, in turn, their suppliers is already gaining momentum.

On the other hand, some companies are facing a spike in demand. Industries like ecommerce, content streaming, telecommunications and home delivery food and meal services that support people’s ability to live fuller lives while self-quarantined in their homes are thriving.

But many companies are struggling to scale fast enough to meet that demand. For example, healthcare providers, especially doctors, hospital emergency rooms and urgent care facilities are completely under-resourced to deal with the masses of people needing to be tested and, in some cases, treated.

Reflecting this sudden reversal in what had been a strong economy and the overwhelming uncertainty about the current and future economic climate, global stock markets on average lost approx. 25% of their value from February 22nd to March 13th. Central bankers are racing to lower interest rates and governments are putting together trillion-dollar rescue packages trying to stop the hemorrhaging.

Here are five actions every CEO and his or her leadership team should be doing RIGHT NOW so they not only survive but win in the short and long-term.

1.Keep your company’s COVID-related policies up-to-date and relevant.

If your company hasn’t published clear guidelines to protect your people, you have placed the company in a very risky position. Make this action item a priority. Your company’s policies should be revisited weekly to incorporate new government mandates and other events that might change or add something new.

2.Make, remake and unmake decisions.

The challenge for most CEOs is not accepting that change is necessary but rather making the best possible decisions about what needs to change and when. During this time of uncertainty, however, it’s extremely difficult to predict the outcomes of any decision, let alone the most important ones. Actively seek input from your team, investors, Board, business associates and follow events of the day to validate and inform your decisions.

Decisions are like forks in a road. If you decide on a path, stick to it. But if you hit a dead end, change course or stop that particular journey without hesitation. In today’s environment, the ability to think and act with agility is what makes a company resilient.

1.Treat this as an opportunity for transformation.

Most CEOs know that meaningful change only happens when there is a burning platform or crisis. The best crisis is one caused by forces other than yourself. The panic caused by COVID-19 is one of those crises.

The kind of change and transformation your team will plan and implement depends a lot on the industry or industries your company is active in. Right-size, shut down or, even better, reposition any business lines that might be too weak to withstand the coming pressures. Ensure that the products and services that will see dramatically increased demand can scale as quickly as possible.

Push through initiatives you’ve been holding off on, even if on the surface those changes may have little to do with current events.

1.Ensure your company has access to financing to cover shortfalls in working capital.

Despite the availability of lower interest rate loans, the meltdown of stock and bond markets will make it more difficult to secure funding, especially if your company slips into the red.

That’s why reducing or eliminating unnecessary costs such as executive perks, large events (which probably shouldn’t be happening anyway right now), luxurious office space, first class travel and lodging, etc. should be a CEOs first priority. Banks and investors will want to see that your company can achieve its financial goals even in the middle of an economic crisis before they provide the sort of funding your company will need to survive.

1.Communicate constantly and consistently.

You should assume everyone in your company is experiencing a high degree of frustration and fear. Add to that a sense of isolation and being out of touch when working from home and you have a recipe for decreasing motivation, poor focus and low productivity.

Thank goodness for services that help you make quick videos to distribute to your employees wherever they may be. There are of course other forms of staying in touch but anything you send out should be short, inspiring, informative and authentic with regular updates on the company’s key initiatives – positive or negative.

But most importantly, there has to be a consistent story and key messages that run through all communications. Any sudden deviation from your fundamental narrative will just spook your employees, customers, investors, board and suppliers even more.

Creating Great Disruptive Business Ideas #3 – Put Consumers at the Center of Everything You Do

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 19:36:29 GMT

Putting the consumer at the center of an industry’s ecosystem previously dominated by a handful of powerful organizations sets off a chain reaction that can touch and transform the lives of thousands, millions and even billions of people. Quite a few companies have been able to create so much value through a highly customer-centric global disruption that they become financial juggernauts.

At the most basic level, every successful business—disruptive or otherwise, B2B or B2C—needs to excite its customers, usually in one of three ways:

Provide goods, services and experiences that were previously only available to the most privileged members of society to a much larger percentage of the population more easily and affordably.
Give customers what they want, when they want it, and how they want it.
Eliminate or reduce everyday annoyances like wasted time, boredom, complexity, or unhappiness as well as life-threatening situations like poverty and disease.

Jeff Bezos, the ultimate master of disruption, understood the power of consumer-centricity so well that he developed the ultimate mission for Amazon: “Our vision is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” It gives Bezos and his team a lot of territory to work with. In their relentless drive to disrupt and transform any industry, company or individual that has stopped adding value,

As Amazon gained the trust of consumers around the world, the company was able to leverage those relationships to challenge the entrenched major publishing houses and their traditional business and operating models. Amazon disrupted and changed the economics of publishing and made it easy and inexpensive for young and first-time authors to publish and sell books that the traditional publishing world often ignored. Less well-known writers were given the opportunity to tap into a huge, international market of potential readers which had theretofore been unavailable to them.

But this comes at the expense of other, less powerful companies, not just the ones that were disrupted out of existence, but also the legions of vendors who have gone bust or have lost a lot of money selling through Amazon. In that way, Amazon is no different than traditional retailers like Walmart who squeeze the companies that choose to do business with them mercilessly and find new and imaginative ways to charge them often outrageous fees.

Why do these vendors put up with this? Because of the access Amazon has to 100’s of millions of paying consumers…the direct results of this company fulfilling on its very powerful mission.

Internal disruptions, on the other hand, are usually required when a business has lost sight of its customers and their needs and then goes into tailspin because of faltering revenue. In the case of IBM, the back-to-back revolutions of the PC and the client server dramatically undermined IBM’s core mainframe business and forced IBM into a tailspin. Both revolutions transformed the way customers viewed, used, and bought technology. Companies’ purchasing decisions were placed in the hands of individuals and departments—not the places where IBM had long-standing customer relationships.

When he became IBM’s CEO in 1994, Lou Gerstner realized that IBM’s unique competitive advantage was its ability to provide integrated solutions for customers—a company that could represent more than piece parts or components. Like all great disruptors, Gerstner literally forced IBM to become a customer-centric company.

Gerstner’s disruption of IBM was a resounding success. From 1993 until Gerstner’s retirement in 2002, IBM’s market capitalization rose from $29 billion to $168 billion.