Rather Than Fear Disruption, Embrace It As A Viable Strategy

In a classroom at every Ivy League business school, there is a professor stressing to their Business 101 students that a business is “never too big to fail.”

This has been the go-to generalization tagged to some of the most astoundingly catastrophic company failures of all time, including but not limited to Kmart, Blockbuster, Circuit City, and more. But what did these failures actually entail?

While several may assume it was some lethal combination of poor management and greed, most do not realize that more often than not, it is a direct result of a company failing to disrupt themselves! At some point, a system was in place that generated the majority of the company’s income, and from that moment forward, business leaders tied their success to that system and the present, completely disregarding the future.

But the reality is the future is what matters the most, as it’s what we all live in! The present only lasts for a moment, and with an agile mindset, you spend each moment putting out more and more fires as the world moves forward. That, coupled with being focused on the need to exceed your quarterly numbers, distracts those business leaders from instead implementing an Anticipatory mindset that could position them to be the disruptor and not the disrupted.