Disrupted: Strategy for Exponential Change

by Larry W. Quick, David Platt, Kristin Van Vloften (With)

“People don’t get exponential” - Nicholas Negroponte In the next 5 years, global Machine-to-Machine connections will grow by 400% from 5 billion to over 20 billion. In the past six years Uber has grown from a mere app to a 50 billion-dollar business. The driverless electric car is a reality, and the noxious methane gas that once escaped the Artic Ocean in meter-wide plumes now bubbles out of the water in kilometer-wide columns. This is exponential change… and it’s happening now! We are in an environment where the exponential “elbows” of multiple systems are converging and disrupting lives and organizations at an accelerated rate. Disruptive change is turning business models upside-down, destroying legacy value, and opening the possibility for revolutionary futures to emerge across all industries. This is new territory. And if there was ever a time we needed to “get exponential” – it is now! And in this environment organizations have two leverage disruptive, exponential change to generate new value or fall afoul of its consequences. In the convergence of accelerating change, the strategic planning processes of yesteryear are inadequate. Tenuous visions and missions framed across five to ten-year time horizons are predicated on a slower pace of life. Too often, these approaches produce irrelevant strategies with rapidly diminishing shelf lives and little power to inspire team members, let alone leverage exponential change. Disrupted is a distillation of the wisdom of Resilient Futures’, Strategy in Action (SiA), a framework designed to support teams and leaders to leverage—rather than fall prey to— exponential, disruptive change. Disrupted is a guidebook to the exponential era and a toolbox for proactively leveraging this change. By exploring well-known examples of disruption-opportunists like Apple and Tesla Motors, Disrupted helps readers to understand the kind of “strategic thinking” that allow teams and leaders to confidently pursue opportunities with a shared strategic language, and a methodology designed for timely and agile execution at all levels of their organization. In Disrupted we are challenged to confront exponential change and ask “ What are our disruptors, and how will we leverage them?”

258 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2015

Reviews

[Theo McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The concepts in this book are critical for people, particularly those within organisations, who have a genuine interest in making the most of disruption. This book made me realise that disruption is not about singular events, or disruptors, which you work through and come out the other side of, disruption is a continuous process, and at this point, the reality of the world we live in. Disrupted lays down a powerful framework which everyone needs to be seriously consider applying, if they don't wish to go down with the effects of disruption.

[Small Creek · Rating 1 out of 5]

At some point in the convention, where you got this for free, you realise that trees had to die for this.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the frameworks in this book not as compelling and easy to follow as some other recent reads. Stories like Kodak were great reminders of what shouldn’t happen.