How Does Disruption Actually Happen Inside Organizations with Scott Anthony

I thought you looked familiar.

I had glasses then and the hair might've been a slightly different shade at the time, but such is time.

I assure you that my hair was a very different shade. So first of all, I would like I'd like to ask you a question. Are there examples of companies that have been disruptive more than once?

Who have been disrupted more than once? They felt— or they have done disruption more than once? Which one?

Have done disruption more than once.

Yeah, for sure. You know, you mentioned Procter& Gamble in the beginning, and I think that is a great example. And through its history, about every 20 years, it comes up with a big new disruptive platform. So, you've got The origins of Tide as the wash day miracle in the 1930s and '40s, and then Crest in the 1950s, Pampers disposable diapers in the '60s and '70s, et cetera, et cetera. In each case, following the pattern of disruptive innovation, taking things that once were complicated and expensive and making them simple and affordable, driving explosive growth and changing market dynamics. So that's, I think, a pretty good example of it.

Okay, so why has Procter& Gamble been able to do that? And Kodak and Data General and Smith-Corona and Remington Rand and Wang, why are they gone?

Well, there's a 2-part answer I would give to that. First, I would say one of the things that Procter& Gamble has been able to successfully do is go and disrupt other categories. So it's gone and disrupted the way that you clean clothes and the way that you put diapers on babies and clean your floors and so on, that is not disruptive necessarily to itself and the business model it follows. The companies you all mentioned had a dominant business model, a dominant approach that got disrupted, and that's harder. If you're a multi-product, multi-category company and you can go and play offense in different places, it's easy to say, I'm gonna go and use disruption to go and create the next category, the next part of my business unit, et cetera. If disruption comes at you and you've got, in essence, one thing, that can be really hard. Not impossible, but can be really hard.

So is there an example of a company that did that where, you know, they were fundamentally in one thing and they, and they, they didn't, you know, go into diapers or go into a different kind of detergent, but they, they stuck to their knitting and disrupted again?

I think a, a recent example of this, which is pretty interesting, is Schneider Electric, which is a French industrial company, which is not exactly where you would expect to look if you're looking at someone who has successfully responded to disruptive change. But it followed a pattern that I detailed in my 2017 book, going back in time a little bit, called Dual Transformation, where it simultaneously embraced digitalization in its existing products and also created new services, value-added services that use smart connected devices and so on. So it was able to catch the disruptive trend and both defend what it currently had and went and played offense to go and create what it didn't have. So, it's an example of an established company that had a pretty concentrated portfolio that responded to disruption in a very positive way.

Would you say that, depressing as this may sound, would you say that very few companies are disruptive more than once? So, maybe you declare victory, you're disruptive, you are a cash cow, and You know, you take the win and, you know, you don't make yourself crazy because 99% of the companies have never even disrupted once.

Well, I'm an optimist by nature. I'm a believer, as Clay was. If you understand the forces that work on you, you are able to take something that is an anomalous outcome and make it more normal. So that is the bet though. You know, if you see a large established company and you see disruption taking place in or around it, The safest bet to place is that it's going to screw it up. That's what history shows. That's what experience shows. But increasingly, you see examples of companies that don't do that. As an example, if we just stopped at the innovator's dilemma, then the last 2 decades of tech would not have happened. So Apple would not have done the iPhone. Microsoft would not have gotten the cloud and artificial intelligence right. Meta would not have gotten social networking on mobile phones and messaging right. So all the big tech companies that have elongated their lives before The Innovator's Dilemma would have had one shot, that they would have gone and done their one thing and failed. For better or worse, large established companies have learned that they can ride additional waves of disruption. And I say for worse because, you know, sometimes it's actually good that you get creative destruction and you get the old falling and the new coming in. That leads to a degree of vibrancy versus companies trying to protect, but that's maybe a whole different line of discussion.

I think it's— this is not just for a semantic point of view, but perhaps it would be very helpful for you to define the difference between disruption and innovation because, you know, somebody might say, well, those companies continue to innovate, but I think you're saying they continue to disrupt, which is in my mind different.

Absolutely different and related, of course. So innovation broadly is something different that creates value, and that's an intentionally broad definition. It leaves room for lots of categories underneath it, and disruption is one of those categories underneath it. The way I define a disruptive innovation is something that takes what once was complicated and expensive and makes it simple and affordable. And by doing so, it changes market dynamics and it drives explosive growth. The key thing in that is the disruptor is playing the game in a fundamentally different way. It's not trying to do what the old guard was doing better. It's trying to do something very different. And if you look in the details of Clay Christensen's original research, that means often the disruptor isn't starting squarely in the mainstream. They're starting in the underbelly of the market or a completely different market. It means often the disruptor is making money in very different ways that look foreign to the market leader. And often the market leader is plenty happy to have the disruptor exist in the early days until it gets better and better and ultimately serves as a competitive threat. So that's the distinction. Innovation broadly, something different that creates value. A disruptor, in short, does it really differently and therefore changes dynamics.

So, I mean, this may be heresy, but as I was reading your book, I kept thinking to myself, maybe Clayton Christensen should have called his book The Disruptor's Dilemma instead of The Innovator's Dilemma.

Say a little bit more, Guy. Why do you, uh, why'd you think that? I think that's a really— I, I love the heresy. We have 2 heretical acts already. We're only a minute 9.

I am familiar with the book and I am now familiar with your book. And it seems that the message here is that, you know, a disruptor must continue to disrupt. Otherwise, it, you know, sort of slides into innovation. And then after innovation, it's just very lucrative. And then pretty soon it becomes irrelevant. So if you want to continue to disrupt, that is a higher bar than the continue to innovate. You could innovate with an existing product. You cannot disrupt. disrupt with an existing product. So I think the higher bar and the more interesting case is the disruptor's dilemma, that you disrupted, you know, the phone business, but now what is the next thing you're going to disrupt as opposed to innovate existing phones? So maybe Clayton Christensen is up there shaking his head at Guy, or he's saying, Guy, yeah, I never thought of that. Plus, I like alliterations, and Disruptor's Dilemma is a better title than

Yeah, having worked with Clay for 25 years, I think he would be shaking his head and said, gosh, Guy, that's a really good idea. And dang, I wish I would've thought of it. And I think those are the exact phrases he would've used. You're exactly right. You know, one of the kind of paradoxes of the world of innovation is you disrupt, you go and create a new paradigm, but then in the language of Clay's original research, you sustain to extend that paradigm. And then you're locked within it. So you mentioned the phone, the Apple iPhone, very disruptive product. It brings computing into people's hands and into people's pockets and probably the most successful product in history. And then people say, okay, what's next? And it's hard to do the most successful product in history twice. And a lot of credit to what the team has done to sustain success over the past decade, but still at some point. You got to do it again.

And from the outside looking in, what are the, you know, sort of the patterns that you recognize for a Procter& Gamble or an Apple? Or I think, you know, you could make the case that Google with Gemini has disrupted again, right? So now what are the patterns? What are the best practices that a Fortune 500 CEO could ask you? So, you know, How do I do this, Scott? How do I be like Apple or be like Procter& Gamble?

There's a lot that we could talk about here, but I will highlight 2 points. One is a friendly amendment to the line that Andy Grove from Intel used to use. Only the paranoid survive was his line. So you're always looking for the threats. My friendly amendment to that is only the paranoid survive, but only the optimistic thrive. So I think you see in these companies a belief that, that which they have is finite, that they always have to be looking out for the things that will get it, but also a belief at the same time that in doing so, they can create new growth, reach new customers, reach new market segments. Because the problem with pure paranoia is it makes you very defensive and it makes you very rigid in how you respond. And you can play defense, but you can't play offense. So there is this almost optimistic paranoia that they have. That's one. 2, you recognize if you are truly going to do new things, you have to do what Procter Gamble did all the way back in 1954 when they're trying to go into the disposable diaper category. They don't say, let's ask an existing business unit that's really busy doing all the things that it's doing to simultaneously go and pioneer. Let's create the organizational space, the exploratory products division that's going to go and do this. So organizations that do this serially recognize we have to make sure there's space for the new stuff. And it sounds simple, but it's actually really hard to do inside established organizations because the drumbeats and rhythms and routines are all choreographed to make today better, not to do tomorrow different. So it really requires very active leadership to get it right. So, you know, there's more, of course, but those 2 ingredients, the optimistic paranoia And giving space and sometimes— not sometimes, and always time for the new. I think those are 2 essential ingredients for success.

Well, based on my personal experience, I would absolutely say that that's true with the Macintosh division. We were paranoid, but we were optimistic. And I mean, it really was a case like that. And we were trying to make something complicated, i.e., personal computers, simple and try to reduce the price. So, uh, and then of course, if, if the, if, if the board of directors of Apple in 1980 would say, you know what, we should, we need to disrupt ourselves, we need to create a new personal computer built on a graphical user interface, WYSIWYG, blah blah blah, and we are chartering the Apple II division to do this. to evolve to this next kind of computing, Apple would not be around today. It took a separate business unit, the Macintosh division. It took an egomaniac, Steve Jobs. It took an egomaniac who was co-founder so he could do anything he wanted. And basically, we ran roughshod over the Apple II division. I'm not advocating that part.

In the end, for the good of the organization and the good of the world. And, you know, Apple of course replicates the story with the iPhone. It'd be very easy— we forget this now, of course— but, you know, it'd be very easy for Apple to say, hey, we've got this business, the iPod business. It's a super good business. It's what's brought us back from the dead. Why would we do something that might cannibalize it with the phone? Let's just go and milk everything we can out of this. And the iPod business died, and that was good for Apple. So this is something, again, a little bit of willingness to What do they say in writing? Kill your darlings. You have to be willing to do that sometimes.

Okay, but now for Apple, I mean, you know, I don't see the VR thing as that big a deal. I don't see the watch as a big deal. I mean, what's the next thing? You know, what does Apple do to disrupt? It can be more innovative with including AI into its entire product line, but You know, isn't the bar higher for Apple? What's the next disruption? What's going to make me go to an Apple Store at midnight so I can get the thing in the morning?

That's a great question. Well, I got my Vision Pro a few weeks ago. My kids finally convinced me. They said, hey, this is your field. You just write it off as a business expense. And I did. And it's super fun to play around with. But you're right, it's not— it is still way too expensive and too cumbersome. And there's not enough software on it for it really to be something that you say, this is the next one. But I think you have for Apple 3 possibilities, one of which they've already opted out of, which is the car. So, you know, you look and see what's happened in China. It is Huawei and a lot of consumer electronics companies that have done it. Apple tried but gave up. So that one's gone. So you got 2 chances left. One is something with mixed and augmented reality. And hey, just because the first and second isn't the breakthrough, the Apple Newton didn't get it quite right. It took time until you get to the iPhone. So I wouldn't give up on that. And then the third thing that I have just been watching and waiting for about 15 years now is healthcare. Healthcare is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that needs a lot of disruption. And you look at the functionality that Apple has put in its watch and in other places, and you can see the beginnings of something that really could be a very sophisticated play at primary care and related areas. It requires several steps to get there, but that's the sort of thing that you say, If any industry in this world needs Apple's ability to simplify and bring elegant design, my goodness, it is healthcare. So that's another one that I have long believed is possible, really, really, really hard to do. And the point you've made is true. Apple's reward for having the most successful product in history is everything else is going to look worse by comparison. I remember a couple decades ago, back before I was a professor and I was a consultant, Doing consulting work for newspapers. And they said, what we need is we need a business that's as good as the classified ads that were getting disrupted by Craigslist and other things. Those classified ads, 80% gross margin. I said, there is no such thing. You, you'll never get a business like that. That was a historical anomaly. Your question isn't, will I get a business as good as this or not? Your question is, will I have a business or not? By framing the question as a business as good as this or not, well, we saw how that one played out.

Well, I mean, honestly, I think the only way you can say that, oh, we disrupted and had this business just as good as our classified business is after the fact. I mean, I don't know how you predict that. You just take a lot of shots and then you declare victory where victory occurred.

There was an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review last year that said exactly that. It said when you look at true radical innovation, it is impossible to fully predict it ex ante. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not worth investing in. You're creating the surface area for good things to happen. Even if you fail with something, you learn how it works and you learn the good M&A candidates out there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But saying that you know for sure this one's going to make it, Never, never possible.

Not, not even with somebody from, you know, Tuck Advisory or Harvard Business School.

No, no, no. Yeah, one of the points I make in the book is that innovation, disruption in particular, is predictably unpredictable. There are patterns in it for sure. So when I see someone who is purposely trading off performance in the name of simplicity, when I see they've got a protected starting point away from the mainstream, When they see they've got a powerful business model that's making money in different ways to say, this could be one of those, but could be because stuff happens. We're doing work in complicated systems that are run by complicated individuals. So weird things happen. You can't fully predict that in Tesla's early days, it's going to get $800 million in government loans, and that's going to change the way things play out. Whatever. Weird things happen. So you use the patterns to increase the odds. But you recognize that stuff happens.

Well, since you brought up Tesla, would you say, or who would you say is the bigger disruptor, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs?

Oh God, that's a great question. So, if you look at the dictionary definition of disruption, I don't think there's any doubt about that. If you look at the way that we're talking about disruption in the Clayton Christensen sense, I think The history's still being written, but I think you gotta give the edge to Elon Musk because you have the collection of not just doing it at Tesla, but SpaceX, The Boring Company, all the things that he has done. And some of them haven't worked and some of them have had some downsides to them, but it's a really interesting, in fact, totally unique portfolio of efforts driven by a singular vision to go and back up society on Mars. You know, it's unlike anything we've ever seen before. And Elon Musk, of course, is a complicated and very polarizing character. I tell my kids, maybe don't replicate the person, but the business stuff, that's good. Could you get one without the other? I don't know. That's a great question.

I hesitate to say this, but I have to admit that I agree with you. And I mean, I don't know Elon Musk personally. I knew Steve Jobs, but Steve definitely disrupted Computers and phones and, you know, digital devices. But Elon is like satellites and tunneling and cars and solar panels. And I mean, you name it, right? Link chips in your head. It's a scary thought there.

You know, the— at the graduation ceremony for the class of 2025 from our business school, our Dean Matt Slaughter, who is a consummate optimist, which I love because I am too, told the graduates the world stands at a crossroads. No one disagrees with that. He said, of extraordinary possibility. And I love the way he framed it because that is a way to look at the world right now. Others would have chosen other words to end that sentence, but I like that frame of the world.

And wait, are you making the point that things are so screwed up that it is a time of great opportunity?

Absolutely. So, the way that I frame it is in the 1940s, Kurt Lewin, who's one of the fathers of thinking about organizational design and behavior, put forward this very simple model. He said, at any given moment, an organization is frozen. You cannot change it. Something leads to it unfreezing. It might be a charismatic leader, a shock, whatever. Then you can change, but you have to move quickly because it refreezes, and then change again is impossible. For better or worse, I think you can call the time we're in right now the great unfreezing, which is very disconcerting and can be very hard to get through, but it also creates once-in-a-lifetime possibilities. One specific example, I started teaching 3 and a half years ago, 2022. I thought it was my reward for 20-plus years of consulting, as schools don't change very fast. Then 4 months later, ChatGPT comes out. 2 years later, Trump is reelected with very clear viewpoints about how to change universities. So We're on the front line of disruptive change. Is that good or bad? I don't know. If you're Sian Beilock, our president, you have a chance to remake an institution and do things that 5 years ago would have been impossible. And now, they're not only possible, they might even be desirable. So again, that can be a downside, but I see upside in that as well.

Okay. Now, if What are the people who were the CEOs of Kodak or Remington Rand or Smith-Corona or Wang or any of these companies that failed? What were they telling themselves? I mean, were they ignorant of the change or were they in denial? I mean, when Steve Sasson showed up at the Kodak managers' meeting with his new digital camera, What did they say? Were they just in denial? Were they ignorant? I mean, what goes through your head that would, you know, especially now with books like yours and Clayton Christensen's, at this point, 2025, you cannot say that, oh, this is news to me. What are these people saying to themselves when they deny this?

You know, I remember, Guy, in 2000 and— let's see, what year was it? It was right before presidential elections, 2008. 2008, I was on a panel discussion and it was me, A.G. Lafley from P&G, Stephanie Burns from Dow Corning, and I cannot remember his name, but it was the president of Eastman Kodak. And we're talking about this kind of stuff. And what the president of Eastman Kodak said is, look, the basic problem we faced is our core business just would not stop growing. So everybody is telling us the future is digital and we kind of conceptually believed it, But film just kept going up and up and up and up. I play a video when I'm with groups. It's with Jim Balsillie, who is the co-CEO of Research in Motion. It's from April 2008, so it's a few months after the iPhone comes out. He's smug, he's dismissive. He's talking about how, yes, you know, our product portfolio is poorly diversified, but it's going to the moon pretty well. Maybe it'll crash to Earth, but whatever, it's going well so far. And everyone laughs at that, but I said, In April 2008, that was truth. Their revenues had tripled. Their stock price was up 70%. Here's the basic problem. The data lags. Everyone suffers from what I call the information-action paradox. By the time the data are clear telling you exactly what to do, it's too late to do it. So what Clay Christensen would say is this is where you use a good theory or model so you can make sense of the early signs of change. The problem, if you're a human, is all the signals are telling you, keep doing what you're doing until it's too late to do anything about it. You do have wise leaders who are beginning to get this, but that to me is the essence of the challenge. Those leaders would all tell you everything looked good. It's the Ernest Hemingway Sun Also Rises line. How did you go bankrupt? First slowly, then suddenly. So how do you get disrupted? First slowly, then suddenly.

One of the things that I kept noticing in your 11 stories in the book is that There seems to be this myth about there's this eureka moment, there's this aha moment where a lone genius or 2 guys in a garage or 2 gals in a garage, they have this bada-bing, bada-bang moment. In all your examples, it goes back decades and decades. It's not like Gutenberg one day said, aha, printing press. I mean, he was in a place that there were metalworkers. And stampers. And I mean, look, a lot of things had to line up. So what is— is there— is it a complete myth that it's a lone genius and there's this eureka moment?

Yes, it is. And it's a myth that I used to tell. I mean, I used to say essentially we've been through various eras of innovation. If you work backwards, there's the venture capital-backed startup, there's the large corporate lab, and then there's the lone genius. And I would say Gutenberg is an example of that. Until I actually researched it and realized exactly what you said. It isn't a lone genius. It's a team. It's Konrad Sasspach, who is the person who actually brings the team the press. It's Nikolaus of Cusa, who is the early customer. It's Johann Fust, who is the investor, who, side note, ends up suing Gutenberg and takes over the technology, which is another thing I didn't know. So, you know, there, of course, are people who are playing outsized roles. And there's no Apple iPhone without Steve Jobs and the singular things he did. But there's also no Apple iPhone without— you know this better than anyone— without people like you doing the work that you did on the Macintosh. You can't just have a leader who wills things into being. People have to do stuff. So it's one of the silliest things I realized in the book. It's— I've written other books before, and in those books, when I would write a sentence about innovation, the subject in the sentence would be a company. So, Apple did this. Procter& Gamble did this. No company does anything. It's people who do things. And often, not often, always collection of people who do things. It is an individually collective activity.

Well, okay. So, let's take that as a given. So now, knowing that, well, what's the best practice knowing that? What do I do?

So a couple things. Number one, if you're an individual, find a squad to go and hunt with. So find people who can complement you, who can give you different capabilities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just like Julia Child, one of my favorite stories in the book, she doesn't go and do all of her stuff on her own. Her first book has Simca Beck and Louisette Berthold as co-authors. Paul Child's helping in the background with experiments. She's got Avis DeVoto who helps to make connections, Judy Jones, who's her publisher. Find your squad if you're an individual. If you're inside a company and you're a leader and you want to boost your ability to innovate, create a culture where the behaviors that drive innovation success are celebrated, rewarded, and in fact habitual. So make it easy for people to go and understand customers and run experiments and be curious and all the stuff that is part of the human condition, but we grind out of people inside organizations. If you want more innovation, It isn't just trying to find Steve Jobs reincarnated and bringing him to your organization. It's creating the conditions where he and people around him can go and flourish.

So, do you think that one of the telltale signs that a company is really in trouble is when it appoints a chief innovation officer?

I don't think it necessarily means they're in trouble or a chief AI officer today would be the kind of new equivalent because I do think I think the role, if it is done well, can be a value-added role and can help with a bunch of things. If the chief innovation officer is reporting to the chief marketing officer and all the funding comes from the marketing budget, then I get really worried. If the chief innovation officer is reporting to the CEO or the CFO or a place where real resource allocation decisions are made, different thing. I mean, it is a little thing I would do whenever I would go into a company and they would show me their innovation lab. Which always looks cool, right? No one ever shows you a dud innovation lab. You just ask who's paying for it. And if it comes from marketing and PR, well, you got your answer. They're not serious about it. So, I don't think it has to be. It just depends on how things are set up.

Oh, that's a good test. That's a good test. You know, I don't think you mentioned it, but did you know that Julia Child was a spook until she moved to France and got interested

in food? Yeah.

Isn't that a great story?

I mean, the whole Julia Child story is just a fascinating story. Is, you know, it— the path to get to where she got to, like all innovators, is a winding path. And it's a reminder that people are not born— you don't come out as a fully fledged innovator. Julia Child was not born a great cook. She's born in 1912. She moves to France in 1948, falls in love with French cooking. 1951, she fails the exam at Le Cordon Bleu. fails the exam. And she said, well, it was rigged against me. Whatever. She still failed the exam at Le Cordon Bleu. The first meal she ever cooked for her husband, Paul Child, was— wait for it— brains simmered in red wine sauce. She had the detour through being a spook. She also was a magazine writer at one point. And the first 40 years of her life, she's not someone who you say, this person is poised for greatness. Sometimes we bloom late.

The reason why I even knew that story about Julia Child Is you're a spook

too? Is that the, uh—

No, no, no, no, no, no. It's because of ChatGPT. So I was writing with Madison a book called Think Remarkable, and I wanted to talk about the concept that people start in one industry and make a completely different change, you know, to go from spook to cook, for example. And so I went to ChatGPT and I said, give me examples of people who are very successful after a dramatic career change. And of course it tells me Jeff Bezos, who was a, you know, private equity kind of guy, switched to e-commerce. But then it said, yeah, Julia Child worked for the OSS until she moved to France with her OSS husband and she fell in love with French food. And that's how Julia Child became Julia Child. So without ChatGPT, I would've never learned that story.

The parallel example to that, that is one of these things that was just staring at me in the face that I didn't realize until someone asked. My publicist for the book said, we want to do an article or something for AARP. Do you have any examples in the book of people who are older than 50? I'm like, I think so, but I hadn't looked at it. So I first went to Julia Child, of course, and she did turn 50 the year her cooking show came out. So check. But then a chapter right before that is about McDonald's. And the McDonald's story is the brothers have the hamburger stand, and then this milkshake equipment salesperson, Ray Kroc, shows up in 1954. And he says, my God, you are sitting on a gold mine. I'm going to leave that and I'm going to become the master franchisor of McDonald's. He was 52. And the argument that I now make, and this is totally self-serving, I turned 50 this year. Disruption begins at 50 because you have the crystallized wisdom that allows you to see things that other people are missing. And we know that fluid intelligence rises rapidly and peaks at 20 or 30 or thereabouts and begins to decline. So your ability to do super fast processing does go down over time, but crystallized intelligence continues to go up. And because so much of disruption is rethinking and refashioning systems, I think there's something to be said that wisdom and age are benefits, not curses, which goes totally against what most people think, which is, you know, it's the 19-year-olds or whatever that are all the people who are entrepreneurs. Yes, of course, there are examples like that, but there's room for us older folk as well.

Well, I am 71, and so I think my crystals are all turning to dust right now, but that's okay.

But, you know, the research I was looking at, I just was looking at the research around this. You know, teaching is one of the few fields, and again, this is totally self-serving, where performance improves over time. Most fields, at certain points, performance begins to degrade. But even in 60s and 70s, you look at teacher ratings for not everyone, but for many teachers, they continue to go up because they have more wisdom to draw on to be able to teach their classes. So Guy, you want another career? There's space at the Tuck School of Business. You want to come and experience a Hanover, New Hampshire winter? It's just waiting for you.

Well, it's always good to have backup plans. But I would make the case that podcasting is like teaching, that the older you are, the better podcaster you are because I have much more data to interview someone like you about innovation and disruption because I'm 71 and I've been through it as opposed to what? Somebody who just graduated from Northwestern in journalism. What's that person going to ask you about, Clayton? I mean,

absolutely. And, you know, they could ask the same question, but then the follow-up, the depth, the nuance, that is all that's lost. And, you know, it's interesting, it's one of the things I, I teach a class about GenAI and, and consultative decision-making, GenAI and consulting. Half of our graduates go into consulting, so, you know, natural thing to do. And the number one thing that I teach them is you got to do the work to develop the wisdom. And if you offload You will never develop the wisdom, and that will make you a bad advisor. And I have them read the short little interview that Jerry Seinfeld did with Harvard Business Review in 2018. It's an awesome interview. The person saying, you know, you had this great show, but you burned a lot of people out. You were famous for micromanaging, etc. The interviewer said, would it have been better if you'd hired McKinsey? And Seinfeld said, who's McKinsey? And the interviewer says, they're a consulting company. No! And Seinfeld says, are they funny? And I cut my teeth at McKinsey, so I will attest to this answer. The, the interviewer said, no, they're not funny. And Seinfeld said, then they would not have helped. And this is the thing. He said, the right way is the hard way. It was because I micromanaged the show that it was a great show. The right way is the hard way. Of course, there are easy things to do if you want quick answers and shortcuts, but the right way is the hard way. You want to be wise, you have to do hard things. You have to get the experience. That will make you better over time.

I got to ask you, Scott, who the hell asked him that question?

I can't remember who the interviewer was. It was easily discoverable on Google, but it was a Harvard Business Review interviewer. It was the back page of 2017 or 2018, one of the issues. But interestingly, it works better with certain audiences. My MBAs really like that. When I shared it with undergraduates, Enough of them are like, who's Seinfeld? That they didn't quite get it, which made me a bit sad. But so there you go.

I hope the interviewer's last name was not Welch.

No, no, it was not Susie. No, no, no, no, no. That's a whole different conversation. That was before or after.

You know, in your Gutenberg example, I found one thing very interesting is that the church was kind of his first customer, right? And on the other hand, you also point out that the democratization of the replication of Bibles, the spread of religious information was also threatening to some people because they lost the monopoly on the Bible, right? So could you just like, what's the— what casts a shadow over this Yeah, this

is in the category of be careful what you wish for. So, you know, the Catholic Church, you can understand why they love the printing press at first, because they want to standardize religious services. It takes 3 years to inscribe a Bible. Now you can do it like that. The problem is that Martin Luther can also, like that, go and publish information about different views of religion. The printing press led to the splintering of the church, the Reformation. And the creation and the promulgation of lots of different religions. So in modern times, the be careful what you wish for, I think, is consulting companies and artificial intelligence. Right now, consulting companies like McKinsey and Accenture and BCG and so on are making a ton of money helping their clients implement artificial intelligence. What happens when those clients say, hey, great, we can now do all the things we used to hire you to do because we have this great new capacity inside our organization. The second-order effect can often get you. There's always a downside. There's always a shadow to disruption.

I find it inconceivable to retain a firm like McKinsey to help you disrupt. I mean, what— am I being too harsh? Am I being too negative? Like, what does a Harvard Business School MBA— what is that person going to tell me about how to disrupt the steel mill business or something?

Having spent 20 years of my life as a consultant trying to advise people to do exactly that in a smaller, much smaller organization than McKinsey, I will say that if you do it well, what you're helping people to do— I remember one of our clients said, you were a helicopter, a mirror, and an architect. Helicopter, you helped us get a level higher. Mirror, help us understand the things that we didn't see in ourselves that were holding us back. And then architect the things that we were going to do. So, you know, again, there is a pattern to disruptive innovation. So that's something that good advisors can help you with. I understand your skepticism because you also need people who are just a little bit, you know, your old advertising campaign. Here's to the crazy ones, just a little bit crazy. And that doesn't come from a structured analytical approach that a management consulting company will typically do. So in my mind, when we got it right at InnoCite, It'd be a mix of, yes, we're going to take a scientific approach and we're going to walk away from it, and we're going to allow a little bit of craziness and allow a little bit of mess, which was easier arguably for us as a small organization to do than a great big behemoth like McKinsey. But it's my, my 2 cents on the topic.

Okay, so if, if I am an entrepreneur listening to this and I'm not yet 50 and I'm thinking, so So, you know, here I am. I've been asking myself, how do I disrupt an industry? But maybe the better question I should be asking myself is, how do I make things cheaper and simpler? Which is a very different question. Like, so do successful disruptors— are they sitting there wondering how to disrupt, or are they just sitting there thinking, how do I make this cheaper and simpler?

I think the good ones are doing the latter. I don't think they're saying, how do I disrupt? They're saying, how do I solve a problem that's not well solved? How do I go and allow a broader population to be able to enjoy things? How do I radically change costs? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think if you start with the premise, how do I disrupt? I don't know. It just leads you to a different place. I mean, you're trying to get an outcome as opposed to really achieving something with a consumer or customer mindset. So I think starting with the premise, you know, like Henry Ford, You know, Henry Ford, you know, this is before anyone had any language around this, but Henry Ford, his vision was a car for the great multitudes, which means he was obsessed with making things as cheap as possible. So, you know, people say he was a bad marketer. The only color— you have any color you want as long as it's black. But that was because he wanted to get prices down. And at that point, that was everything. And he did it. Prices were $30,000 in today's terms when the Model T came out. Down to $5,000 in today's terms by the early 1920s. And that's why the automotive age happened, because he took something that was complicated and expensive and made it affordable. I— there was a great book that came out in 2025, first half, about Taylor Swift and the strategic lessons you can learn from Kevin Evers, who was actually the editor for Epic Disruptions. And one of the things he talked about is exactly this. Taylor Swift has been incredibly innovative. But she said, at no point do I wake up saying, let me be innovative. Instead, she says, how do I connect more deeply with my fans? How do I find new ways to spread my music in different places? Innovation is a means. Disruption is an approach. The end goal is that connection to fans, that ability to serve customers in different ways, and so on.

So, so which is to say that, in summary, that disruption Is a means to an end. It is not the end in itself.

I tell you, Guy, one of the never-ending debates I would have back in my client service days is people would say, is this or is it not disruptive? And I would usually end the debates by saying, I don't care. That's not really the important question. If it fits an academic definition of— the question is, is there a customer problem that you are solving in a unique way that enables you to make money. That's all that matters. And disruption is a lens that can lead you to look in different places. It's a tool that can help you then go and fine-tune. But it's not the end. The end is ultimately something that delights a customer and leads to them spending money, time, and telling other people about it.

I'm telling you that lots of heads are going to explode if they hear us say this. I mean, That is, I don't see many people sitting around thinking like, how do I make things cheaper and simpler? They're always trying to get funding for disruption. Or maybe it's because of where I live, but yeah, it's a very different perspective out here. So listen, one of the great examples in your book was about controlling the narrative. Yeah. God, I should have wrote it down, but I forget the term you talk about when the cars of Henry Ford example that, you know, there were, what part of the narrative was the jaywalker? And the other part of the narrative was this word that I cannot remember right now with 2 Vs.

Such a beautiful word. It's a flivverboob was the other word. Flivverboob. F-L-I-V-V-E-R-B-O-O-B.

Okay. So now, explain controlling the narrative with the jaywalker versus the fever voob. Yeah.

So yeah, this is something that I think has a lot of pertinence today. So, back to the Model T story, Henry Ford achieves his vision, has the car for the multitude, sales explode. A problem erupts. Cities are built not for cars, but for people and horses. So you've got this great battle, you've got chaos in the streets. Sadly, you have carnage as well. How do you get through it? Well, technologies like traffic lights, norms— who gets to cross the street where? Well, there were 2 sides. There were the motorists who said, we want to own the road, so let's brand the people who are wandering in the road something bad. We'll call them jaywalkers. Jay was a country bumpkin. So we'll get the Boy Scouts to hand out cards saying, you don't want to do this, you don't want to be a jaywalker. The pedestrian said, no, it's not our fault. The motorists are driving like maniacs. Let's brand them as fliver boobs. Fliver is old-time slang for a car boob. Well, that's pretty universal. You know who won this? You don't remember the word. Nobody does. The word stopped being used in 1929. Ultimately, it was the motorists who got the right of way. So you get the technology, you get norms, and then, and then you get regulations. Things like you need a driver's license to drive a car, or if you go above a posted speed limit, we are going to fine you, or later you have to wear a seatbelt, and so on. The reason why I think this is important is we are dealing with some big technological developments right now where there's plenty of technology being developed. There's norms and there's battles between, for AI, boomers and doomers and so on, and we're working through that. But the general view has been, hey, let's just keep our hands off it. Let's let technology develop and then it will all work out fine. History suggests that might not be the best answer.

So what, what, what is your suggestion there then?

So I am not an expert, so I, let me be very clear, but none cannot possibly be the right answer. So at the very least, as a parent of 4 children, I, I look at, at what they are able to do with their phones on social media. And I say, this just can't be good for people. And then you add on top companions and so on from AI, and it just makes you shiver in fear. My 9-year-old, he has to face the onslaught of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who are fighting for his soul. And that is not a good thing. So that would be one area where the ability to go and reach children, it feels like the sort of thing that government exists to put some guardrails against. Bob Johansen, who you probably know, great futurist from the Institute for the Future for decades. His view is for artificial intelligence, we shouldn't have boundaries and guardrails. We should have bounce ropes like in a wrestling ring. So there's some flexibility in them and you can even use them in some ways. But there's some really fixed stanchions which they came off of. Exactly what those look like, I don't know. But I know something is better than nothing. Nothing, I think, is just extremely, extraordinarily dangerous. One person's view. I'm not an expert, but that's my view.

To use the example of jaywalker versus fiver-voob, or whatever that word is, how do you apply that to crypto? I mean, crypto, you can make the case you're a crypto bro and you believe in it, or, you know, you're this dinosaur who doesn't get it. I mean, what— where are we? Whose narrative are we looking at now?

I think you've nailed it. So the question will be, in the middle, it always looks And you look back in hindsight and you say, well, obviously the cars won. That was not clear in 1924 who was actually going to win that battle. There were 2 sides to it. So in any of these big disruptive shifts, you know, crypto, alternative meats, new forms of clean tech, and so on, you're going to have 2 sides. And who ultimately wins, not perfectly predictable. Crypto, you know, my own point of view on crypto If you pull one level up to look at the underlying distributed ledger technologies, I think truly transformational technologies for a whole bunch of things, asset ownership and contracts and so on. I think we're in that period where there's just a lot of noise and speculation and so on, but we will look back and say, this was the beginning of something really important. Technologies have to develop. You have new things that need to develop as well. But I think that is a fundamentally disruptive technology for many, many things.

Wait, wait, wait. When you say it is a fundamentally disruptive thing, you're referring to blockchain, not necessarily crypto, right?

Not specific, you know, not a specific meme coin or whatever, but no, the underlying technological infrastructure on which things run.

Yes. I would agree with that. I am not a crypto believer at all, but I think blockchain, you know, is a very disruptive technology. Wow, okay. I have exhausted all my questions here. I got them all covered here that I wanted to ask you. I share your admiration of Clayton Christensen. I came to know him a little bit. I have attended his speeches. I have to tell you that I once went to a Clayton Christensen speech, and besides the fact that I was blown away by the message and all that, I got to tell you, He had the worst freaking slides in the world. I mean, I don't know who made his slides, but—

He did. I could, you know, having worked with him for 20 years, I can attest. We tried, Guy, again and again to beautify them. And, you know, you really make me smile sharing that. I remember that you took me right back 20, 25-plus years ago when I was a second-year student at the Harvard Business School and I took his class. And I'm like, this is the technology expert. It's going to be all whiz-bang stuff. He came in the first class in October 20— or September 2020— 2000, sorry, September 2000. He took out an acetate, like an actual slide, and put it on a projector. It's just, you know, it's, uh, he, he understood how technology changed. He was not a technology user per se himself.

I, I actually offered once to fix all his slides and He never responded.

You know, there's just something about the character. You know, he was— that's just kind of who he was. And I think he liked the ability to just have control because, you know, ultimately it was the message that he wanted people to pay attention to, not, not the materials. And, you know, I was— he was the best in the world. So I've not seen anyone better as a business storyteller, the ability to communicate complex concepts through essentially parables that people would leave saying, I get steel mini-mils and milkshakes and so on, and they can repeat the stories and all that. He was a truly gifted storyteller and a truly, truly wonderful human being.

Well, I hope now that Clayton Christensen and Jane Goodall are hanging out together because 2 very remarkable people in my life. So yeah.

That's a great thought. Well, Guy, thank you very much for the conversation. I have had a terrific time. Oh, thank you.

Yeah, so, um, it's been wonderful. I, I really like the book. I really like, uh, your body of work and all this knowledge. And I hope all you young entrepreneurs out there listening, you're asking yourself, how do I make things simpler and cheaper, not how do I disrupt things? All righty, so just let me thank, you know, Madison, the co-producer, Jeff C., co-producer, I recently saw a podcast where at this point they put up a different graphic and they list the names. It says Madison Neismar, co-producer Jeff Sieg, co-producer Shannon Hernandez, design engineer Tessa Neismar. So maybe we'll step up our game and innovate and put that slide up. But that's the reMarkable People team. Mm-hmm. And again, thank you very much. Have a great holiday season. And I hope that you continue to just do this great work and continue to write these great books, Scott.

Thank you very much, guys. Same to you and yours.