The Hidden PATTERN Behind Every Epic Disruption | Scott D. Anthony

What this episode is about

Scott D. Anthony discusses the importance of balancing present realities with long-term vision in leadership, emphasizing that success today is essential for securing future opportunities. He advises leaders to adopt diverse time frames and mental models when making decisions to ensure their efforts are both effective and aligned with their ultimate goals.

Key takeaways

• Balance today’s delivery with tomorrow’s vision; without one, the other becomes irrelevant.
• Disruption isn’t just a threat; it’s an opportunity for those willing to adapt and innovate.
• Great leaders apply diverse mental models to remain relevant, as complacency is the enemy of progress.
• Ecosystem thinking is crucial; disregarding it can lead to oversight in the face of disruption.
• History shows that even giants can fall; adaptability today ensures survival and success tomorrow.

Who speaks in this episode?

• John Rile (Host) · 18 min speaking
• Scott D. Anthony (Guest) · 28 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Disruption, John Rile, The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard Business School
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Disruption, Epic Disruptions, Artificial Intelligence, Amazon
3. 10:00 – 15:00: John Rile
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Disruption, Epic Disruptions, Tuck School of Business
5. 20:00 – 25:00: Disruption, Predictably Unpredictable Disruption
6. 25:00 – 30:00: Disruption, Predictably Unpredictable Disruption
7. 30:00 – 35:00: Disruption, Artificial Intelligence
8. 35:00 – 40:00: Disruption
9. 40:00 – 45:00: Disruption
10. 45:00 – 46:03: Epic Disruptions

Notable quotes from "The Hidden PATTERN Behind Every Epic Disruption | Scott D. Anthony"

• Hey, I'm so excited today to have Scott Anthony join me on Passion Struck. Hey Scott, how are you today?

  about John Rile · at 1:24

• Thought the description sounded interesting. The first day of the class, Clay Christensen ambles into the room.

  about Harvard Business School · at 2:25

• Complicated. The other big thing that I would point out is Clay's first book, a famous book, The Innovators Dilemma. The subtitle kind of says it all. When new technologies…

  about The Innovator's Dilemma · at 4:29

• Didn't see the more macro. When I look at companies like Amazon, I really think of Amazon as a data company, and Lowe's had that opportunity to do the same given our customer…

  about Amazon · at 8:29

• My publisher, Harvard Business Review Press. I teach a class at Tuck called Leading Disruptive Change. Teaching is a second career for me. I was a consultant for about 20 years…

  about Tuck School of Business · at 15:38

• Expensive, make it simple and affordable, change market dynamics, drive explosive growth. The word epic in the title is absolutely an intentional word. In 1620, Sir Francis…

  about Epic Disruptions · at 18:19

• Experimenting, etc., etc. This is a very persistent part of the stories of disruption. Disruption rewards patience.

  about Disruption · at 20:54

• That's the idea of being predictably unpredictable.

  about Predictably Unpredictable Disruption · at 27:21

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• John Rile — Person · Host · 3 mentions · first at 0:39
  Hosts the Passion Struck podcast, guides the conversation, and provides personal executive experiences (Lowe’s, Dell) to frame questions about disruption.
• Ron Adner — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at 4:05
  Cited for ecosystem strategy and the 'wide lens' framing to understand disruption beyond a single firm/technology.
  Better. And certainly over the past 25 years, the world has gotten more complicated. I look a lot now to the research of my tuck colleague Ron Adner who has done some great…

Books & papers

• Epic Disruptions — Book · Primary recommendation · 4 mentions · first at 9:10
  Scott Anthony's book that explores historical disruptions and their modern echoes, providing insights into how disruption unfolds.
• The Innovator's Dilemma — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at 4:31
  Clay Christensen's seminal book on disruptive innovation, foundational to the discussion on how companies can fail or succeed in the face of disruption.

Companies & orgs

• Amazon — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at 8:32
  Mentioned as an example of a company that successfully leveraged data and technology to disrupt traditional industries.
• Harvard Business School — Company · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 2:14
  Mentioned as the institution where Scott Anthony first encountered Clayton Christensen's teachings on disruptive innovation.
• Tuck School of Business — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at 15:40
  Scott Anthony's current academic affiliation where he teaches about disruptive change.
• DBS Bank — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at 7:32
  Mentioned as an example of a company that redefined itself beyond its traditional industry identity.
  Retail services. Or an organization that I consulted with back when I lived in Singapore, DBS Bank. It's not a bank, it's a technology company that happens to provide banking…

Concepts & topics

• Disruption — Concept · Core topic · 21 mentions · first at 3:22
  Central theme of the episode, discussing the impact and evolution of disruptive technologies and business models.
• Artificial Intelligence — Concept · Key argument · 2 mentions · first at 5:07
  Highlighted as a current disruptive force that is changing industries and requiring new approaches to innovation.
  Innovator's dilemma presents the innovator's opportunity. In a previous generation, Microsoft would have missed cloud. It would have missed artificial intelligence. Meta would have missed messaging, would have missed Instagram.
• Predictably Unpredictable Disruption — Concept · Framework · 2 mentions · first at 24:54
  A concept introduced by Scott Anthony to describe the inherent uncertainties and patterns in disruptive innovation.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 You need this duality almost a paradox in your mind where you are simultaneously thinking about long-term future and present reality recognizing if you don't care and deliver for today you don't earn the right to do tomorrow but if you don't have a vision a direction to which you're trying to go to for tomorrow the efforts that you have in today are going to be misguided or even counterproductive and the thing that I generally counsel leaders to do is make sure that you just stop and you apply different time frames and mental models as you're looking at different things that you are trying to decide around. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host John Rile. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so

0:59 that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become Passion Struck.

1:28 Hey, I'm so excited today to have Scott Anthony join me on Passion Struck. Hey Scott, how are you today?

1:33 And John, I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me. Man, I'm so honored to have you here. Primarily because I've been studying your work for a couple decades. So, it's great to actually talk to a person who I admire and I applied their teachings into my professional career. I can't mention you without mentioning another person who deeply impacted my career which was Clayton Christensen. Can you take us back to that first spark and what drew you so deeply into the field and also into his work?

2:08 Yeah, for sure. So, it started in September 2000. I was a secondyear student at the Harvard Business School and I signed up for this class called building and sustaining a successful enterprise. It was a new class, so there were no reviews of the class. I just thought the description sounded interesting. The first day of the class, Clay Christensen ambles into the room. He was 6' 8 in tall, so quite a figure, and did something that was really quite anacronistic, which was he took out acetates, like actual slides, and put them onto a projector and started lecturing. And if you know anything about the Harvard Business School, that's really unusual. It is entirely the case-based method. That's just the way that classes start. But Clay was saying from the beginning, this is going to be a different class. Yes, we're going to do lots of cases. We're going to explore lots of territories, but I

3:01 want to ground it in models, frameworks, and ways of thinking so that you leave it with new lenses to look at the world. And from that minute, I was captivated just by the approach. Then as I learned about some of his thinking, well, we can explore that in more depth. I was even more hooked. must have been just amazing to work alongside Clay. I wanted to ask how has your understanding of disruption evolved since those early Harvard days, especially with the evolution of AI that we see all around us today. And the world certainly is different than it was in 2000 in lots of ways, for better in some and for worse in others. I always think about the sign that Clay had hanging in his office, the famous sign, anomalies wanted. Clay was a very good social scientist. When he saw something that didn't fit his research, he didn't seek to go and hide it or to refute it.

3:55 He sought to understand it so he could make his models, tools, and frameworks better. And certainly over the past 25 years, the world has gotten more complicated. I look a lot now to the research of my tuck colleague Ron Adner who has done some great work on ecosystems to understand disruption sometimes occurs in a pocket of an ecosystem and if you don't take what Ron calls the wide lens and look at the entire ecosystem you can sometimes miss the implications of it. So that's one thing you've had ecosystems and platforms emerge so it's gotten more complicated. The other big thing that I would point out is Clay's first book, a famous book, The Innovators Dilemma. The subtitle kind of says it all. When new technologies cause, wait for it, great firms to fail. What he said is there is a dilemma when disruption strikes. When someone makes the complicated, simple, the expensive, affordable, my research

4:49 says you bet on the attacker. The incumbent struggle with it. Over the past 25 years, people have read that book and read all the other work that's been produced and have learned that the innovator's dilemma presents the innovator's opportunity. In a previous generation, Microsoft would have missed cloud. It would have missed artificial intelligence. Meta would have missed messaging, would have missed Instagram. In this world, they see it, they respond to it, they can seize those opportunities. That is a huge shift.

5:20 It's interesting. One of the times I was most involved with the research was during my time as an executive at Lowe's and I was taking MBA courses at Wake Forest and I remember this course I was in was examining the Fortune 500 and the professor was asking us to look at the evolution of the companies in the Fortune 500 list over the past 20 to 30 years and how many of the names had dropped off because they were great companies but they hadn't evolved enough to keep pace with the disruptions that were happening around them. So I was taking this to heart and I was trying to influence our executive leadership team to understand that while Lowe's was in the retail industry, I thought we needed to stop looking at the industry itself and evolving to what other rightaways we might have that would make the company more powerful, such as our supply chain ecosystem, but also as trying to get them to think of

6:25 us as instead of I was in the IT organization, an IT impacted organization to becoming a software company or a retailer powered by software. And the current that past leadership team, I couldn't get them to see it, but the new leadership team that's at Lowe's now actually describes the company as a software company. So, it's crazy how paradigms shift over time and why it's so important.

6:54 For sure. And you've hit on a couple really important things. One, when you're dealing with a world where disruption is everpresent, that's another big shift. In 2000, disruption was a niche phenomena. Now it's pervasive. Alex Partners had a report earlier this year where twothirds of leaders said that they had experienced disruption within the last year. So everybody is facing it to some degree. When you have that kind of world, recognizing that the essence of the organization might not be what you think it is. You're not a retail company, but you're a software company that provides retail services. Or an organization that I consulted with back when I lived in Singapore, DBS Bank. It's not a bank, it's a technology company that happens to provide banking services. That's a really important thing. And then second, this idea that you really do have to change in order to survive. I think people now understand this and I suspect

7:48 we're going to actually see a change in the long-term trends where over periods of time big churn in the Fortune 500, the S&P 500 and so on. But I think more and more organizations are getting it. Of course, lots of exciting startups that are driving big change, but more and more big organizations recognize that standing still is moving backwards and they have to change. They have to evolve if they're going to thrive in a world of never- ending disruption. It's an exciting time. It's a scary time at the same time.

8:17 One of the things I was trying to get them to see is I was the chief data officer in one of my roles and we competed against Home Depot and others using data to our advantage, but they didn't see the more macro. When I look at companies like Amazon, I really think of Amazon as a data company, and Lowe's had that opportunity to do the same given our customer interactions and other things. But why do you think it's so hard for leaders at times to see themselves in a different light like that Lowe's could be a data company that we could compete against others using data? It's so hard to get people to make that leap yet I think once you do it's so apparent the chasm that can be crossed.

9:07 I think absolutely. I think one of the cases that I research for my book Epic Disruptions helped to make this really clear to me. So I have a chapter about steel mini mills if you're if you study disruptive change at all. Clay Christensen loved the steel mini story. There were integrated mills that created big expensive plants that created the best deal in the world. And then there was a classic disruptive technology, steel mini mills that used electric arc furnace that did pretty good steel at really low prices and they drove big change in the space. So the question is why did the market leader Bethlehem Steel was one of them? It's the one I look into deeply in the book. Why did it struggle to go and adopt minimal technology? It could go and buy an electric arc furnace. It wasn't that expensive. It could have created a like forlike competitor to it. It could have embraced disruptive change. The argument

9:59 that I make in the book is Clay had part of the answer. He talked about the resource allocation process naturally prioritizing making today better versus tomorrow different. That's absolutely true. And I say there's another part which is maybe a little bit irrational. I argue in the chapter that every organization to a degree is haunted by ghosts. In homage to Charles Dickens, some of those are ghosts of the past, traumas the organization hasn't gotten over. Bethlehem Steel had to deal with a lot of labor unrest. One key to many males was non-unionized labor. Talk about that and people are like, "No, that's scary." You have goes to the present. You have the inertial pull, the patterns you follow that you're not aware of. It's just the way you do things. There had been 80 years where Bethlehem Steel focused on making sure it was the scale producer that it didn't pioneer that it was just really good at

10:54 executing at scale. That was just the way they did things. It's hard to fight that. Ghost of the future, a fear that if you do something new, you're going to invalidate who you are. Your identity is going to be threatened. And nobody likes that. Bethlehem Steel. They had this massive outdated plant that had all these things juryrigged together in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Rationally, they should have shut it down. But who were they? They were Bethlehem Steel. So, I think you have to recognize there's a resource allocation problem that's hard. And there's an irrational set of ghosts that you have to overcome if you're going to drive change. That is equally, if not harder, to overcome.

11:38 That's why I think you see so many organizations struggle with the exact problem you described.

11:44 In another conversation, I heard you talking to that podcast host about Nokia and Apple, but I want to take it to a different comparison. I want to compare Apple to Microsoft because when I was at senior executive at Dell, I got to work with both of them very closely. And it's interesting because Apple made a pivot and exploded uh their market value but at the time Microsoft at that time under Steve Balmer was facing obscurity. What ended up happening in your opinion after Balmer left and Satia came on that really changed the whole trajectory of where Microsoft is and changed its whole destiny. I think the thing that most scholars would point to who have studied Microsoft, it' be pretty simple and complex at the same time. A fundamental mindset shift. The mindset that Nadella tried to bring to the organization I trying successfully brought to the organization was the growth mindset that

12:46 said we're going to go from a culture where we are know-it-alls, which it really was. I experienced it. I'm sure you experienced it too. everything from we're going to force rank people and get rid of the people who are the lowest performance to we're going to encourage a lot of rivalry inside the organization and we're going to believe we're Microsoft we have the right god to go and produce monopoly profits forever they wouldn't say the m word in that but the rest of it they would say to [snorts] a culture where we're really going to be learn it alls where we're going to be humble we're going to recognize the limits of our knowledge we're going to seek to go and explore seek to go and try things and along the Hey, we're going to fail and have setbacks and that's fine. We're going to learn from them, celebrate, blah blah blah blah blah. It's such a simple idea, but so powerful when you implement it

13:35 because it just opens up possibilities. I think one example of this is there's the famous video of Steve Bombers seeing somebody using an iPhone and taking the iPhone and throwing it down. You got to use Microsoft products. You can't use the competitor's products. Satcha on the other hand when you saw Elon Musk tweet something about how Grock wasn't being favored by Microsoft no matter what Satcha Nadella personally thought about it he recognizes as an ecosystem provider you got to work with everybody so let's talk about it let's talk about how we work together let's learn let's go and develop let's push let's experiment it's really amazing to see the changes that have taken place in Microsoft in a generation 20 years ago it looked like innovators dilemma version 2.0 It's like it could be the focal case study the next time you update that book. Now it looks like innovator solution 2.0 and that's

14:25 happened in a pretty short period of time. Really is. I had a firsthand experience because somewhere around 2012 I interviewed for their CEO role and just as you're explaining I came in there having examined the company and being at Dell they were a close partner of ours so I knew him pretty well and saw Bomber basically mandate that when we were launching our first uh mobile device he mandated to Michael that it needed to be on the Microsoft operating system instead of Android. And so we were dead on arrival, but I went in there with all these fresh ideas and everyone I met along the interview pattern basically said, "What we're doing is better until I met Satia and in one of my last interviews and he was the only one I met who was really open to other ideas."

15:13 Well, getting back to the reason for our discussion today, you've brought it up already. You've written a new book, Epic Disruptions, and you have eight books before this one. Why turn to history and why release it now?

15:28 Well, do do you want the answer that I'm supposed to give or you want the truth? I'll give you the truth. The truth is it actually was not my idea. So, I had a very different book that I proposed to my publisher, Harvard Business Review Press. I teach a class at Tuck called Leading Disruptive Change. Teaching is a second career for me. I was a consultant for about 20 years before that. So, I started teaching three years ago. I designed this class. The class was going well. I said, "I want to write a book about the ideas in this class." And the publisher said, "It sounds great. We're really interested in it, but we have a different idea for you." They had just named disruptive innovation one of four ideas that had shaped the modern business world along with shareholder value maximization, emotional intelligence, scientific management. And they said, "You're so intertwined with the idea. What about writing a history

16:17 book about disruption?" And at first I was like, "That's not the book I want to write." I had another idea in mind and then it just sat in my head. I said, "There still are a lot of questions about disruption. It's been 20 plus years since the idea has been out there. People misuse it. People don't understand it." I said, "Maybe taking a fresh look and looking through the lens of deep history will teach me things I didn't know and allow me to communicate in ways I couldn't communicate before." And that's absolutely what I found. In the end, I was so thrilled that I didn't have this idea, but I did like this idea because it just taught me so many things about disruption that I just would not have learned in any other way.

16:57 Yeah, Scott, the word epic feels intentional and this whole podcast is about intentionality. So, I I find it to be both historical and mythic. How do you define epic disruption and what distinguishes the 11 stories you already went through one from typical innovation case studies?

17:16 So first just to make sure we've got terms of reference let me talk about what disruption is and I will illustrate this with an example. My father was born in 1947. In 1947 there was exactly one computer in the world. It was huge. It weighed about 20 tons. I was born in 1975. Now, there are tens of thousands of computers in the world. They're still pretty big and they're not things that I, as an individual, would likely ever access because they're in very large organizations in central locations. My daughter Holly is born in 2007.

17:56 Now, there are hundreds of millions of computers. We talked already about Microsoft, Dell, and we know all the names. There are laptops and desktop computers. And of course, in 2007, we now have a computer that's in our palm and in our pocket with the introduction of the Apple iPhone. Today, there are billions of computers. That's disruption. Take the complicated and expensive, make it simple and affordable, change market dynamics, drive explosive growth. The word epic in the title is absolutely an intentional word. In 1620, Sir Francis Bacon said, "There have been three things that have changed the state and appearance of the entire world. Gunpowder, printing press, and the compass. Those are epic disruptions. Things that changed the state and appearance of the entire world. Two of those three made it into epic disruptions. The compass did not for whatever reason." The rest of the stories are like that. You can see a

18:56 material difference in the world before and the world after. That is an epic disruption. The world is different because it exists.

19:07 I love that. And one of the earliest stories you tell us is about gunpowder. What does this unlikely innovation reveal about how disruption actually unfolds?

19:18 Many things I will highlight two things. First, it helps us to understand that innovator's dilemma. So the story starts in 1453. There's an army approaching Constantinople. Now, inside the city, people probably felt okay because they had these walls, these Theodocian walls. There's a moat that goes around the walls. The walls have two sets to them. They're each 15 ft thick. There's 96 towers that them. They had stood for more than a thousand years until Gunpowder. There was this cannon that a mysterious gunner named Orbin cast that could fling a halftonon cannonball over a distance of a mile. Imagine that. The world had never seen anything like this before. And suddenly, cannonballs are flying out of the sky. The walls were smashed. The city fell in 47 days. This reminds us that disruption changes everything. The defenses that were built for yesterday are not fit for the disruptions of today. That's lesson

20:18 number one. Lesson number two, the path to get there is not a straight line. 142, that is the first reference that I could find to gunpowder. And of course then it wasn't gunpowder, it's just people messing around with stuff. It was alchemists that were working on it, magicians who were working on it, philosophers who were working on it for about the first thousand years until people say, "Hey, you mix salt peter and sulfur and charcoal together in the right way. You put a container around it. You put a projectile in it. We can do some interesting things with militaries as well." Somehow it crosses over to Europe. People keep experimenting, etc., etc. This is a very persistent part of the stories of disruption. Disruption rewards patience.

21:02 It's not something where, pardon the pun, there's a big bang and all of a sudden overnight the world changes. It takes time. It takes iteration. It takes experimentation before you get there. There are other lessons of course in the chapter, but those are the two big ones that really struck me as I was going through it.

21:18 In my first book, I have this concept I lay out called the be and turtle effect. And I examined Elon Musk using it. And I was trying to show that Elon, like the sea turtle, has a very long range view of where his head is at. He's thinking of exploration in the cosmos. And so he's trying to think of if we're going to get to Mars, what types of disruptive technologies are we going to need to survive there? So, it's led him to look at um different ways that you're going to have to propel things up there using different forms of energy generation. He knows you're not going to be able to survive on the planet on its surface.

22:03 So, he's done a lot of expeditions using deep mining technology, etc. But he also works like the honeybee which is very concerned about serving the mother bee and carrying out what it needs to on a daily basis. So you talked about gunpowder. I brought up the iPhone earlier. It's two examples of one taking that long-term view. One that many people would think is a shorter term view although in Job's head it probably unfolded a lot slower than that. But how do using all these examples, how do leaders plan for deep roots and fast fields at the same time?

22:44 It is a truly fantastic question and we now get to bridge a little bit into some of the material in the book that is yet to be written which is about how do you really lead through disruptive change and I love the metaphors that you've given because that's exactly what you need. You need this duality almost a paradox in your mind where you are simultaneously thinking about long-term future and present reality recognizing if you don't care and deliver for today you don't earn the right to do tomorrow but if you don't have a vision a direction to which you're trying to go to for tomorrow the efforts that you have in today are going to be misguided or even counterproductive and the thing that I generally counsel leaders to do is make sure that you just stop and you apply different time frames and mental models as you're looking at different things that you are trying to decide around and it's a wonky word but I think an

23:42 important one and I think if you were to peer into Elon Musk's brain or Steve Jobs's brain or whatever you would see this you need to have metacognition which means you are thinking consciously about how you are thinking and saying okay what hat am I putting on what glasses am I putting on what lenses am I putting on what time frame am I thinking about how do I go and connect these things Danella Meadows who taught at Dartmouth for a long period of time was a famous thinker in the systems thinker space we're really bad as humans at being systems thinkers about thinking about second order effects and what do we have to do to be able to do this and then what happens and that's the sort of thing that a someone who has high metacognition is able to do good news this is a trainable skill you can practice and get better at it by making sure that you get diverse stimuli, you think about different things, you have

24:31 different experiences and so on, but it's not something that we spend a lot of time talking about. And the ones that really drive disruptive change are really good at doing it. For many decades of my career, Mark Beni off, the CEO and founder of Salesforce, was a close mentor of mine. And something that you argue about is predictably unpredictable disruption. And when I think about Mark, that kind of sums up a lot of what I think his ethos was. For someone who doesn't understand what that means, can you explain what it is and specifically what tilts the odds? So, let me illustrate it with a brief story. Julia Child, who was one of the more fun chapters in the book and one I really didn't see coming when the research and writing started. Julie Child, if you're asking your head, well, what exactly did she disrupt? Well, you go back to the 1950s. You live in America. You want to enjoy a great

25:31 French meal. What do you do? You probably don't have a restaurant in your local area. So, that means your best choice is to get on a plane and fly to Paris, which meant not many people were enjoying French food. Mastering the art of French cooking made it simple and accessible for a broader population to enjoy French cooking. Julia Child amplified that by having her TV show that brought it to more people. Classic disruptive innovation. So the story, the brief story, Julia Child joined with two co-authors, Sim Quebec and Luis Ed Berthal, in 1951 to work on the project that became Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It was not an overnight success. It took 10 years. There were three different publishers. There were two near-death experiences. She needed help from an outside friend, Avisato, who introduced her at the last minute to Judy Jones at Alfred Knoff that published the book. This is one of the

26:24 very clear patterns for disruptive innovation. There's always twists and turns. There's always false steps and fumbles. There's always in the classic mono myth divine help from an outsider that can help to make connections. I know for sure whenever I start researching or writing or helping somebody with a disruptive idea, that pattern will exist. That's predictable. exactly where and when and how misfortune or fortune will strike. You cannot know for sure. It is not Newtonian physics. It is not deterministic. It is not a checklist.

26:58 That part is unpredictable. What that means is you have to recognize that you're going to learn experientially as you're progressing with disruption. You're going to have to be ready to handle setbacks and you're going to need a lot of friends to help you along the way. And then you got to strap yourself in and be ready for the ride because exactly what will happen, exactly when it will happen is very hard to tell. That's the idea of being predictably unpredictable.

27:24 Yeah. And I want to focus on Julia here for a second because as I was reading this, I think she's a great example beyond what you just talked about because people often look at people like her or other people we've talked about in today's discussion and they see the end trajectory of what they've created, but they don't see the journey along the way. And when I think about Julia, what gets lost is that she really struggled when she was going through schooling to become a chef. So, not only did she have this near miss with her book, but her career could have been derailed before it even started had she not doubled down and on how she was focusing on her cooking. And I think that's another thing that people don't really see is the perseverance that disruptors have to take.

28:16 And that is true for anybody, anybody who is wildly successful. Julia Child, she's born in 1912. She does not come out of the womb as a great chef. Nobody does. The first time she cooked a meal for her husband, Paul Child. She made brains and red wine. I have no idea why she picked that recipe, but sounds not very appetizing. And it was a disaster. When she visited Paul's family, the joke was she couldn't successfully boil water. When she went to France and got struck by this idea of cooking French food, she enrolled in Lake Cordon Blue and then failed the final exam. There's a lot of setbacks along the way before you actually see success. You go and study people who are great athletes.

28:58 Almost all of them, yes, of course, they're touched by God with amazing talent, but almost all of them will tell you stories of shooting a thousand shots in the driveway and working and working and working to get better at something and the help of a coach because it's not just practice, it's deliberate practice where someone can give you feedback and help you get better. We see the end of the story, we don't see the work that goes into it. That's something that I think really struck me in the research. Then there's something, John, that just struck me literally last week. So last week I got a call from my publicist. She said, "We're considering pitching a story to ARP." And they asked, "Any protagonists in the book who are over 50?" And I said, "I think so." And I thought immediately of Julia Child. And Julia Child, the first time she went on television, she was 50 years old. But then I started going through every

29:45 chapter and every chapter where there's names, the printing press, Gutenberg was at least 55 when the first Bible came off the printing press. Sir Francis Bacon, who I mentioned before, the disruptive idea of the scientific revolution, he was more than 60 when he wrote his breakthrough book. And this is in the 17th century. Steve Jobs is 52 when the iPhone comes out. So, of course, we celebrate the wonderkins that come up with ideas in their late teens and early 20s. But there's a lot to be said for people who have crystallized intelligence, who can take all the wisdom they have and say, "I see something here. I see pieces I can put together that you might not see because you don't have the experience. That was just an interesting thing that was in plain sight, but I had not seen it before. Disruption begins at 50. I guess I just turned 50 this year, so I like that.

30:37 Well, I think another great example of that is if you want to look at actors is Morgan Freeman. He didn't start his career really didn't take off until he was in midlife either. And I think you bring up a very good point. The other thing I wanted to highlight here is I was having a discussion with Jim McKelie who co-founded Square and Jim was telling me that the reason he sees most entrepreneurs or innovators fail is they run into these friction points like you described with Julia and a lot of them instead of staying true to their direction and adapting tend to become so distracted they start venturing from it.

31:18 And that lack of focus is what causes the disruption to come to a grinding halt, which is something else I think is important. One one other thing I did want to explore is what did Julia Child and crypto have to do with each other?

31:33 At first, I will admit it's a little bit of a stretch. The conclusion of the book, it says for each of the chapters that focuses on a product, let's find an echo of that product in modern days that has some disruptive elements to it. Some of them were very easy. So, gunpowder, boom. Let's look at clean tech, the printing press, artificial intelligence, the Model T, Henry Ford's breakthrough vehicle, autonomous vehicles. I wanted to get cryptocurrency distributed ledger technologies in there. I'm like, which one does this fit best with? And I said, okay, let's do a little bit of squinting in the book and say Julia Child. The squinting in the book is this. When Julia Child was working on her book, she was very concerned that the recipes she was working on, which were carefully crafted, honed through lots of experimentation, were going to leak. So when she sent them to people, top secret stamps on them and made sure that they

32:25 were wrapped and all that. And she used to work at the predecessor to the CIA. So she understood all this stuff. In modern days, she could use distributed ledger technologies to make sure that there is clear mark of ownership of everything that she distributes. And if there is leaking, she can figure out exactly where in the chain it happened and how. That was the argument that I made. Since writing the book, I've realized I could have said even more. Julia Child, one of the things she was great at, pushing frontiers. She pioneered chefs going on television. She pioneered modern formats for all the TV shows that we see now. I am willing to wager that if she were alive today, she would certainly accept payment in crypto and she probably would have a memecoin because she's very memeable. So, I could have done even more in the book with that one. I think

33:11 I love it. You call disruption collectively individualistic. And that spoke to me because when I started this podcast, it was really a soloreneur type of initiative. And now, like so many people out there, you reach a point where it can't be a solo initiative anymore. So, I thought that this one was one to highlight for our audience, especially how should we design teams around that truth?

33:39 Well, I'll answer that question first and then go back to a story from the book that helped to really firm this up in my mind. How should we design teams? Number one, make sure you have them. Make sure you recognize that this is not no matter what you're doing, it's not an individual activity. There are people who support you and augment you and amplify you, etc. whether it's a village or a platoon that it takes to actually do this, make sure you format. Then the second thing, one of the very persistent findings in the innovation literature is that magic happens at intersections where you get different mindsets and backgrounds colliding. The more that team is replete with intersections, people who will look at the world in different ways, think in different ways, have different skills, etc., the stronger that team is going to be. And the story to reinforce this is the printing press story. This one taught me

34:30 a lot. The printing press I had historically told as a story about the lone genius. You have Johannes Gutenberg. He's the one guy who does this. Of course, you go and study history, you realize that's not true at all. 1437, he forms a partnership. The partnership isn't to go and create the printing press. It's to create trinkets with silver foil or mirror behind them that would capture the essence of the Holy Spirit during a planned pilgrimage in 1439. The bubanic plague broke out. The pilgrimage was called off. So that little team had to go and in modern terms pivot. They added some new members. They found this guy Conrad Saspot that had this really interesting press that was originally for wine but could be used for other purposes. They got funding from Johan Fouse. They found Nicholas of Kusa who was looking for ways to standardize religious ceremonies. A bunch of people are coming together. It always requires a bunch of

35:27 people coming together. Of course, there's a hero in the story. There always is, but there usually are multiple ones. There are heroes and there always are lots of people involved in it. So, I love solopreneurs. my 14-year-old son, Harry, who is at that 14-year-old awkwardness and says, "Can I just build a huge business without ever talking to anyone?" I encourage him to go as far as he can, but I say, "Harry, you really are going to have to learn how to look people in the eye and talk with them." Harry, I apologize for sharing this story during this podcast, but over time, I hope you appreciate it.

36:00 I want to go back to my comments earlier about my Wake Forest learnings about the Fortune 50 and so many of them disappearing because it ties back to something that you wrote that companies often play a critical role in their very own disruptions that end up unseeding them. What are some great historical examples that illustrate this paradox? Well, I was just speaking at an event recently and they said, "Well, we want to hear your own story." So, I said, "Okay, let me tell you a version of my story at least." So, my first face-to-face experience encounter with disruptive innovation was in 1995 when I was the managing editor of a newspaper.

36:40 Now, if you've tracked what I've said about how old I am and when I was born, you very quickly recognize that I was not the editor of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. This was my college newspaper. I was 20 years old at the time. 1995 was a important year because the year before Mark Andre and his team had introduced the Netscape browser. So there we were a leadership team staring at disruptive change in the face and we made all the mistakes. We hesitated to allocate resources towards it rather than embracing the new power of the internet. We tried to force fit it through our old model. We did everything wrong. 2000 I told you before I met Klay Christensen. I start to understand disruptive change. I say, "Oh my gosh, it's obvious what we did wrong now." I study it. I learn about it. Clay and I work together for a couple years. I'm his research assistant. I then join the team at Innocight, the consulting

37:32 company that he had set up, and I get my shot at redemption. 2005, I lead a project with the American Press Institute to save the US newspaper industry. You know how this one turned out? It's a line on my failure resume now. the newspaper industry was not saved because I recognized after this how deliciously deep the dilemmas of disruption actually are. It was crystal clear in 2005 that readers were going to other places, new business models were emerging, the industry needed to fundamentally change. The challenge the industry had at that time is while it intellectually made sense to them, their businesses were still healthy. their businesses were still producing lots of positive cash flow. the data lagged the degree of disruption and because of that they felt no urgency to act until the data were crystal clear and by the time the data are crystal clear it's too late you don't have the degrees of freedom to

38:30 act around it me and a couple former insight colleagues in a Harvard business review article a few years ago called this the information action paradox and that is to me one of the deepest challenges of dealing with disruptive change by the time the data are clear, it's too late to act based on the data. So, a good leader will act at the moment when the data tells them not to, which is a wonderful paradoxical thought that you have to act against what the data tells you, but that's what's required in disruptive change.

39:03 I'm glad you brought up that example. Going back to a conversation I had with Jim McKelie, he started a new company called I think it's invisibly and he's trying to disrupt that whole model that you were just talking about historical the way we consume content and he's trying as I understand it to put more onus on the consumers of the information and how do you incentivize them financially to consume the best data that's out there? Because I don't know if you're like me, but I hate it when I'm doing research and I keep hitting payw wall after payw wall to get the information that I need. And instead of hitting the pay walls, it would actually be incentivizing the person to look at that content and then recommend it to others as being the foremost content that's applicable to the question that they're asking, which is an interesting model if if he can get it to to grow momentum. But that's often the most

40:02 difficult part is having this great idea, having this disruptive path that you can take and then making it a reality because what I have typically found is the original ideas that you come across rarely are the ones that eventually take hold. So long way of asking you like how do you cross that chasm? I think first to highlight what you said, the first and final ideas are never ever the same. And even the ones that that we deem brilliant get it wrong all the time. This is something I had forgotten, but in the research for the book, I went back and watched the video where Steve Jobs launched the iPhone at Mac World 2007. And somebody asked him, "What is the killer app of this thing?"

40:46 And he said, "Well, it's a phone." So, it's the ability to make and receive phone calls. Of course, that's the killer app. which turned out to be completely wrong. So, we forget this, but in the early days, the iPhone sales were pretty low. The phone was a pretty disappointing thing because it couldn't do that much with it. There was a good browser on the phone, but there were no apps because Apple had a very tightly controlled ecosystem. It took someone convincing Steve Jobs, telling him that, you know what, we got to open this thing up for the app store to come into being and for the world to really change.

41:17 Point number one, first and final are not the same. Point number two, even the geniuses get it wrong. Point number three, how do you cross that? You cross it by experimenting, by testing, by learning, by probing, by listening to dissenting voices, by trying things and letting the world work out for you what actually the right answer is. Your firm envisioned. So Steve Jobs had a very clear vision. We're going to create an amazingly easy to use computer that fits in your hand, in your pocket, that also incidentally allows you to make phone calls. That vision never changed. the components of it absolutely changed based on reactions from real people in real context using it. So the idea you detail I think has a lot of merit to it.

42:00 It's a problem I certainly have encountered, many people have encountered. You are asking people to change their behavior. That's hard to do. How do you figure out how to actually do it? You go and do it. That that that is the only way. Well, I'm going to ask you a follow on to that because across these different 11 disruptions, what struck you most about the human dimension of innovation? This podcast talks a lot about human flourishing, but to me, there's an individual aspect of that and there's a business aspect of that in how I I think connection forms a critical element of why companies are successful or not. making people feel like they belong, that they matter. So, look, using that as a lens, what struck most out to you?

42:48 One of the things that was a very surprising finding to me from the book is look, I I love disruption. I've studied it for 25 years. I've researched it. I've written about it. I've practiced it. I teach it. I truly believe the world is a better place because of it. However, as I went into each of the stories, for as good as disruption is, it also casts a shadow. That shadow can be a company that was a great company that fails. And a lot is lost when companies fail. It can be a market that goes through a lot of tumultuous changes that has pain as that happens. And the one I want to focus on is it casts a shadow on individuals. I think perhaps my favorite find for the book was the 1548 proclamation from King Edward V 6th or his team because he was 10 at the time. Proclamation against those that doeth innovate. You see the title and you're like, well that that's silly. Why would the king care about

43:43 people innovating? But then you pause for a second. What do innovators do at their core? They question the status quo. They say why are we doing it this way? How might we do it differently? If you are questioning the status quo in 1548, who are you questioning? You are questioning the king or you are questioning God. That's not a good thing. We do not issue proclamations like this, but we still act like they exist inside many of our organizations. We punish people for taking wellthoughtout risk, for trying things, for experimenting. And then individuals, they get scar tissue. They internalize it. They say, "The safest thing for me to do is to not do anything at all."

44:24 That compounds something that we all as humans suffer from known as the status quo bias. All things being equal, we'd like things to remain exactly the same. I said it before, I'll say it again. I love disruption. The first time I got into a robo taxi, my palms got sweaty. I got nervous because I'm a human. The new and unfamiliar still strikes me to my core. So what we need in our organization is we need to make sure that it's clear that it's okay to try. It's okay to be nervous. It's okay if things don't work out. As long as of course we do it in the right way, we do stupid things. Yeah, you should be punished for that. But taking wellthoughtout, intelligent risks. We need to remove the King's Proclamation.

45:05 We need to make sure we don't act like it's still in effect because in far too many organizations, that's what life looks like. Well, Scott, it was such a fabulous time having you on the show. For people who want to learn more about you and what you're doing and your courses, etc. Where's the best place for them to go?

45:24 So, LinkedIn is the social media platform on which I live. So, Scott Anthony Tuck, because there are more than one Scott Anony's out there that will point you to me. And there is a companion website for the book, Epic Disruptions, with an S at the end. There's more than one. Epicdisruptions.com.

45:41 Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the launch of this book. It was so nice to have you,

45:48 John. Thanks for having me and thanks for the great questions.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "The Hidden PATTERN Behind Every Epic Disruption | Scott D. Anthony"?

John Rile (Host), Scott D. Anthony (Guest).

What is "The Hidden PATTERN Behind Every Epic Disruption | Scott D. Anthony" about?

Scott D. Anthony discusses the importance of balancing present realities with long-term vision in leadership, emphasizing that success today is essential for securing future opportunities. He advises leaders to adopt diverse time frames and mental models when making decisions to ensure their efforts are both effective and aligned with their ultimate goals.

What is mentioned in this John R. Miles episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Disruption, Epic Disruptions, John Rile, The Innovator's Dilemma, Artificial Intelligence, Predictably Unpredictable Disruption. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "The Hidden PATTERN Behind Every Epic Disruption | Scott D. Anthony"?

The episode runs 46 min; the transcript is about 8,204 words in 68 timestamped sections.

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