Disruption

Brant Cooper was a vanguard. As one of the originators of the Lean Startup movement, more than 15 years ago, he had a vision he boldly pursued through thought leadership, community engagement, and entrepreneurship. His body of work serves as an atlas for exploring bold ideas. Starting with “ The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development,”  then the NYT bestseller "The Lean Entrepreneur," and most recently, the thought-provoking “Disruption Proof,” his writing is permeated with his values of integrity, candor, and illustrates his belief in the individual.

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Surviving and thriving in the digital world does not mean merely implementing technology. It also requires instilling new mindsets at all levels in the organization. The way people work needs to align with the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of today’s economic activity while solving real-world problems that benefit customers. The path forward is to create RAD organizations: resilient to endless disruptions, aware of changing market conditions, and dynamically adapting to create real value.

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The trap that many corporations fall into is the belief that digital transformation is mostly a technological thing. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as there’s a human side to digital transformation. And while technology is disruptive to the business, it is not disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation is a purposeful re-imagining of how you structure and manage your work. It's recognizing that the real disruptions are external to the company, mostly in the form of pandemics, war, ransomware attacks, supply shocks, energy grid collapses, etc.

So the question becomes: how do you drive disruptive innovation? Start exploring within the core?

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In established businesses, leaders and employees assume the blueprint they use to execute on the business is fixed. But as the last few years demonstrate, little is fixed. Pandemic, war, supply chain issues, ransomware attacks, inflation–it’s crazy out there! All these events ripple across the business landscape, disrupting the markets. The blueprint maybe doesn’t work anymore.

How do you fix that?

The goal of the book Disruption Proof is to help leaders and founders of companies to create what I call RAD companies, which stands for being resilient, aware, and dynamic. RAD requires new behaviors and skills for all, while also establishing new systems, processes, and structure to deal with an increasingly complex and uncertain world.

RAD companies are necessary to survive and thrive in the Digital Age. Many of the trends we see in business–increasing diversity, agile practices, developing empathy, running experiments–are in response to the complexity and uncertainty in our sociopolitical, economic, and working environments.

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Wars, technological advances, the pandemic, social, and political turmoil have led to businesses facing disruption on an ongoing basis. As technology innovation has moved to the edge, technical risk is less problematic than market risk. The risk to business is less “can we build the product” than “should we?” Customer insights represent an important and vastly under-appreciated intellectual capital versus, say, patents. Businesses must be closer to the customer; understand them deeper. They must be able to respond to change. Overall, companies must be nimble and move fast.

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