Disrupt Yourself First

My teammates from around the world and I had our annual meeting in Kuala Lumpur today. We celebrated our achievements last year and discussed our plans for the coming year. We spent some time discussing the exciting future that awaits us as an organization and what we need to do to prepare for the opportunities the markets will throw up. 

During the discussions, the distracting memory of a quote kept flashing in my mind. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall it precisely. So, after returning home, to relieve myself of the gnawing feeling of remembering something but not exactly, I googled it and found it in a Blogpost by Tanmay Vora.

The quote by Whitney Johnson says: 

“Not just products, services, and companies, the fundamental unit of disruption is an individual.”

This is so true. 

If we want to disrupt the market, we must first disrupt our way of thinking and doing things.

Any transformation or change occurs when we disrupt ourselves by taking risks, doing things we’ve never done before, learning from our experiences, connecting the dots, thinking about the intersections between our present state and future possibilities, and preparing ourselves to seize the opportunities these intersections offer.