“How did you go bankrupt?” asks one character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.” (via Paul Nunes, in “Big Bang Disruption”) That sentence explains so many collapses in life: waistlines, empires, reputations. One biscuit at a time. One skipped workout. One more justification. I […]

“The Map is not the Territory” — Alfred Korzybski For generations, the German village of Mödlareuth lived as one. A narrow brook — the Tannbach — trickled through its centre, technically dividing Bavaria from Thuringia. But for the people who called it home, it was simply a stream. They crossed it daily to attend school, share meals, marry neighbours, and bury their

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw Imagine you’ve washed ashore on a distant, unknown island. You’re immediately faced with a local tribe whose intentions are unclear. Your next move could be the

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” — Thomas Carlyle In the early 1900s, a German schoolteacher named Wilhelm von Osten toured Europe with his amazing horse, Clever Hans. Hans could apparently solve math problems and even read German, tapping out answers with his hoof to the delight of crowds. A government

“We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.” — Seneca “Why did you say ‘brother’ to people who aren’t your brother?” [Referring to how I addressed people at The Reinvention Summit]. My son’s breakfast-time question hung in the air, innocent yet profound. How could I explain this ingrained

“You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.” — Maxwell Maltz “The external world is an echo of your internal world.” — Tom Asacker Organizations, like individuals, are guided by self-image. They act not based on external reality, but on what they believe themselves to be. If a company sees itself as an industrial manufacturer, it

“If you give a ton of gold to an ant, it will only crush the ant.” — Sadhguru The fastest route to innovation is not through resourcing. You can’t throw money, people, and infrastructure at a problem and expect it to disappear. Yet, that’s exactly what many organisations do. Like a child handed every toy at once,

“In most companies there would be months, perhaps years, of savage debate… The spectre of cannibalisation would roam the hallways, striking fear into fainthearted executives.” — Gary Hamel [TL;DR Some companies struggle to kill off profitable but customer-hostile revenue streams, fearing short-term losses. But clinging to a fading model often proves more costly than the pivot itself. From

“If we only defend, we lose the war.” — Kambei Shimada, Seven Samurai (1954) I was incredibly lucky to play for two of the best attacking rugby teams in the world — Toulouse and Leinster. Toulouse, in particular, had a deep-rooted culture of attacking rugby, a philosophy that didn’t rely on grinding out wins through defense alone. Instead, the club

Mark Twain is credited with the quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” I find this quote incredibly relevant as we dive deep into the work of thought leaders who have studied the fate of companies and industries for decades. It is a privilege to explore the research of Michael Tushman, Charles O’Reilly,