The new Rules of Disruption

It's not about speed. It's about design.

A few years ago (or maybe already 10–15, time flies), the word "disruption" exploded. It showed up in decks, off-sites, thought leadership posts, investor reports. From taxi drivers to bookstores, from newspapers to hotels, no one was off-limits. Everyone told the same story: "Big old company gets blindsided by tiny startup. Don’t be that company. Move faster."

But here’s the thing: disruption isn’t new. It wasn’t new then, either.

Ford disrupted the horse. Electricity disrupted gaslight. Email disrupted mail. None of this was called disruption. It was called "progress." It happened over decades. The Model T didn’t kill horses in a quarter. Electricity didn’t wipe out gas overnight. Even Amazon took nearly a decade to become dangerous.

Today, disruption doesn’t wait. It compounds. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. By January, it was the fastest-growing consumer app in history. By March, it was being built into Microsoft, Notion, Salesforce, Adobe, and half of your client’s strategy decks. Not in 10 years. Not in one. In one quarter.

And then? Tools like Midjourney, ElevenLabs, and Claude followed with even faster cycles. Shein overran fashion logistics with algorithmic sourcing. Deel disrupted global payroll from nowhere.

So the old lesson was: move faster. But what if that’s the wrong conclusion now?

What if speed isn’t the issue anymore? What if trying to act like a startup is actually distracting us from what really matters? What if chasing speed is how we end up with noise instead of insight?

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Not everyone can change like a startup

Let’s be honest. If you’re a legacy player, you can’t pivot like a startup. You have customers to protect, infrastructure you’ve built over decades, layers of governance, compliance, reputation, and politics. You don’t have the luxury of a clean sheet. You can’t just move fast and break things. But here's the flip side. A startup doesn't have what you have. Global reach. Trusted brand equity. Cash reserves. Deep talent networks. Operational scale.

You don’t need to act like a startup. You need to design like one.

And by design, I don’t mean UI. I mean the underlying architecture of your business: how decisions flow, how fast ideas get tested, how close teams are to outcomes, how easy it is to stop doing what no longer works.

When LEGO faced near-bankruptcy, they didn’t just speed up product launches. They redesigned how innovation worked across teams, how IP flowed from play to film to licensing, and how feedback from kids actually shaped their pipeline. That wasn’t velocity, it was systemic redesign.

A well-designed business doesn’t just scale. It flexes. It senses. It self-corrects.

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Most companies aren’t being outpaced. They’re being out-designed.

Tesla didn’t beat GM because it shipped more cars. It didn’t have to. It redefined what a car is. A computer on wheels. Software-first. Updateable. Data-driven. Integrated.

It wasn’t the speed. It was the architecture. Every industry that says "we’re not digital" needs to rethink. Especially manufacturing, pharma, logistics, chemicals, construction. The walls between physical and digital are gone. You might think you’re safe because you produce real things. But so did Ford. So did Nokia. So did Kodak.

Schneider Electric restructured their entire offer around energy data. Microsoft rebuilt itself around cloud and collaboration. Adobe moved from product sales to subscriptions and grew stronger. Legacy doesn't mean immobile. It means choosing carefully.

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So what does that mean? For business and for consultants?

If disruption is faster than ever, but acting like a startup is a fantasy, what do we do? We stop copying the surface of speed. We stop mistaking noise for momentum.

And we start by asking ourselves: what would we redesign if we weren’t protecting anything? Where have we lost clarity in the name of legacy? What system are we maintaining, not because it works, but because we’re too embedded to stop until someone else does it for us?

That’s where the work starts. It’s the meeting where no one kills the outdated product because it’s still profitable, just barely. Or the dashboard everyone checks, but no one trusts. These are design failures, not speed problems. And ask the harder question. What parts of our business, if we didn’t already have them, would we choose to build again today?

And maybe even harder. What are we pretending still works just because it used to?

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Final reflection

Disruption used to be about speed. Today it’s about design. The winners won’t be the ones who copy startup behavior. They’ll be the ones who redesign their business models to move with the world, without losing their depth.

So what are the new rules of disruption?

1. Don’t copy speed, but design for resilience. Startups move fast because they must. Legacy players win when they build architectures that flex, sense, and self-correct.

2. Noise is not momentum. Dashboards, launches, or endless “initiatives” don’t matter if they don’t change outcomes. Clarity beats activity.

3. Legacy is not weakness, just use it better. Scale, brand, cash, and trust are massive assets. Stop imitating startups and start designing systems that only you can.

4. Disruption is a design failure, not a speed failure. If your business is outpaced, it’s because it’s mis-designed, not too slow.

Not every company needs to move faster. But every company needs to move on purpose. Because the game isn’t speed anymore. It’s staying meaningful.