 everyone. Let's talk about growth. Let's talk about, actually let's make sure we have the slides first. Before we do that, can we make do a quick slide check? Oh, there we go. All right, here we go. Let's talk about growth. Let's talk about your growth. Let's talk about the growth of your team, your organization, and the one thing you all have in common, or they all have in common, is you. The fundamental unit of growth in any organization is it's the individual. We know this to be true. We follow a pattern. We start at the low end, grasping for knowledge that will allow us to accelerate. We then move to the sweet spot. We find our groove, and when we're almost at the point where we capitulate, we decide that we have to jump. That's what growth looks like. Now I'd like to share with you a little bit of my personal story, and it begins with a question, and the question is, how is it possible that a music major like me, I played piano in college, ends up speaking to Bright Line's strategy at work conference? How is that possible? The answer is, you disrupt yourself. When I graduated from college, my husband and I, we moved here to New York, so he could pursue his PhD at Columbia, just up the street. I can still feel the terror that I felt as we drove across the George Washington Bridge here into Manhattan. For the first week, I wouldn't go anywhere by myself, but we needed to eat, so I finally had to leave our 19th floor apartment and get a job. Because I had never set foot in a business course, I had zero connections, clearly very little confidence, and at the risk of stating what is probably quite obvious to most of you, I am a woman. My first job was as a secretary to a stockbroker, Smith Barney, 1345 Avenue of the Americas, just a few blocks away from here. Across to my desk, there was this bullpen of young male stockbrokers, aspiring masters of the universe. This was the era of Liar's poker and bonfire, the vanity, so the pressure to open accounts was intense. They'd say things like, Throw down your pompoms and get in the game. At first, I was a little offended. I was a cheerleader in high school. But after listening to this over and again and thinking, I'm going to be working at least five years, why would I make X1 10X as a possibility? And I'm just as smart as these guys. It was time to throw down my pompoms. I wouldn't have known to call it this then, but that was the beginning of me disrupting myself. Started taking business courses at night, accounting, economics, finance. And then because I had a boss who believed in me, like this panel was just talking about, who was willing to give me this opportunity to learn, I was able to become an investment banker. And for those of you in financial services, you know that divide between secretary and banker is very, very wide. Then I moved into equity research. We had two children, a very big disruption. I then left Wall Street to become an entrepreneur and then co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School. And now several more disruptions later, I become an author and a researcher and codified a framework of personal disruption that I teach to organizations, to high growth organizations around the world. But that was the beginning. And that's my message to you today. Disrupt yourself. Disrupt yourself over and over and over again. Now, what do I mean when I say disruptive innovation? It's a term we hear a lot. So what do I mean when I say it? Well, at its simplest, it is a silly little thing that takes over the world. Like the telephone did too, and you can probably do this with me, did to the telegraph, like the automobile did to the horse and buggy. More recently, we've seen Netflix disrupt blockbuster and Uber taxis. Disruptive innovation follows a framework. The disruptor secures a foothold at the low end of the market. Initially, its products are inferior. Its position is weak. Think about Netflix in the 90s. Blockbuster, they could have crushed them like a cockroach, but they didn't. Market leaders rarely bother. It's just a silly little thing. Nothing to worry about. No big deal. Let's go after bigger, faster, better. The bad news, or the good, depending on your point of view, is that once a disruptor gains a foothold, it too is motivated by bigger, better. And so it goes. Personal disruption is how you take all of these ideas and make them meaningful to you. And that was my first big aha in working with Clayton, is that this theory of disruption, it's not just about products, it's also about people. You start at the bottom of the ladder, you climb to the top, and then you jump to the bottom of a new ladder, like the children's game shoots and ladders. The big difference with personal disruption is that your Netflix and your blockbuster, your Uber and your cabs, you're the silly little thing. And you take over the world because you are disrupting you. Lady Gaga, she's a master of personal disruption. In 2008, she goes straight to the top of the charts. And what does she do for an encore? She jumps to the bottom of a new chart, one that could have put off her fan base. So what does she do? First, she collaborates with Tony Bennett on a jazz album. She does a sound of music tribute, Lady Gaga at the Oscars. And then she produces a country album. But the jumps, they paid off. Her performance at the Super Bowl in 2017 had the largest music audience ever. And now a star is born. That's personal disruption. It's a cycle of learn, leap and repeat. This now is where the S curve comes in. It was popularized by Ian Rogers in 1962. And we used it at the disruptive innovation fund to help us gauge how quickly an innovation would be adopted. At the base of the S, the growth is slow until a tipping point is reached at the knee of the curve, then you move into hypergrowth. And then at saturation, the growth, it tapers off. As we invested, I had another big insight. So the first one was a disruption is not just about products. Well, the second insight was that this S curve could also help us understand how we learn how we grow. S curve math tells us that every time you start something new, you start a new project, you start a new role. You're at the bottom. Growth will be slow. It will feel like a slog. And this helps you avoid discouragement. But as you put in the effort, you accelerate into competence with this comes confidence and engagement. This is the exciting part of the curve where all your neurons are firing. And as you approach mastery, things will be easy. But because you're no longer learning, you're no longer getting the dopamine that comes with learning, you can start to get bored. You've learned. Now it's time to leap. It's right about here that a lot of senior executives like you say to me, stop, stop, stop. I don't want to hear anymore. I don't want my people near you. I don't want them to read your books. I don't want them to listen to your podcast because if they do, they're all going to leave, which of course, this is the point. Because high growth organizations need must have high growth individuals, people who can learn, leap and repeat. This is a mechanism by which you become a high growth individual, not so your people leave, but they stay and they grow. And they take you and your organization where you want to go. Let me tell you two quick stories around this. Story number one, imagine you're a VP and some of you probably this has been you at some point in your career. You're a VP, one of 25 at a company of 6,000 people. You have a billion dollar line of business and about a thousand total reports. That's what the top of the S curve looked like for Dan Shapiro at LinkedIn. He studied math and statistics in college. After college, he did consulting, went to Bain and then he landed at LinkedIn in operations in 2008. By 2010, he was at the top of his S curve. So he jumped to the bottom of a new S curve in sales. By 2013, he's again at the top of his S curve. When he started, it was a $10 million business now. It's a billion dollar business. So yes, it's a rocket ship. And he had eight reports and now he has a thousand reports. So he has a meeting with the CEO and he thinks this is going to be a victory lap. And so during this meeting, he shares with the CEO some day he wants to be a tech CEO himself. The CEO says to him, if that's your dream, you're in the wrong job. Tech CEOs build product and you're in sales. You can't get there from here. Oh, well, after about a frustration, and I suspect many people would have jumped to a new S curve inside of a new S curve of a company, he comes back and he says, okay, let's build great product. What? You want to go from the top of the S curve, a billion dollar line of business, a thousand total reports to an individual contributor, four engineers and no guarantees based on the data. And LinkedIn has a lot of data. People do not move from sales to product. But Dan did. He did. He says there were parts he was terrible at. He was on the launch point of that curve. But there were parts he was amazing at. And now six years later after climbing that product curve, he jumped to the bottom of a new curve or back into sales, but responsible for sales globally, all $5 billion of it. It's impressive, isn't it? But you know what's even more impressive to me is that it even happened. Because there was a cost. There was a cost to Dan to do this. There was a cost to Dan's family. Honey, I shrunk my role today. There was a cost to his boss. There were the cost to his boss's boss. But this step back, this decision to become a silly little thing turned out to be a slingshot for Dan and for LinkedIn. If you want to go up, you disrupt story number two. Now, this story is a bit more personal because after all we are talking about personal disruption, so it felt fitting. When I was in college, I met this young man. I liked him. I liked him a lot. But I was afraid. My parents' marriage had not been good. They'd gotten pregnant. They'd gotten married. They'd never really loved each other. My dad slept around a lot and oh, by the way, he embezzled money. Then there was the real fear that in becoming a wife and a mother, I would lose my identity. So marrying this man was going to require that I change my point of view. It was going to require that I break my addiction to being right because we're all addicted to being right. It was going to require that I disrupt my belief about something that wasn't necessarily true. My belief that my marriage would be just like my parents' marriage. And so what I did, what any self-respecting person would do in this situation when I thought everybody else should change and I shouldn't, I sabotaged the relationship. Our courtship was a misery. But for the grace of God, my husband, he wouldn't have married me. Sometimes we need help to disrupt. Thankfully, my husband saw me for who I could be. How could I have known that in marrying this man, this would be the best decision that I had ever made. How could I know that not only in becoming a mother, I would not only not lose myself, I would become more myself than ever. The most important and the hardest disrupting you will ever do is to disrupt those beliefs that you hold that aren't true. The most important and hardest disrupting you will ever do is to step back from who you are to slingshot into who you can be. No one tells you. The textbooks on disruption do not tell you that disruption is by definition, it's scary and it's lonely. Whenever you leave, you're comfortable perch of doing things the way you've always done them. There is this moment of freefall, a loss of identity. The PE, the puke to excitement ratio, is so uncomfortably high you feel like you're on a thrill ride to zero. It doesn't mean you shouldn't disrupt. It just means if you're scared and lonely, you're on the right track. In fact, if you have a feeling in the deepest part of yourself that you need to try something new and you don't, you will die inside a little. That's why it's called a dilemma. Whether you innovate or not, whether you jump or not, there's risk. So what's your disruptive path? We give a lot of airtime to building and buying disruptive companies, we should. But innovation, ultimately, it begins on the inside. If you want to be an agent of disruption, first become its subject. You start at the low end of the S curve, you shift into gear to scale and when you're learning peaks, you do what all great disruptors do. You walk straight into your dilemma and you leap to a new curve because companies can't disrupt. Your company cannot disrupt unless you do. Do I dare? Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe? Do you? Thank you.