 Hello, and welcome to Brightline's webinar. You've been disrupted three ways to empower your people to transform. My name is Emile Anderson, and with me, I have Yamnit Gakana from Brightline Initiative. And we will be the moderators and tech support for this webinar. Whitney Johnson is the CEO of WeWLJ Advisors and ranked as the top business thinker by Thinkers 50. She's an expert in the field of innovation and disruption and author of the best-selling books, build an A team, play to their strengths and leave them up the learning curve and disrupt yourself, putting the power of disruptive innovation at work. So without further ado, I would like to hand over the word to Whitney. Enjoy the webinar. Thank you, Emile. And it is a pleasure to be with all of you today. And I have to just say, I'm laughing like right out of the gate because we've been disrupted in that for whatever reason, my webcam is not interfacing with O2 webinar. So I can't see you and you can't see me. If you want, you can Google and see what I look like. So you can imagine me talking to you as we're going through this. But I think it's actually quite fitting that this is not working, that we can't see each other. It's been, as we all know, a very difficult and challenging couple of months, very difficult and challenging in lots of different ways for each and every individual. And so it makes it feel to me like a trip that I took a few months ago back in November was a very, very long time ago. I was speaking in Peru, had the opportunity to go there. And if you go to Peru, my daughter was taking a gap year. She went with me. And if you're in Peru, of course you have to go to Machu Picchu. And those of you who are familiar with Machu Picchu, there's this village that you can walk in. But then there's also, you can also climb the Machu Picchu mountain. And that is exactly what we did. It was a grueling several hours. It took us about two hours to get to the top. And I knew that I was gonna, my legs were going to be sore and wobbly once we got there. But what, and so that was all expected. But what was not expected that is that as we got close to the top, the paths got very, very narrow. So narrow that they were about three or four feet wide. And importantly, there were no guardrails, there were no chains, there were no barriers, there were no ropes, there was nothing. So if we had slipped in any way, we could have plunged to our death. I am not usually afraid of heights, but in that moment my fear took over. And so I did what any respectable person I think would do in that situation, at least what I did is I tried, I went into survival mode and I lowered my center of gravity. I started to cling to the side of the mountain. I stopped looking out at the view and just said, how do I make sure that I can move along this as safely as possible in order to not fall off the cliff? Well, as you can imagine, we made it to the top and on the way down, my daughter took this picture and we're hiking down and someone stops our guide and says to our guide, so is it a problem? Is it difficult to get to the top of the mountain? And he says to them in Spanish, nunca es problema siempre es aprendizaje, which loosely translated means it's never a problem, you're always learning. But that is not how it feels right now, is it? Never a problem, we're always learning. Just a few weeks ago, the Boston Globe, a newspaper in the United States, did a survey and asked people how they're feeling. Well, 25% of the respondents said I have never been more scared in my life. So the question is, is okay, if we're more scared than we've ever been in our life, how do we say it's never a problem we're always learning? Well, that is what we're going to talk about today. I would assert that the only way that we can conquer this mountain that we are currently trying to climb is to conquer ourselves. And that's really the topic of our conversation, this idea that the fundamental unit of growth, the fundamental unit of change in any organization is the individual. We follow a pattern, we start at the bottom, we're trying to figure out how things are gonna look, grasping for knowledge to accelerate. We move into the sweet spot, we're in the groove, and then we get to the top and we feel like we've got things figured out but worried that we're gonna capitulate. And so we jump to the bottom of a new learning curve. This is how we grow. The thing that's interesting right now though is that none of us have to make the decision about whether we're going to jump or not we've all been pushed. So what do we do? What does that look like? Well, what we're gonna talk about, what you're gonna learn now that we've been disrupted, we're gonna talk about the fact that the only truly effective way for you to manage through disruption is to disrupt yourself. The only way to manage through disruption is to disrupt yourself. Now, before we go any further and I talk to you about this, I wanna just tell you a little bit of my own story so that you have some context for why these ideas are so interesting and important to me. And it starts with a question. And the question is, how is it possible that a music major like me, so I played the piano in college, ends up speaking to a group of leaders across the globe at a bright line webinar? How is that possible? Well, the answer is, and you've probably figured it out already, is that you disrupt yourself. When I graduated from college, my husband and I, we moved to New York, so he could get his PhD at Columbia University. And I would never have gone to New York on my own. I can still feel the terror that I felt as we drove across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. And for the first several weeks, I wouldn't go anywhere by myself. But we needed to eat, food is good. So I had to eventually leave our 19th floor apartment and go out and get a job. Because I had never set foot in a business course because I majored in music, because I didn't know anybody in New York. I grew up in a different part of the United States. I had very little confidence. And at the risk of stating what you're probably discovering is fairly obvious. I am a female. My first job was as a secretary to a stockbroker. Across from my desk, there was this bullpen of young male stockbrokers all aspiring to be masters of the universe if they can only get people to open up an account. So they would say things like, throw down your pom-poms and get in the game. And at first I was a little offended because I had been a cheerleader in high school. But after hearing them say this over and over and over again, I realized it was time for me to throw down my pom-poms. I wouldn't have known to call it this then, but that was the beginning of me disrupting myself. And that's my message to you today is to disrupt yourself over and over and over again. That is how you grow and that is how you manage through disruption. Now, very quickly, what do I mean when I say disruptive innovation? It's a term we hear a lot. Well, at its simplest, it's a silly little thing that takes over the world, like the telephone did to the telegraph, the automobile did to the horse and buggy. More recently, we've seen Netflix disrupt blockbuster, Uber and Lyft are disrupting cabs. Personal disruption, and that's what we're gonna talk about today, is how you take all of these ideas and you make them meaningful, you make them relevant to you. And that was my first big insight in working with Clayton Christensen at the Harper Business School as we co-founded our Disruptive Innovation Fund is that this theory of disruption, it isn't just about products, it's also about people. You start at the bottom of a ladder, you climb to the top and then you jump to the bottom of a new ladder. Think about your lives, you've already, you've disrupted a lot. You did this in secondary school, you started at the bottom, you were a freshman and then you get to the top and then you jumped to the bottom of a new one and you're a college and then your first job and your second job, you start at the bottom, you climb to the top and then you jump. 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. That is personal disruption. It's a cycle where you learn, you leap and then you repeat. This is where the S-curve comes in. Now the S-curve, you may be familiar with this, it was popularized by Am Rogers in 1962 and it was used or we used it at our Disruptive Innovation Fund to help us figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopted. Right now we're using it to track the spread of COVID-19 and what it looks like is that the base of that S growth is slow until you reach a tipping point at which point you enter into hypergrowth and then you, once you get to the top of the curve, you reach saturation. So that's what it looks like and we're using it for investing. The second big insight though that I had was that disruption is not just about products, it's about people. The next big insight was that this S-curve that we were using for investing could also help us understand how we learn. It helps us understand how we grow. Whenever we start something new and we're all starting something new right now, we are at the bottom of the S. It can be growth is going to feel like a slog. It seemed like a good idea, but now we're not so sure and so this helps us avoid discouragement and then you accelerate into confidence where this comes confidence and engagement and as you approach mastery, things will be easy but because you're no longer learning, you can get bored. So where are you on your current S-curve? So there's one big S-curve that we're all on the launch point but in your current role, in your current job, where are you on the S-curve? Are you at the base of that S-curve? Where, like I said, you thought it was a good idea to be here but now you're not so sure. There's days where you come home from work or well, you don't come home because you're always at home but there are days where you're saying, I don't feel like I know what I'm doing. It feels kind of overwhelming and it takes a lot of time to feel like anything's happening. Growth seems slow. Well, that when you know that, when you know that that's what the S-curve looks like, it's gonna help you avoid discouragement. Are you in the sweet spot? Where it's hard but it's not too hard. It's easy but it's not too easy. You're exhilarating. You feel like you're exactly where you're supposed to be. This is the right role, the right job, the right opportunity for you right now. This is the sweet spot of the S-curve. Or are you at the height of the S-curve where you thought this was the right role? It did feel really good and I was learning a lot but my growth has started to slow down. I'm starting to feel kind of bored. I'm no longer enjoying the feel good effects that come with learning. And so now I've got this dilemma. Do I jump or don't I jump? That's what personal disruption looks like is that dilemma. I've learned now it's time for me to leap and repeat. So let's chat about this for just a second. In your current role, where are you on the S-curve of learning? Are you at the launch point? Are you at the sweet spot? Are you at the high end of the S-curve? And Emil, I'm gonna let you manage the chat and just see what you're seeing and what's coming in and share it with everybody so we can sort of see where people are. Launch point, sweet spot or high end of the S-curve? Absolutely, let's see. So as mentioned before, you guys can insert your answer in the question functionality here on GoToWebinar for now. And as you're doing that and you might not be ready to sort of shout it out to the world, one of the things you're gonna discover as you may have discovered already as you're thinking through this is that you can be on a lot of different S-curves at once. So you think about your life as an S-curve and I want you to all picture me because I'm drawing this with my hands. Your life as an S-curve, your career as an S-curve, then you can have a job within, if you're a company for 15 years, you might have different S-curves. You as a partner, as a parent, that's an S-curve and then roles and projects can be S-curves. So it's this fractal where there's S-curves within S-curves. The thing I want you to be thinking about right now is where are you on your current S-curve of learning? All right, so, Emil, if there aren't any comments, I will proceed. Yeah, no, we have a few comments. I think it's pretty much an equal distribution between all the three different options, launch point, sweet point and yeah. Wonderful, okay. So we've got a number of you who are in this sweet spot, a number of you in the engagement and mastery. One of the things I will tell you just very quickly what we've found or are finding in our research is that if you're trying to optimize a team or even in an organization to be able to grow most quickly, we typically want this distribution of a bell curve where you've got about 70% of your people on the engagement part of the curve, 15% of your people who are in the inexperienced part of the curve and then 15% of your people at the high end of the S-curve. So that's how we grow. You learn, leap and repeat and you disrupt yourself. If you wanna go up, you disrupt. In saying that, I want to be clear. I don't want to minimize what is happening right now. There, a lot of the disruptions are taking place or as I said at the very beginning, it's very challenging, it's very difficult for many, many people, pretty much actually for everybody but for very different reasons. What we also know though is history has taught us that we've been disrupted over and over again, we're incredibly resilient and as a consequence of those disruptions, we have more resources than ever before. Even 10 years ago, think about it, we would not be able to be having the conversation that we are having right now. So I love this quote, it's from Thomas Trower of about 120 years ago. He said, life ultimately consists in circulation, whether within the physical body of the individual or on the scale of the entire solar system. Circulation means a continual flowing around where you're learning and you're leaping and repeating. So that's the framework at a high level. What does this now look like? And we've talked about, we've been disrupted, we're on a brand new S-curve. What are some tips, what are some suggestions for you to manage through this disruption? Well, in our research, we've identified seven accelerants that allow you to move along this S-curve systematically and effectively. We'll take each of them in turn, there are seven of them. I'm gonna touch on all of them lightly. I'll talk about three in particular that I think are especially relevant in the moment that we're in. So the first is to take the right kinds of risks. Two kinds of risks I'll mention, the first is competitive risk. Competitive risk is there's a big opportunity, projections to prove it. Now you just have to figure out if you can compete, you can win. Market risk is you don't know if there's an opportunity, but if there is an opportunity, then there's no competition. You're used to thinking about this in the context of your company, your organization, but this also applies to you as an individual. Let me give you a quick example of what that can look like. First of all, you can picture or you can imagine it by thinking, well, market risk is I don't know if there's an opportunity, meaning I'm gonna play where no one else is playing. And if it works out, if it turns out that there is a market, then there's not gonna be any competition. And we know from the theory of disruptive innovation and innovators dilemma written by Clayton Christensen is that when you play where no one else is playing, when you take on market versus competitive risk, your odds of success are six times higher and your revenue opportunity is 20 times greater. Just a very simple example of this, if any of you follow basketball, you're familiar with Steph Curry, one of the things that he has made a career out of taking market risk. Well, how will you say? How will you might be asking? Well, he figured out how to perfect the three-point shot. So the three-point shot, historically no one figured out how to defend against a three-point shot because no one could make those three-point shots. The percentages were so low it wasn't worth doing it. Competitive risk, there wasn't any competitive risk. So Steph Curry says, I'm gonna play where no one else is playing. I'm gonna take on market risk. And by doing that, by perfecting that, instead of being in the crowded key under the basket, that competitive risk, he took on market risk. And as you know, he is a superstar. Now, if you wanna drill down on this idea for you individually on taking on the right risks, on taking on market risk, we've got a 30-minute episode that goes into this in great detail. The thing that I want you to remember about taking on market risk is right now, there are so many opportunities to play where no one else is playing. More than is typical. And so this is a great chance for you to play where no one else is playing, to take on market risk. And when you do your odds of success are going to be six times higher. So that's the first thing that I really want you to be thinking about is this idea of how do I create versus compete? Because we know that amateurs compete and professionals create. Now, once you take on that market risk, you walk through the door of your market opportunity by playing to your distinctive strengths. And this is the second accelerant or guardrail, because right now we kind of need guardrails like me up at the top of that mountain. This is the second one. And a distinctive strength is something you do well that other people don't, like the koala. That cuddly little animal, it sleeps 20 hours a day. So you're like, well, if I sleep 20 hours a day, how am I going to be able to survive? Well, it survives because it eats something, no other animal, pretty much, no human can eat. It eats eucalyptus leaves, which are poisonous. So this is its distinctive strength. What's interesting about our strengths is that we don't actually know what they are. I'll tell you why in just a minute. Before I do that, I'm going to give you a clue to figure out what they are. And that is to start paying attention to compliments. You've got compliments. People give you compliments pretty frequently, actually, but you dismiss them. You say, oh, no, that, no, no, no, that was nothing. No, that nothing is something that you do uniquely well. It's likely your superpower, you need to pay attention to it because if you'll pay attention to it, you'll be able to disrupt yourself and therefore manage through disruption. The thing about your strengths is because they're so reflexive, they're so easy for you, you don't really notice them. And even if you do notice them, you don't value them. Now, what's unusual about the era that we're living in right now is that because we're kind of in a bind, we're feeling like we don't quite know what to do and we're in that difficult place. Our strengths that we sometimes ignore start to come out to play because we refer to the default and the default are our strengths. And so just kind of pay attention, peek to the right and the left and you'll see your strengths coming out and then use them deliberately. So people tend to undervalue what they are and overvalue what they are not. If you want to manage through disruption, you need to start valuing what you are. And when you value what you are, you feel strong because that's a strength and then you're willing to play where no one else is playing and then you're willing to eat where no one else is eating and you can be the only and you can let this eater in town. So you're playing where no one else is playing, you're playing to your distinctive strengths and now you're like, okay, I've got this momentum, I'm moving up the S curve. Well, not right now, it feels like you don't have momentum. It feels like you've got a lot of constraints, those things that are stopping you from moving up the S curve, but the reality is that's exactly what you need. Oops, podcasts on this as well. I think it's episode 120 if you want to go into strengths. All right, so now let's go to constraints. So what's interesting is we know it's a lot of physics that you need something to bump up against. You need to have friction if you're going to make progress. And I'm gonna give you a couple of quick examples I want you to think about. Right now you're probably thinking I don't have enough of fill in the blank. I don't know what it is, but I can guarantee that you're thinking I don't have enough of something. So here's how I want you to start thinking about reframing this. If you've ever seen this film, you know that there are some iconic scenes. Well, what's interesting about these very famous scenes that they came about because of constraints. So Steven Spielberg, he's making this movie, he doesn't have enough money, he's completely over budget, he's completely out of time because the mechanical shark that he wants to use, it doesn't work. So he finally has to shoot all the scenes from the shark's point of view and let the music and our imagination do the rest. Without those constraints, it could have been sort of a meh movie, but with them it's become a classic. So be thinking about that. With those constraints, it's become a classic. Example number two, there was a post-mortem of 200 failed startups, they divided them into funded startups and unfunded startups. So you're thinking, all right, well, what happened? Well, the number one reason that the funded startups went out of business, they ran out of cash, they had enough money and they ran out of cash. It was only the number 10 reason for the unfunded startups. Example number three, skateboarders, they are some of the quickest learners in the world because they receive incredibly fast and useful feedback. Every action, every move has an immediate consequence. So the question is, skateboarders, Spielberg startups successful in spite of or because of their constraints. One other quick piece of research on this, we just interviewed Kelly Goldsmith, she's a professor at Vanderbilt University for our podcast. One of the things she found is that when people are in a constrained situation, when they're feeling like they're scarcity, sometimes they engage in behavior, compensatory behavior, but sometimes they go into problem-solving mode. They think more abstractly, how am I going to figure this out? And we right now with the constraints that we have, have an opportunity to say, what, how do I sort of go at a 10,000 foot level and think about things differently? I love this quote from Clayton Christensen, my mentor. He said, he said this about the great recession, but I think it's also true now. He said that it would have an unmitigated positive impact on innovation because when the tension is greatest and resources are limited, people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way that they do business. Did you know that 51%, this isn't now, but a few years ago, according to the Kaufman Foundation, 51% of all the Fortune 500 companies were started during a recession or a bear market or both. 41% of all of the major companies, and I can't remember the actual index right now, but 41% of them were started by people who were immigrants to the United States, not native-born Americans. And do you know why that is? At least that's why I think it is, is because as an immigrant moving to another country, you have learned to deal with constraints. You have learned to figure out how to do something with nothing. For a disruptor, a constraint is not a check on absolute freedom. It is a tool of creation. So the thing that I want you to be thinking about as you're, we've all been disrupted, how are you gonna use what you think you don't have enough of in order to create something, to take on market risk, to play where no one else is playing, leveraging your strengths? So that's guardrail slash accelerant number three. Let's go to number four, but before we do that, if you wanna ask questions during the Q&A, think about what's something that you're curious about at this point, and what about this information to you is, what about this information thus far is useful to you? And the reason that I'm asking that question is that when we start thinking about what's useful, our brain basically tags it, puts a post-it note on that information. And when you put a post, a mental post-it note on that information, then your brain starts thinking, okay, so what can I do with this? It moves in a problem solving mode. So instead of it just being information coming in, it starts to be something you can act on, and learn, and therefore move up your current S-curve. Okay, so let's continue. Number four is battle entitlement. And what do I mean when I say this? It means battling the belief that we think that we're either better or worse than someone else. It's believing that all of us are truly created equal with all the same opportunity to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's what I mean by battling entitlement. And the reason that we need to battle our sense of entitlement is that when we believe that we're better than other people or even worse than other people, we're competing with them as opposed to being taking on market risk and creating. So we need to battle our entitlement if we wanna climb the curve. So what are some ways that we battle it? Well, there are three antidotes that I'm gonna share. I'm putting out my fingers, three, count of three, everyone. So the first one, oh, sorry, before I get there, research says this is really interesting. The more successful we are, the more we think we deserve our success. Isn't that interesting? So sometimes I'll have people say to me, well, I've worked really hard, I've earned everything I have, but we know from the research that the more successful we are, the more we start to believe, start to believe our own press clippings, we deserve our success. Okay, now let's go to the antidotes. First off is this idea of people, not objects. So what do I mean when that happens? Well, let's say right now you have a person who's working for you and they're not quite getting everything done and you're like, what is their problem? They're not delivering what way I need them to deliver. That's making them an object. Instead of asking yourself, huh, maybe I should figure out what's going on. Just the other day I was talking to someone and he was saying they had a person on their team. They were doing all their work on a bar stool at their kitchen counter for 12 hours a day, not optimal. In that moment, the person becomes not an object, but a person, or maybe you've got a manager and you're like, hey, manager, you're not paying attention to me. I need your attention, not recognizing that they've got four children at home, trying to homeschool, single parent, trying to manage all of that and saying in that moment you move when you look at that, oh, they're not an object, supporting actor in my hero of the story play, but they are a person. Another way you could think about that is if you're out and about, instead of social distancing, because it's safe for you to do it, are we being entitled? There are lots of different ways we can do it, but what we want to think about is how am I in this moment right now treating the person that I'm interacting with as a person, not an object. Super important, super, super valuable. And again, when we do that, we're creating, we're not competing. Second thing is, and this is built on the work of Tasha Urik, is to ask what not why questions. If I truly believe that we are all equal, then I'm not gonna ask questions like why did this happen to me? If I believe that, it's why wouldn't this happen to me? And besides those why questions, they make us a victim and they don't serve us. So it's much better for us to ask, well, so what am I gonna do now? And what meaning do I want to make of this? Because it's those questions, though what meaning do I wanna make of this? What do I want to do that is the stuff of personal disruption? This is how we transform. Third antidote is gratitude. I love this quote from Eric Hoffer, is written during the Great Depression, almost 100 years ago. He said, the hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. And I wanna tell you a personal story around this because I think it's really important and powerful. So 2012 came around, the concept's powerful. I don't know if you'll think my story's powerful, but the concept of gratitude is powerful. So here's the story. It's 2012, it was a bad year. So work was really bad, really tough. Financially, things were really tough. We were like on the brink of bankruptcy. My younger brother commits suicide and my husband is diagnosed with cancer. My husband's okay, just so you know. So it's bad, it's really bad. And so I had to ask myself, I had to figure out, well, what am I gonna do? Cause part of me was just like angry, like this isn't fair. Why did this happen to me? And I had in that year, I had in that moment, I had always heard the expression, you get what you get, you don't throw a fit. But I realized that in that moment, I needed to be grateful, not because it was the right thing to do. I realized that I could be bitter about what was happening or I could be grateful. And if I were bitter, it was gonna destroy me. That the only way through, again, the only way to manage your disruption is to disrupt yourself. The only way for me to manage through this was to be grateful. It was the only way. So I want you to think about what you're grateful for. And I also want you to think about what in your life to date has prepared you to manage to this disruption? Cause guaranteed, every single one of you has had something really hard happen and it's prepared you to manage to what we're doing right now. It's given you a muscle, it's given you a skill set. An important skill set, an important muscle is for us to learn how to be grateful. Okay, next one. This is the next long one and then we're gonna kind of shoot and race to the end and we're gonna open up to Q and A. Okay, so step back to grow. So you crouch before you jump, you bring your fist back to punch, personal disruption involves moving sideways, it involves moving backwards, it involves moving down, two outside observers, when you make the choice to do it, it frequently looks like this, but sideways and backwards frequently can turn into a slingshot. Now let me tell you a couple of stories or couple of stories, couple of examples for you to think about this step back in order to grow. The first one is a friend of mine named Bala Afshar. In this instance, he was pushed and a lot of us are being pushed right now. So I'm gonna tell you the story cause I want you to think about how am I being pushed back and what am I gonna do with this? So Bala's working as a software engineer at a company called Enterosys and testing the quality of software sort of day in and out, testing, testing, testing. He gets a new boss, the new CTO and his boss says to him, all right, Bala, you know what? Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take away a lot of your engineering responsibilities. That sounds like a step back to me and I'm also gonna have you move into customer service or customer support at a lot of companies. And that feels like a step back to a lot of people. His boss says to him, most customers, they don't really care about features. They don't really care about pricing, what they care about support. And I know you don't want me to do this, but this is going to make the difference. It's gonna be a career changer for you or a career maker for you. So Bala takes on the role because that's who Bala is. Over the next couple of years, he ends up managing seven call centers, has a P&L of $200 million on his boss now, who was a CTO, now becomes a CEO. And he comes to Bala and he says, you know what? We need a new chief marketing officer. And it turns out you not only know the software, but you're really good at being customer facing. So we're gonna make you the chief marketing officer step back to slingshot forward. Goes on to be really successful. Today, he is the chief digital evangelist at salesforce.com. He says, had his boss not required him to take that step back, he would be still testing software. Right now, all of us have been forced to take a step back. What are we gonna do to help us slingshot forward? Well, one thing that's gonna help us do that is to take time to reflect. We spend a lot of time on Zoom every single day. One of the most important things that we can do is to Zoom out. Take time. What am I learning? What does this mean? Even if you're journaling only one minute a day, what worked? What didn't? That's going to allow you to make meaning of this experience so that you're not just being disrupted. You're in a position to disrupt going forward. Another way to put a finer point on this is this idea of a tech shabbat. Tiffany Schlein wrote a book called 24-6. She talks about this idea of unplugging once a week. And then she says, and this is fascinating, she says that rest is a technology. Specifically, she says, the promise of technology is that it makes things efficient. It saves time. It allows us to get things done by giving you a complete day off each week from screens, from responsibilities, from being available, letting you reflect and connect. Tech shabbat becomes the ultimate technology. You step back in order to slingshot forward. We are in a unique time. A possibly, we hope, never to happen again in our lifetime sort of time. You have, up until now, up until a few months ago on the grid paper of your life, you were moving over one, up one, over one, up one. When you disrupt yourself, what happens is that maybe on the y-axis of success, you were at a 12 and you were moving that over one, up one, over one, up one. But when you disrupt, you move down that y-axis of success to an eight, to a seven because you believe that over time, it will be over one, up three, or over one, up five, or over one, up 10. That step back, that time to reflect, can be a slingshot. You can step back to slingshot into who you can be. This is the time. We've been disrupted to take this time and figure this out. All right, last two. I'm gonna go through these quickly and then we're gonna talk about questions. So this, give the regrets too. We're gonna make a lot of mistakes right now. A lot of mistakes. In fact, if you look at it, you'll see, oh yeah, I'm making a lot of mistakes. And whenever we start something new, there's this fantasy of a simple linear world. Beginning of 2020, January 1st, 2020, I'm gonna make X, Y, and Z happen. And there will be this linear path and I will be the hail, the conquering hero. And sometimes that just does not happen. My moments of humiliation include bombing speeches in front of, well, not speeches, bombing a speech in front of hundreds of people being fired from a job and backing, investing in a business that imploded. When we fail and we will all continue to fail, we need to take a moment, take a step back to grief because that grief, that feeling that we have around it is the same energy that we need in order to move forward. But then we have to ditch the shame because when we buy into shame, we allow failure to become a referendum on you, on your identity, on your sense of self. And it is shame that limits your ability to disrupt. It's not failure. Think about it, we all fail all the time, every day. And most of the time we're like, oh, made a mistake. Let's keep going. It's the shame that we attach to the failure that actually holds us back. So if you are struggling with shame, we all do it to a lesser or greater extent. This is a time for you to do that inner work and ditch the shame because when you can do that, you can iterate and every time something doesn't work, it's a piece of information that allows you to get better, faster and move up that S curve more quickly. Again, if you wanna manage your disruption, you disrupt yourself. Failure is a constraint, it's a tool of creation. So give failure it's due, but choose success, especially right now. Number seven, this is the last one. So be driven by discovery. As a person who is choosing to disrupt, yes, we've been disrupted but you can still choose to disrupt, you are going to, you're trying to figure out this yet to be defined market because you're playing where no one else is playing. You have a purpose but how you're going to get there is yet to be determined. You're basically, you are an explorer which means you're gonna end up somewhere you didn't expect, you won't be alone. 70% of all successful new businesses like a Netflix, end up in a very different place from where they started. Corn Fairy did a study to come up with the leading predictors of people who could be successful in the C-suite. Technical skills, yep, they're important but the leading predictors were the ability to take a step forward, to gather feedback and then adapt. We all make plans for the future. Whether you are trying to cross a continent, go across the ocean, travel through outer space or navigate through the next week, you don't know what it's gonna look like. You're gonna end up in a place that you hadn't expected so we just need to be willing when we can't plan and we can't take a step forward, gather feedback and then adapt. This is the framework. You take the right risks, you play to your distinctive strengths, you embrace your constraints, battle entitlement, step back to grow, give failure it's due and be discovery driven at the top of the curve, at the bottom of the curve and everywhere in between. So I have a few final remarks but we have time. We have about five minutes for questions. Question for you is what was most useful to you? What was useful to you? So you might have a question that you wanna ask but you can also just include it in chat box as you were listening and contemplating and reflecting what was useful to you. Emil, I'll turn that over to you for about five minutes to moderate before we go to this. Three or four minutes of closing remarks. Yes, absolutely. We have two questions about the S-Curve. The first one is from Antonio. He says, as a director in charge of innovation, I feel personally like we're in the sweet spot but many times it also feels that we are in the inexperienced space since all is changing and you apparently need to relearn all. So he separates the personal disruption and compares that with how it feels his organization is doing. So this is more of a comment. Maybe you can elaborate on that. Oh yeah, that's really interesting. So Antonio, it sounds like if I'm hearing correctly that you feel like for you and your audience. So actually, so Emil, did he say that, did Antonio say that he feels like he personally is in the sweet spot? Is that what you said? It could be a misspelling here but it feels like I'm personally in the sweet spot but it feels like we are personally in the sweet spot. So yeah. Okay, got it, okay. So yeah, I mean, so a couple of things there, Antonio. I think this is really good because if you think about when you're in the sweet spot you know enough but not too much so you're capable of asking questions like why do we do it like this but you're also, you've got enough experience and expertise to say, well, I think I can answer that question as well. We also know that people who are on the launch point of that S-curve there are a lot of things that they don't know how to do and so there's a lot of training that has to take place and that's one of the challenges of where we are in the world right now is when you've got people at the launch point of the curve they need training, they need mentoring, they need guidance. Well, when you've got the whole world at the launch point of the S-curve we don't have that happening so it makes it more complicated but the thing that a launch point person or the inexperienced person can do is they can say and ask why do we do it like this? If we'll allow them to ask those questions because we have to make sure that we give them the space to ask those questions otherwise they won't ask them but they can ask that why do we do it like this that makes it very useful. Those questions are very useful for people who are in the sweet spot who can start to answer those questions and especially people who are at the high end who are saying, well, this is how we do it. They can say, well, why do we do it like that? And so people at the high end can help establish the baseline and say, well, we tried this, we tried that but yeah, that's interesting. Why don't we play with this? So they've got the tribal knowledge. So what you want to do is, yes, if you're in the sweet spot you wanna stay there as long as you possibly can if you've got a lot of people at the launch point they need training but they also need for you to value their inexperience and ideally in your organization you're going to have as many people in the sweet spot as possible, a few at the launch point and then also a few at the high end who can act as anchors or stabilizers for everybody else who's coming up along the curve. So anyway, those were some thoughts. What else in the L do you have? Yeah, we had a very similar question. I think you might cover it. It's from Richard. He says, how to deal with insecurities that go with making the next jump on the S-curve? Oh, Richard, that's such a good question. I'm glad you asked that. Okay, so one of the things that happens when we get to the top of the S-curve is you could feel it. So you might have been in a role for doing that same project for three or four years. So the time's telling you it might be time to do something new but you also, as I said, you're not learning quite as much as you were. You're getting bored. You find yourself saying a lot. That's not how we do it here, which are all signals. So you know it's time but again, you've got this dilemma because if you jump, it's gonna be kind of scary. So one of the things that we can do to deal with our insecurity is, number one is to, as you're thinking about jumping to that new S-curve is look at who you're going to be working with. Are these people who make it possible for others to learn? Who make it possible for others to ask questions like why do we do it like this? So sort of look at what pool am I gonna jump into, right? So who are you gonna hire to be your boss and your colleagues? But the second thing that you can do to help overcome that insecurity is sometimes when we're thinking about jumping, we're thinking, well, if I jump, it's gonna be exciting. Well, that's actually not very motivating. We know from Lassel version theory, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky is that we're actually almost two and a half times, I think 2.22 times to be specific, more motivated by what we lose than by what we gain. So one of the ways that we can overcome our insecurity is instead of saying to ourselves, okay, here's what's good thing is gonna happen to me if I jump to a new S-curve. Instead say to ourselves, what are the bad things that are gonna happen to me if I don't jump? So for example, if I don't jump, I might get complacent. And if I get complacent, I might get pushed off. I mean, I might get fired or I might be bored out of my mind or my children will see that my father has stagnated and he's not as happy. And when he comes home, he's not as happy and on and on. So you start playing out the negative things because there's no such thing as standing still. So look at the pool that you would be diving into. Who are the people that you would be hiring to be your colleagues and your manager? But then you also motivate yourself by saying what bad thing could happen to me if I don't jump? And then finally, acknowledge this thing inside of you. And I'll talk about this in just a minute. If we don't jump and we know we need to, we die inside just a little bit and no one wants to die inside a little bit. That's again, part of the opportunity of us all having been disrupted. If we will let it, it will allow us to come alive again in ways that we haven't been for possibly for a time. Should we take one more question, Amiel? And then I'll wrap. Yeah, yeah, sure. And this is a question from us in Brightline actually. So one of the most important things when you transform in an organization is to transform the people, the employees. So how can an organization, from an organization standpoint, how can leaders in organization convince their employees to change with them and disrupt themselves as the organization disrupts itself? Yeah, okay, so I think what I would say is the starting point is if you're a leader and you're saying, okay, I need my people to, so I'm a leader, I wanna have a high growth organization or we are a high growth organization but I need my people to be high growth as well. I think the starting place is that you are modeling that behavior. So modeling the behavior in that you, it might be something of like I've been in a role for four years and I make the decision to disrupt myself and go do something new inside the organization so that I'm opening up a space for a person who reports to me who's in the sweet spot, move into the high end of the S-curve, for example. It's simple things like when you make a mistake, you apologize and say, huh, I didn't really handle that well. I apologize, cause that's personal disruption as well. That's battling our sense of entitlement. And so when you start to model in those microactions, the day-to-day interaction of how you treat people, people as people, not objects, but when you also, and then you also model on a sort of larger way of you've got people on your team who are at the top of their S-curve and they wanna jump, they wanna do something new and you allow them to do it and you don't hoard the talent, you're also making it, you're sending a very clear message that you yourself are willing to change and are committed to disrupting yourself and therefore you expect the people on your team to do the same, which includes things like apologizing, not being addicted to being right, then you make it possible for people on your team to disrupt and go do potentially something else inside of the organization. And as you start to model that behavior of what you're trying to do and you make it safe for other people to change, make it safe for other people to disrupt, then that bottom up starts to move from a sort of small way into the swell of a very large way that allows you to have that growth that you want in your organization. Great, very nice, very good answer, yeah. So we have a few other questions, but I know we need to be respectful of everyone's time here, so Whitney, please feel free to wrap it up. All right, thank you for those great questions everyone Antonio and Richard. So one of the things that no one tells you, I mean, the textbooks certainly do not tell you is that disruption is, it's by definition, it's lonely, we talked about this, you're playing where no one else is playing, and it's kind of scary. And the reason it's scary is that whenever you leave your comfortable purge, like this status quo of doing what you've always done, and these questions, your questions touched on this, there's this moment of free fall and loss of identity and the PE, the puke to excitement ratio, is so uncomfortably high, you feel like you're on a thrill ride to zero. It does not though mean you shouldn't disrupt, it just means if it's scary and lonely, you're on the right path, always learning. Nunca es problema, siempre es aprendizaje, you're always learning. We give a lot of air time to building and buying disruptive companies, we should, we wanna be agents of disruption, but what we know is that if you're going to be an agent of disruption, if you are going to manage through change, first become its subject. You start at the low end, the launch point of the S-curve, you shift into gear to scale, and when you're learning peaks or crests, you do what all great disruptors do, you walk straight into that dilemma and you leap to a new curve, because your organization, your company, Emile, as you just said, cannot disrupt unless you do. Thank you very much, everyone. So, such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you, Emile and Yachtika.