Your Next Disrupter May Already Be on Your Payroll

In The Wall Street Journal's CEO Brief, Lila MacLellan's Why Are Disrupters So Hard to Spot? looks at a new book, Disrupters at the Gate, by USC's Jeffrey Cole and historian Harlan Lebo. Their case is fair and familiar. Disruption tends to start where nobody is looking, in a garage, a dorm room or a lab, and even humble, paranoid leaders get blindsided. Cole says established leaders pay "too much attention to their competitors" and not enough to change coming from outside.

Then he describes a second group, and that is the part that stayed with me. Years ago he shared his analysis of banking's vulnerability with bank CEOs. Almost all of them agreed with him. They also told him their boards would remove them if they took their eyes off short-term gains. They knew, and they waited.

Look Inside Before You Look Outside

The piece treats disruption as something that arrives from beyond the walls. Often it does. But the earliest signals rarely show up there first. They show up inside the building, in the people closest to the customer and the work. The frontline manager who notices customers asking for something you don't sell. The young analyst who quietly built a better workflow with a tool nobody approved. The veteran who recognizes the pattern because she has lived through three cycles of it.

Those people are an early warning system. Most organizations are not designed to hear them. Competitors are visible, measurable and safe to talk about in a leadership meeting. The person in the third row of the town hall who sees the threat clearly is none of those things. So leaders keep studying the market, because it is easier than studying the individuals who already understand where the market is going.

In 2019 I argued that individuals would increasingly define institutions, rather than the other way around. Disruption is one of the clearest proofs. Nearly every disrupter Cole describes started as one person following their own curiosity. Your organization is full of people with that same curiosity. The real question is whether your culture lets them use it on your behalf, or teaches them to keep it to themselves.

AI makes this more urgent. The tools that could disrupt your business are already in your employees' hands, and many of them are experimenting quietly because they are not sure the experiments are welcome. When people believe curiosity outside their job description will be ignored or punished, the insight stays hidden, and leaders hear about the opportunity when a competitor announces it.

When Knowing Isn't Enough

The bank CEOs are the more important lesson. They had the insight. What they lacked was the conviction to act on it before the outcome was certain. I see this constantly. The knowledge a company needs to protect its future is usually already in the room. What is missing is the willingness to say it plainly and do something about it, which is also why people so often wait until they leave to tell the truth.

Short-term pressure is real, and the discipline to deliver the quarter is worth protecting. Consistent execution is what funds the future. The trouble begins when that discipline becomes the only lens, and every signal that doesn't fit this quarter's plan gets filed as noise. A company can become extraordinarily good at repeating what worked, right up until the day it stops working. From the inside, that kind of momentum looks like progress.

The answer is not to abandon the plan. It is to keep the plan and the people in conversation with each other, so the system stays reliable while the individuals inside it are free to report what they see changing. Deciding what stays the same and what changes is ongoing leadership work, and the balance is never settled. It has to be checked, adjusted and checked again.

Three Moves for This Week

First, ask three people at least two levels below you one question: what are customers asking for that we can't give them? Write down the answers before you explain or defend anything.

Second, find the person who built a workaround. A workaround is a signal that the system has fallen behind the people using it. Ask what they solved and why the official process wasn't enough.

Third, name one thing your leadership team already knows and hasn't acted on. Put it on the agenda with an owner and a date. Knowing without acting is how smart companies get surprised by threats they saw coming.

Cole observes that truly self-reflective CEOs, the ones who push their teams to challenge assumptions and look for reasons they could become obsolete, are rare. They don't have to be. Self-reflection at scale begins when leaders ask the people around them what they see, and then take the answer seriously.

The disrupter you fear is often already on your payroll, waiting for someone to ask what they see.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.