by Robyn Bolton | Jul 21, 2026 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples
“Disruption [is] driven by the pursuit of profit. That’s the causal mechanism for these things…”
Clayton Christensen at the 2011 Gartner Symposium ITExpo
When I told a client that peak profit was one of the signs that they were about to be disrupted, his jaw fell open. He didn’t believe me because, like any businessperson, achieving record profit is THE reason to celebrate. His company had just doubled revenue in the past five years and was positioned to double again in the next five. AND they supply mission-critical systems to build out data centers.
Business literally could not be better.
Which is exactly what the CEOs of Big Steel thought in 1968.
It wasn’t too big to fail.
“US Steel posted record profit margins in the years prior to unseating by the minimills; in many ways it was blind to its disruption.”
Clayton Christensen in HBR
Since the mid 1850s, steel was produced in integrated steel mills that performed every function required to produce the material that was building America. The costs to build a mill were high, about $8B in today’s dollars, and, to operate efficiently, mills ran 24/7 to produce at least 2M tons of steel per year.
In 1968, a metallurgist at Nucor invented something called the minimill. It could only perform half of the functions of an integrated mill and produced only rebar, the lowest quality of steel. But the minimill cost only $6M and could be profitable at just 50,000 tons of production.
Christensen called the minimill “not good enough.” He was being nice. The minimill was a joke.
Rebar was a joke, too. At just 4% of the steel market, it had the lowest gross margin of any type of steel. Ceding it to minimills freed up integrated mill capacity to produce more high profit steel. By 1977, Nucor was the leading manufacturer of rebar.
It had also spent 7 years improving the minimill.
The pattern continued:
- 1984: Big steel cedes the angle iron, bars, and rods to Nucor
- 1989: Bethlehem Steel’s market value jumps to $2.4B, from $175M just 3 years earlier
- 1993: Minimills directly compete with integrated mills in all segments of the market.
- 1995: Bethlehem Steel’s primary plant ceases operations
- 2001: Bethlehem Steel files for Chapter 11
- 2003: Minimills production exceeds integrated mills while Bethlehem Steel ceases to exist.
By 2017, only 9 integrated mills were still operating in the US, compared to 111 active minimills. The disruption took 35 years to play out.
You don’t have 35 years
The steel industry isn’t the only example:
| Company |
Time to Disruption |
Peak |
Disruption |
Disruptor |
| Sears |
30 years |
1969: World’s largest retailer |
1999: Removed from Dow Jones Industrial Average |
Walmart, Kmart, Target, Amazon |
| Kodak |
16 years |
1996: Record $16B revenue |
2012: Filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection |
Digital photography |
| Blockbuster |
6 years |
2004: Record revenue: $6B |
2010: Filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection |
Redbox, Netflix |
| Nokia |
7 years |
2007: Record Net Profit $51B, 40% of global handset market |
2014: Handset business sold to Microsoft for $7.2B |
iPhone, Android |
| Intel |
3 years |
2021: Record revenue $79B |
2024: Worst ever stock year as price goes below $18/share |
TSMC, Nvidia |
It’s happening right now. Are you seeing it?
“Financial results measure how healthy the business was, not how healthy the business is. Financial results are a particularly bad tool to manage disruption, because moving up-market feels good financially.”
Clayton Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution
Executives and shareholders may feel good right now because, despite supply chain disruptions and high interest rates, earnings are buoyed by “margin expansion” and “revenue beats.” AI feels like an opportunity, not a threat. And there’s no reason to believe that tomorrow’s results will be worse than today’s numbers.
It’s exactly how the CEOs of Big Steel felt in 1968.
You still have time to find the joke.
by Robyn Bolton | May 5, 2026 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples, Strategy
Sunday morning, my phone blew up. Thirty-three text messages. Most mornings, I have zero, so my first thought was “who died?”
The texts were about a death. Sort of.
Sloan Management Review died (ceased publication) and a group chat filled with academics, thought leaders, and consultants were having an absolute meltdown.
Knowing that my husband, an actual Sloan graduate, hadn’t yet seen the news, I broke it to him gently. “Okay,” he shrugged, not even glancing up from his phone.
This was in stark contrast to his reactions to the demise of Spirit Airlines (howling with laughter at the memes) and the resurrection of Allbirds as an AI company (thoughtful and incredibly technical analysis).
Lesson 1: The Race to the Bottom Never Ends Well
CNN’s headline said it all, “Why did Spirit fail? Too many passengers hated flying it.” To prove the point, the article opens,
“Lousy service, not the Iran war, killed Spirit Airlines. Spirit was doomed to fail because of mismanagement, deep financial problems, and – crucially – its reputation for poor customer service. The spike in jet fuel prices during the war just accelerated Spirit’s inevitable demise.”
If that can be written about your business, you don’t deserve to be in business.
It’s only a matter of time until you’re not.
Lesson 2: Be Patient for Growth and Impatient for Profit
Allbirds raised $348 million when it IPOed in 2021 and, at one point, was valued at $4.1 billion despite never turning a profit. Six years later, its stock price had fallen 95% and it sold its business and IP to a brand management company for $39 million.
How did this happen? There are plenty of theories – it expanded too aggressively into bricks and mortar retail, it made ugly shoes but operated like a fashion brand, its Tech Bro image is no longer aspirational for Gen Z customers – but the fact is that it prioritized growth over profit and that ultimately bit them in the balance sheet.
Lesson 3: Some Businesses are Butterflies
While my colleagues’ alarm was understandable, it missed the bigger picture.
Sloan Management Review (SMR) didn’t die. It metamorphosed.
Yes, the SMR brand is going away, but future ideas, research and findings will continue to be shared through digital newsletters, short-form videos, podcasts, and social-first content.
In effect, SMR is metamorphosing to better reflect how its subscribers consume information. Busy executives don’t have the time to read long-form, dense research articles. They grab information in snippets and soundbites. This change ensures the people who need the ideas the most get them.
3 Questions to Find Your Fate
- Do you treat your customers like they exist for your benefit? In other words, are you more focused on value extraction than value creation and delivery? If yes, start planning your business’ funeral and don’t expect anyone to attend.
- Do you have a financially and operationally sustainable business model? If no, start planning your funeral but take comfort in the fact that people will attend and may even say nice things about you.
- Do you know the unique, relevant, valuable, and hard to imitate reason why you exist? Can you articulate the rare and essential Job to be Done you do for your customers? If no, you’re on life support. When you can answer yes, you’ll be ready to be a butterfly.
One quick caveat
When businesses die, people lose their jobs and that is incredibly tragic. The psychological, financial, and relational impacts of job loss are tremendous, impacting people far beyond the individual laid off. It can take months, even years for people and families to recover and, for some, it never happens.
Creative destruction is real and necessary for long-term economic, technological, and societal growth. But the short-term impact has human consequences that should never be ignored.
by Robyn Bolton | Feb 23, 2026 | Leadership, Stories & Examples, Strategy
Congratulations, you’ve done the hard part required to get buy-in! You asked instead of told, said “I don’t know” out loud, and got genuine buy-in. Your team believes, is engaged, and ready to go. And yet execution is stalling.
What gives?
Activity without Achievement
There’s no doubt that people are working hard. You can see it in their schedules and you hear it in your one-on-ones. But projects are moving slower than they should, decisions that seem straightforward take weeks, and agreements made in meetings are quietly undone. Strategies, buy-in, timelines are powerless against an invisible and unnamed force.
So, you consider your options. A team offsite can provide a helpful rest but there’s no guarantee it sticks when you’re back in the office. Training can help shore up skill gaps, but your team is already capable, so this doesn’t feel like a skill problem. You could reorg but that creates new problems.
Your People Aren’t the Problem
The problem isn’t your people, your team, or even your culture. The problem is the hidden seams between people, teams, and cultures, that create friction.
Because of friction, people hesitate to share information across functional or hierarchical seams. They make assumptions about other generations. They work to achieve individual or functional, rather than collective, goals.
These friction points have been part of your organization for so long that they are accepted as normal. As immoveable and unchangeable as your company’s mission and vision. And because they’re so ingrained, you shift your efforts to things that feel changeable: skills, org charts, and communication plans.
You’re addressing symptoms because the root cause seems impossible to fix.
It’s not impossible.
How One Company Resolved the Friction and Tightened the Seams Without Extra Work
When a K-5 curriculum company decided to expand into the Middle School market, they knew they were asking the project team to do something new that was complex, ambiguous, and fraught with high-stakes decisions.
Six months in, the project was breaking down. Decisions that should have taken a day took weeks or months. Work got stuck as different functions weighed in at different times with different mandatory requirements. People hid problems and gave optimistic updates.
The executive who owned the project had seen this before. In fact, she was seeing it in every project team across the entire company. So, she knew that the problem wasn’t the project or the people, it was something much deeper, something that was such a part of the company’s standard operating process that it had become invisible.
So, she brought in someone (me) who could see things differently and together we sought out the seams, naming the moments when friction occurred, and engaging the team in developing and experimenting with solutions.
And we did it all as part of the daily work.
We redesigned hand-offs in real time, experimented with decision-making rules until we found what worked for multiple decision types, and rewarded people for saying “I don’t know.”
Within six months, the project was back on track and engagement and morale were sky-high. Other teams took notice and asked for advice. New products began shipping on time, on budget, and to rave reviews.
Now the Real Work Begins
Where are your seams showing up? A cross-functional initiative that’s losing momentum? A decision that never seems to stick? A team that’s aligned on paper but stuck in execution?
That friction has a name. And it’s findable.
If you’re ready to find the seams and resolve the friction, set up a SeamSpotter Session. It’s a 60 to 90-minute conversation, no prep required, and you’ll receive a written summary and recommended next steps within 48 hours.
If your team is bought in, but execution keeps stuttering, you can fix it. Email me at robyn@milezero.io to get started.
by Robyn Bolton | Jan 17, 2026 | AI, Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples
You’ve clarified the vision and strategy. Laid out the priorities and simplified the message. Held town halls, answered questions, and addressed concerns. Yet the AI initiative is stalled in ‘pilot mode,’ your team is focused solely on this quarter’s numbers, and real change feels impossible. You’re starting to suspect this isn’t a “change management” problem.
You’re right. It’s not.
The Data You’re Not Seeing
You’ve been doing what the research tells you to do: communicate clearly and frequently, clarify decision rights, and reduce change overload. And these things worked. Until employees went from grappling with two to 10 planned change initiatives in a single year. As the number went up, willingness to support organization change crashed, falling from 74% of employees in 2016 to 43% in 2022.
But here’s what the research isn’t telling you: despite your organizational fixes, your people are terrified. 77% of workers fear they’ll lose their jobs to AI in the next year. 70% fear they’ll be exposed as incompetent. And 66% of consumers, the highest level in a decade, expect unemployment to continue to rise.
Why doesn’t the research focus on fear? Because it’s uncomfortable. Messy. It’s a people (Behavior) problem, not a process (Architecture) problem and, as a result, you can’t fix it with a new org chart or better meeting cadence.
The organizational fixes are necessary. They’re just not sufficient to give people the psychological reassurance, resilience, and tools required to navigate an environment in which change is exponential, existential, and constant.
What Actually Works
In 2014, Microsoft was toxic and employees were afraid. Stack ranking meant every conversation was a competition, every mistake was career-limiting, and every decision was a chance to lose status. The company was dying not from bad strategy, but from fear.
CEO Satya Nadella didn’t follow the old change management playbook. He did more:
First, he eliminated the structures that created fear, including the stack ranking system, the zero-sum performance reviews, the incentives that punished mistakes. These were Architecture fixes, and they mattered.
And he addressed the messy, uncomfortable emotions that drove Behavior and Culture. He role modeled the Behaviors required to make it psychologically safe to be wrong. He introduced the “growth mindset” not as a poster on the wall, but as explicit permission to not have all the answers. When he made a public gaffe about gender equality, he immediately emailed all 200,000 employees: “My answer was very bad.” No spin. No excuses. Just modeling the vulnerability that he expected from everyone.
Ten years later, Microsoft is worth $2.5 trillion. Employee engagement and morale are dramatically improved because Nadella addressed the structures that fed fear AND the fear itself.
What This Means for You
You don’t need to be Satya Nadella. But you do need to stop pretending fear doesn’t exist in your organization.
Name it early and often. Not just in the all-hands meeting, but in the team meetings and lunch-and-learns. Be honest, “Some roles will change with this AI implementation. Here’s what we know and don’t know.” Make the implicit explicit.
Eliminate the structures that create fear. If your performance system pits people against each other, change it. If people get punished for taking smart risks, stop. If people ask questions or make suggestions, listen and act.
Be vulnerable. Share what you’re uncertain about. Admit when you don’t know. Show that it’s safe to be learning. Demonstrate that learning is better than (pretending to) know.
The stakes aren’t abstract: That AI pilot stuck in testing. The strategic initiative that gets compliance but not commitment. The team so focused on surviving today they can’t prepare for tomorrow. These aren’t communication failures. They’re misaligned ABCs that allow fear to masquerade as pragmatism.
And the masquerade only stops when you align align the ABCs all at once. Because fixing Architecture without changing your Behavior simply gives fear a new place to hide.
by Robyn Bolton | Nov 19, 2025 | Innovation, Stories & Examples
I can’t believe that I’m writing this. Honestly, I can’t believe I’m even thinking this. I’m an open-minded person, but I truly never thought that anything would ever change my mind on this topic. And yet, I must confess that I’ve come to the conclusion that…
(deep breath)
Innovation Theater is important.
(Sorry, needed a minute to recover. It’s one thing to think something. It’s another to see it in writing.)
Why We All Hate(d) Innovation Theater.
The term “Innovation Theater” was coined by Steve Blank in a 2019 HBR article to describe innovation activities like hackathons, shark tanks, and workshops that “shape and build culture, but they don’t win wars, and they rarely deliver shippable/deployable product.”
The name stuck because it gave the Innovation Industrial Complex a perfect scapegoat. Innovation efforts weren’t producing results because companies were turning real strategy into theater—events that could be delegated and scheduled instead of the courage, commitment, and willingness to change that actual innovation requires.
And in many cases, this criticism was warranted.
But in our rush to dismiss Innovation Theater, we missed something important.
What I (Almost) Missed.
Recently, I visited a company’s Innovation Center, curious to see what ten years of innovation investments and two floors in a downtown high-rise had produced.
The answer was a framework to think more deeply about equity and inclusion. My immediate reaction was rage. A decade of investments for this? Millions of dollars spent on the very definition of Innovation Theater? And they’re bragging about it?!?
Once the rage subsided, something remained. Something that I couldn’t shake. An inkling that I had missed something. That inkling became the realization that I was wrong.
Over the past five years, the framework had been used in carefully curated workshops to help teams across the organization see things they had previously overlooked, understand topics that were sensitive or taboo, and envision solutions that no one their heavily regulated industry had even considered.
Not every workshop resulted in action. But over time, something shifted.
Seasons. Not Shows.
Repetition created a shared language. Multiple touchpoints built permission. Small success stories accumulated to make risk feel manageable. The workshops didn’t send off isolated sparks of innovation. They built the conditions were acting on new ideas became progressively safer and more normal.
And after several seasons, enduring value was created. The company now enjoys the highest retention rate of customers in its industry and has attracted more new customers than all its competitors combined. A decade of “Innovation Theater” delivered exactly what innovation is supposed to deliver: measurable competitive advantage and revenue growth.
Don’t Cancel Your Next Innovation Event.
The problem isn’t Innovation Theater itself. It’s how we practice it.
A one-off hackathon? Theater. An annual workshop? Theater. But sustained investment over years, touching dozens of teams, building shared language and accumulated proof points? That’s a strategic bet on transformation that creates lasting competitive advantage.
The question isn’t whether Innovation Theater works. It’s whether you’re willing to commit to the season, not just the show. Are you prepared to invest consistently, measure differently, and wait for compounding effects that won’t show up in next quarter’s results?
Because when you commit to the season, not just the show, it’s the most strategic bet you can make.
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 4, 2025 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples, Strategy
The best business advice can destroy your business. Especially when you follow it perfectly.
Just ask Johnny Cash.
After bursting onto the scene in the mid-1950s with “Folsom Prison Blues”, Cash enjoyed twenty years of tremendous success. By the 1970s, his authentic, minimalist approach had fallen out of favor.
Eager to sell records, he pivoted to songs backed by lush string arrangements, then to “country pop” to attract mainstream audiences and feed the relentless appetite of 900 radio stations programming country pop full-time.
By late 1992, Johnny Cash’s career was roadkill. Country radio had stopped playing his records, and Columbia Records, his home for 25 years, had shown him the door. At 60, he was marooned in faded casinos, playing to crowds preferring slot machines to songs.
Then he took the stage at Madison Square Garden for Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert.
In the audience sat Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings and uber producer behind Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and Slayer, amongst others. He watched in awe as Cash performed, seeing not a relic but raw power diluted by smart decisions.
The Stare-Down that Saved a Career
Four months later, Rubin attended Cash’s concert at The Rhythm Café in Santa Anna, California. According to Cash’s son, “When they sat down at the table, they said: ‘Hello.’ But then my dad and Rick just sat there and stared at each other for about two minutes without saying anything, as if they were sizing each other up.”
Eventually, Cash broke the silence, “What’re you gonna do with me that nobody else has done to sell records for me?”
What happened next resurrected his career.
Rubin didn’t promise record sales. He promised something more valuable: creative control and a return to Cash’s roots.
Ten years later, Cash had a Grammy, his first gold record in thirty years, and CMA Single of the Year for his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” and millions in record sales.
When Smart Decisions Become Fatal
Executives do exactly what Cash did. You respond to market signals. You pivot your offering when customer preferences shift and invest in emerging technologies.
All logical. All defensible to your board. All potentially fatal.
Because you risk losing what made you unique and valuable. Just as Cash lost his minimalist authenticity and became a casualty of his effort to stay relevant, your business risks losing sight of its purpose and unique value proposition.
Three Beliefs at the Core of a Comeback
So how do you avoid Cash’s initial mistake while replicating his comeback? The difference lies in three beliefs that determine whether you’ll have the creative courage to double down on what makes you valuable instead of diluting it.
- Creative confidence: The belief we can think and act creatively in this moment.
- Perceived value of creativity: Our perceived value of thinking and acting in new ways.
- Creative risk-taking: The willingness to take the risks necessary for active change.
Cash wanted to sell records, and he:
- Believed that he was capable of creativity and change.
- Saw the financial and reputational value of change
- Was willing to partner with a producer who refused to guarantee record sales but promised creative control and a return to his roots.
Your Answers Determine Your Outcome
Like Cash, what you, your team, and your organization believe determines how you respond to change:
- Do I/we believe we can creatively solve this specific challenge we’re facing right now?
- Is finding a genuinely new approach to this situation worth the effort versus sticking with proven methods?
- Am I/we willing to accept the risks of pursuing a creative solution to our current challenge?”
Where there are “no’s,” there is resistance, even refusal, to change. Acknowledge it. Address it. Do the hard work of turning the No into a Yes because it’s the only way change will happen.
The Comeback Question
Cash proved that authentic change—not frantic pivoting—resurrects careers and disrupts industries. His partnership with Rubin succeeded because he answered “yes” to all three creative beliefs when it mattered most. Where are your “no’s” blocking your comeback?
