How leaders stay relevant in an era of relentless disruption

Executive overview

Most organisations facing disruption know it — yet change too little, too late. The real obstacle is rarely information; it's mindset: ego, self-sufficiency, and loyalty to past success.

Steve Dennis draws on his years at Sears and as a strategy consultant to argue that staying relevant requires deliberately widening your inputs, allocating real budget and time to exploration, and accepting — not rationalising — the reality in front of you.

What got you here will not get you there — and defending a losing model is not a strategy.

The slow-motion crisis pattern

• Sears fell from the world's largest retailer to near-irrelevance over 30+ years — largely by optimising a failing model rather than reinventing it
• The decline was visible from the early 1990s; executives mostly watched it happen
• Department stores broadly repeated this pattern: incremental improvements to an approach that had already stopped working
• Disruption today is faster — businesses built on technology can scale from nothing to tens of billions in two to three years (e.g. Temu, Shein, social media platforms)
• The pace of change means the window for response is much shorter than it was even five years ago

Why leaders fail to adapt

• Self-sufficiency, taken too far, becomes a liability — command-and-control leaders assume they must have all the answers
• Ego causes leaders to believe their own press and over-rely on the skills that made them successful
• Past success locks leaders into a playbook that may be actively harmful in new conditions
• High expectations often correlate with low resilience; suffering and setback are frequently what force genuine change
• Many leaders espouse innovation but never allocate time or budget to it — the bank statement and calendar tell the real story

Opening the aperture

• Cast a wider net for inputs: competitors, adjacent industries, emerging technology, shifting consumer behaviour
• Consumers benchmark your experience against their last great experience anywhere — not just your direct competitors
• If you can check out on Amazon in seconds, customers ask why they can't do the same at a doctor's office
• One apparel company sent its top 30 executives around the world for two to three weeks — visiting bakeries, hotels, and universities — to find ideas applicable to their own business
• Exploration requires a dedicated budget, protected time, and people with skills in experimentation; without those, it stays a hobby project

Asking for help

• Many leaders wait until things get bad enough before genuinely seeking help — sometimes too late to recover
• Vulnerability is often treated as weakness in command-and-control cultures; this makes it harder to spot what you're missing
• Organisations that are not current on trends reveal it when their leaders cite "insights" that informed practitioners have known for years
• Doing the work means investing in research, hiring differently, and putting money against things with no short-term payoff

Radical acceptance and taking action

• Seeing your situation clearly — not through denial — is the prerequisite for meaningful change
• Ask honestly: is a slightly better version of what you've done for 20 years actually the answer?
• Accept that the world has changed, then act on that reality rather than rationalising the status quo
• Letting go of things that no longer work is as important as keeping what does

Sharing ideas as a gift, not self-promotion

• Reframing content and consulting work as an act of generosity rather than ego-driven self-promotion changes how it lands
• Not every idea will resonate with every person — being okay with that reduces the need to convince or perform
• The shift is from "I have good ideas and you should listen" to "here is my experience; take what's useful"