CMOs must embrace disruption as a continuous, transformative force
Disruption isn’t a one-time event, it’s a system update that never stops. Most people think of disruption as something you survive, a market crash, a competitor breakthrough, a moment of chaos. But that mindset misses the point. Disruption is the engine of innovation. It’s not a crisis to avoid, but a force to harness. And CMOs, more than anyone else in the C-suite, need to lead with that mindset.
Scott D. Anthony, a clinical professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, puts it clearly: don’t treat disruption as a noun, treat it like an adjective, something that energizes innovation. We’ve seen how quickly industries shift. Generative AI alone has made entire business models obsolete in months. If you’re waiting for stability, you’re already behind. The job is not to react. The job is to move first.
CMOs have more influence now than they did a decade ago. You control how companies speak to the market, how customers interact with digital platforms, and how quickly your brand adapts to change. In this context, disruption is a strategy, not a setback. Use it to simplify systems that are broken. Make products and services more accessible. Lower costs for users, and you’ll reshape the value chain.
Executives can’t afford to view transformation as a project with a deadline. It’s a permanent condition of doing business going forward. If you’re optimizing static systems instead of evolving them, you’ll collapse under the next wave of change.
CMOs play a pivotal role in driving digital transformation
Digital transformation doesn’t belong to IT anymore. CMOs are driving it because they control what matters most, customer perception and experience. Since Capgemini and MIT first defined “digital transformation” back in 2011, the concept has evolved. It’s no longer just a tech overhaul. It’s now about redefining business value through better digital engagement, smarter platforms, and more direct user impact.
A strong CMO doesn’t just manage the brand, they shape how a company interacts with the market at every level. That includes digital products, personalized customer journeys, and how messaging aligns across channels. You’re no longer just selling, you’re building long-term digital relationships. Today, that often involves technologies like agentic AI, which can act on behalf of users to create or capture value with minimal effort. If your tools and systems don’t help customers solve real problems efficiently, you’re losing relevance.
This evolution means CMOs need to think operationally, not just creatively. You need fluency in data, product vision, and forward-looking design. That’s because innovation isn’t something that only tech leadership can execute. Much of it depends on how you translate product advantages into customer value. Understanding that full pipeline, the functionality, the messaging, and the market fit, is core to leading transformation.
Executives who still keep marketing and technology in separate silos are already behind. CMOs are now at the core of change, guiding not only how brands speak but also how companies compete. If you’re a CMO and you’re not heavily involved in the digital operating model, you’re not doing the full job.
Innovation thrives through collective effort
The idea of the lone inventor creating something world-changing in isolation is outdated. Real innovation doesn’t work that way, it’s driven by teams aligned around a common mission. Scott D. Anthony makes this clear: innovation is “collectively individualistic.” It’s a coordinated activity involving shared vision, distributed talent, and continuous collaboration across disciplines.
Strong innovation environments pull from multiple perspectives, product, marketing, operations, engineering. Each function contributes a different kind of intelligence. When you connect those systems, that’s when breakthrough ideas can scale. Innovations that matter rarely come from a single department or leader. They come from ecosystems built to move fast, adapt quickly, and challenge assumptions.
That doesn’t mean visionary leadership is irrelevant. It just shifts the definition. A smart leader doesn’t try to do everything themselves. They build the conditions where smart people from all roles can move with autonomy and accountability. Innovation, then, becomes less about one person’s big idea and more about how well the organization integrates signals and acts on them.
C-suite leaders should focus less on engineering exposure to genius moments and more on managing systems that support idea flow, experimentation, and iteration. Create momentum through alignment, not control. You’ll move faster, track more opportunities, and reduce the cost of learning. When innovation becomes everyone’s job, results become more consistent and less dependent on chance.
Disruption often arises where disciplines, industries, and ideas intersect
Disruption doesn’t come out of nowhere. It happens when disconnected ideas, tools, and market needs collide in unexpected ways. These intersections are where real change starts, where emerging technologies meet overlooked customer friction, or where outdated systems face new capabilities. If you’re not paying attention to these points of intersection, you’ll miss the signals that shape the next shift.
Scott D. Anthony and innovation strategist Rita McGrath both stress the value of watching for “weak signals”—indicators of future demand that are still forming. You won’t find these signals on performance dashboards or historical KPIs. They show up in adjacent industries, in user behavior shifts, and in early-stage product markets. To act on them, you have to remove the blind spots created by traditional success metrics.
For CMOs, this means stepping far beyond campaign performance. It means connecting teams that don’t normally collaborate, marketing, engineering, customer service, data analytics, and scanning broadly for patterns others miss. These collisions, between departments, industries, or ideas, often set the conditions for deep innovation, especially when customers are asking for solutions before they exist.
Executives must design their organizations to detect and act quickly on insights that don’t yet have scale. That agility, combined with a structure that encourages cross-functional validation, is what allows companies to engage early and lead when disruption finally tips from signal to trend.
Innovation may feel faster due to tech acceleration, but it demands long-term commitment
There’s a perception that innovation is accelerating, and on the surface, it is. Product launches come faster. New tools scale globally in weeks. But if you look beneath the surface, truly impactful innovation has always been a long-term play. What looks fast today is usually the result of years, or decades, of investment, iteration, and infrastructure buildup.
Scott D. Anthony makes the point clearly: the iPhone wasn’t a sudden leap. It was built on foundational technologies, touchscreens, processors, wireless networking, developed over multiple decades. The same is true for generative AI. It’s not new. It’s the latest expression of more than 50 years of machine learning research. The sudden scale is new, not the innovation itself.
For C-suite leaders, the lesson is simple. Don’t confuse market speed with innovation speed. There’s no shortcut to building capabilities that last. You can deploy fast, and you should. But long-term returns still require steady, disciplined investment, especially in platforms, people, and deep technical infrastructure.
Executives need to support innovation pipelines that can deliver not just this quarter’s results, but next decade’s relevance. It’s easy to chase what’s trending now. It’s harder, and more effective, to commit to what doesn’t look urgent yet but carries major impact. That’s where the real differentiation comes from.
Innovation creates both value and volatility, leaders must manage its dual impact
Innovation drives growth, but it also introduces risk. That’s the tradeoff. When you change how something works, whether it’s technology, a process, or a customer experience, you disrupt the systems around it. If you’re not prepared to handle those consequences, the gains are temporary or uneven.
Scott D. Anthony doesn’t gloss over this. In Epic Disruptions, he acknowledges the complexity behind progress. Innovation isn’t always clean. Some industries collapse. Jobs shift. Business models that worked last quarter stop making sense. This doesn’t mean you avoid innovation, it means you manage it with full awareness of its operational and human costs.
Leaders need to build capacity for adaptability, within teams, systems, and supply chains. That requires active transition planning. Not just introducing a product or strategy, but lining up resources, support, and communication to shift the rest of the organization at speed. Without that, what starts as progress breaks down into resistance, confusion, or instability.
CMOs specifically need to consider market readiness. If your customers aren’t brought along for the shift, from UX changes to redesigned service models, you lose traction. Innovation that isn’t adopted is just wasted effort. Success means introducing change in a way that encourages usage and aligns with evolving expectations. This balance of pushing forward while absorbing the ripple effects is what separates scalable progress from short-term hustle.
Recognizing and acting on weak signals helps avoid the innovator’s dilemma
The innovator’s dilemma is real. Companies fail not because they ignore their customers, but because they listen too well. They get caught optimizing for the current demand and don’t see the early signs of what’s next. By the time they realize the change, it’s too late to pivot.
The late Clayton Christensen defined this clearly. Your best customers ask for more features, better service, and stronger options, so you deliver. But true disruption doesn’t usually come from those customers. It comes from emerging behavior in adjacent or underserved segments. If you aren’t watching carefully, you’ll double down on the wrong roadmap.
This is where weak signals matter. Small shifts. Early adopters. Adjacent use cases that don’t look strategic yet. Rita McGrath has pointed to this issue repeatedly: leaders need structures that surface early feedback, not just the aggregate majority. That means asking new questions: What’s not being solved? What’s rising in other markets? What changes are customers not asking for, but will expect six months from now?
For CMOs, this is especially important. You’re shaping the message, the channels, the engagement strategy. If you focus only on what’s proven, you’ll miss what’s emerging. Instead, build mechanisms to test, learn, and adapt constantly. Disruption doesn’t punish ignorance, it punishes inertia. Stay aware, act early, and keep agility built into decision-making. That’s how you avoid becoming the next cautionary example.
Disruptive innovations simplify, democratize, and transform markets
Disruption doesn’t just mean doing something differently, it means changing how value is delivered at a structural level. That often looks like simplifying systems others made too complicated, lowering costs where competitors assumed high margins were fixed, and giving more people access to tools they previously couldn’t use. When innovation hits that point, markets don’t adjust slowly, they reshape completely.
Scott D. Anthony defines disruptive innovation as the act of making the complex simple and the expensive affordable. That’s what transforms industries. It doesn’t always come from better performance. Sometimes it comes from offering just enough value at a far lower price with far less friction. That’s when consumer behavior changes in ways incumbents can’t easily control.
For decision-makers, especially CMOs, it’s critical to understand what customers really value, and when they’re getting diminishing returns from feature upgrades, complexity, or price. The shift happens when people say they don’t need more, they just need better access, better usability, or more relevance to their current needs. That’s where disruption gets traction.
Leaders focused on long-term viability should be asking hard questions: Are we competing where the value is moving? Are we solving for cost and simplicity, or just improving complexity? If not, someone else will, probably with a model that scales faster and costs less.
Innovation is rooted in execution
Breakthrough success doesn’t always come from being first. It comes from being right, and from executing better than others. That means refining ideas, removing friction, and delivering value more efficiently than the competition. It’s not about novelty. It’s about making existing concepts work better and expand further.
Scott D. Anthony shows that many major innovations didn’t start with invention. They started with execution. Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile. McDonald’s didn’t invent fast food. Pampers didn’t invent the disposable diaper. What they all did was narrow in on what wasn’t working, cost, inconsistency, usability, and fix it with precision and scale.
For CMOs, this is a key insight. You don’t have to create the next new platform to win. You have to tune your operations, messaging, and experience until friction drops and adoption accelerates. What people remember is how easy and useful the product is, not how unfamiliar it was at launch.
Executives should focus their teams on clarity of function, speed of use, and scalability. These aren’t surface-level improvements. They are strategic advantages. In fast-moving markets, refining execution with consistency often beats out attempts to leapfrog competitors through originality alone. Results come from what customers use, not just what makes headlines.
Failure to adapt leads to irrelevance, transformation is survival
Transformation isn’t optional, and history proves that. Companies that protect their legacy models at the expense of adapting are the first to collapse when the market shifts. The failure isn’t usually sudden, it starts gradually with ignored warning signs, delayed decisions, and an overcommitment to scale that no longer delivers advantage.
Scott D. Anthony uses the example of Nucor and Bethlehem Steel to make this point clear. Bethlehem Steel, once dominant, clung to high-cost, large-scale operations while Nucor focused on flexibility, cost-efficiency, and technology adoption. Nucor survived and grew. Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt. The difference wasn’t resources, it was mindset.
For C-suite executives, there’s a clear takeaway: the pace and direction of your market will shift, whether you’re ready or not. What worked before doesn’t entitle you to future relevance. Incremental change driven by internal tradition is often too slow. What kept you competitive in one era might actively block you in the next.
Transformation requires structure that supports change at speed. It requires rethinking product, people, and process in the context of what the market is becoming, not what it used to reward. CMOs in particular need to act as internal challengers, bringing data and insight to suggest when customer behavior signals outpace internal capabilities. Survival comes from being early, not from being attached to scale.
Big bets, even amid uncertainty, can redefine markets
Calculated risk is not optional in innovation, it’s necessary. The biggest market shifts often come from placing strong bets in uncertain territory. These decisions rarely look obvious in the moment. They don’t have consensus. They challenge successful strategies. But they open entirely new categories for those willing to invest beyond what data alone can justify.
Scott D. Anthony points to the iPhone’s early development as one of these moments. Internally, even Apple questioned its trajectory. The product almost didn’t launch. But it eventually redefined mobile computing, and reshaped adjacent industries from software to connectivity. That outcome wasn’t guaranteed. It was the result of compounding risk, commitment, and long-term vision.
For CMOs and other executives, it means not only backing incremental gains, but also funding ideas that have uncertain timelines with outsized upside. These are the bets that create distance from competitors. Waiting for perfect information or consensus often means someone else makes the move first.
There’s responsible risk and reckless risk. This isn’t about gut decisions without structure. It’s about making bold moves when the data is early, but directionally strong. It’s about trusting internal capability to execute once you commit. Organizations that learn to place smart bets, measured, clear, with committed backing, are the ones that become the reference point for the next wave.
CMOs must look beyond current customers to anticipate emerging needs
Serving only current demand is not enough. Winning in the next wave of competition requires understanding needs that haven’t been fully formed yet. That’s the hard part, shaping what customers will want before they articulate it. Most teams are still optimizing for what has already been proven to work. By the time trends are measurable, they’re no longer a competitive advantage.
CMOs sit in a unique position to push ahead of that. You control how customer signals are gathered, interpreted, and brought back into product direction, channel strategy, and messaging. If all of that is focused on backwards-facing metrics or short-term performance, you’re not innovating, you’re just reacting.
Scott D. Anthony makes the case that transformation leaders don’t just track what’s happening, they tune into what’s coming next. That means looking for friction customers don’t yet have words for. It means exploring behavioral shifts that feel small now but could scale quickly. And it means building marketing systems that aren’t just fast but flexible, capable of adapting on signal, not only after full validation.
For C-suite leadership, this is about strategy alignment. Are your teams capitalizing on emerging behavior, or simply responding to volume? Are you delegating innovation to specialized groups, or embedding it throughout your organization? Anticipating future value starts with a CMO who’s listening to the market five steps ahead, and ensuring the company is ready to respond.
Case studies highlight timeless patterns in disruptive innovation
Disruption can look different over time, but the pattern stays consistent. Long-term leaders recognize change early, respond with urgency, and shift how their organization delivers value. That’s true across industries and over centuries. The case studies Scott D. Anthony presents, from military shifts triggered by gunpowder to today’s smartphone dominance, reveal one thing clearly: adaptability decides who leads, who catches up, and who disappears.
Take Florence Nightingale, whose use of data visualizations changed how medical care was delivered in wartime. Or Henry Ford, who scaled vehicle access through cost control. Or Pampers, which earned a 92% market share not through flashy invention but through better usability. These examples prove that impact comes from observing gaps others overlook, acting with precision, and making those changes accessible to real users.
CMOs should pay attention to these lessons not just as historical reference, but as functional playbooks. What worked was timing, execution, and clarity of need. These aren’t stories of innovation for prestige, they’re examples of how leaders read momentum and align every part of the company to act on it.
Executives can use these reference points to pressure-test current strategies. Where is your organization still operating based on last decade’s assumptions? Are your core functions flexible enough to act when market shifts accelerate? Case studies from the past aren’t about nostalgia. They’re about learning how to stop missing what’s right in front of you. When you apply that mindset, the next disruption isn’t a threat, it’s an opening.
In conclusion
Disruption doesn’t wait for alignment. It doesn’t ask for permission. It rewards leaders who move early, think clearly, and execute without hesitation. The patterns aren’t new. We’ve seen them unfold across industries, technologies, and entire economies. What’s different now is speed, and visibility. If you’re relying on structural advantages built a decade ago, you’re already taking on unnecessary risk.
For decision-makers and executive teams, this is the time to reassess what you think is stable. Markets shift when companies hesitate. The leaders who win are those who stay uncomfortable, curious, open, and prepared to resource action before consensus catches up.
You don’t need to guess the future. You need to build systems that respond fast enough when it walks through the door. That means tightening the loop between signal and strategy. It means asking harder questions about models that “still work” but offer no edge. And it means recognizing that transformation isn’t a phase, it’s a way of operating.
Disruption is a lever. Use it intentionally, or expect it to be used against you.
