Leading through disruption

9 min readSep 7

For some reason, “Leading through Disruption: A Changemaker’s Guide to Twenty-First Century Leadership” reminds me of “No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends”. “No Ordinary Disruption” is the hard-nosed business version of “The Big Pivot” and “Drawdown”. The rallying cry to examine your business model in a world where all the basics you relied on are in question. “Leading through Disruption” is a gentler business version with the same message. The corporate playbook from the last century no longer applies.

119 elements

The book is written by Andrew Liveris, ex-CEO of Dow Chemicals. The company specialises in combining and recombining 118 elements to create something new, powerful, and miraculous. The 119th element is humanity. That is a true reflection of his philosophy.

Other CEO books

His book is a lot better than some of the other CEO books, which are a lot more generic. This book combines practicality with experience and vision. Here are a few other CEO books:

His advice. Embrace your reality; choose among your options; build the team to execute; lead the charge.

Zeronaut

He is a Zeronaut. In his view, today’s leaders need to step up to provide societal, financial, and human benefits at a time when we all recognise this is the only planet we have, and we need to protect it.

We live in a shit show

And this is in an environment of VUCA, new abnormal, G-zero (no public leadership), globalisation eroding (global trading is fragmenting), short-termism, digitisation creating havoc, and unstable geopolitics. A shit show.

The model is broken

The current economic model is broken and can’t be fixed, and plan A — the idea that business should be motivated exclusively by profit — is a model that no longer works. Society is demanding that capitalism take an honest look in the mirror. Capitalism, and the business world in general, has…