We talk about disruption all the time, but are we ready to embrace what that really means? Many companies set disruption as their goal, and even believe that by shaking up their market, they will achieve high levels of growth. For Charlene Li, leaders have all it all backwards. Disruption doesn't create growth; instead, growth creates disruption.

Charlene Li is the author of six books on innovation, digital transformation and leadership, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, Groundswell. Her latest book is the bestseller The Disruption Mindset. She is the Founder and Senior Fellow at Altimeter, a disruptive analyst firm acquired in 2015 by Prophet. Named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company, Charlene is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.

In this episode, you will learn

1. Newspapers, the first Internet Boom and why traditional media struggled to embrace the future (00:21)
2. Why creating an innovation division may by counterproductive (05:09)
3. How Adobe pulled off a disruptive transformation without losing their business (06:00)
4. The art of surviving a big bet, and how T-Mobile made theirs (07:48)
5. Why leaders should focus on their future customers, and where Facebook got it right and Myspace got it wrong (09:41)
6. How the pandemic changed the way we think about disruption (15:01)
7. The impact of disruption on jobs (19:50)
8. What it takes to create a movement for change in your organization (21:50)

Open source technology is at the heart of everything we do. When we browse the Web, use our smartphones, or share content on social media - open software and systems are silently working behind the scenes. How did open source go from being a community of hobbyists and something that Steve Ballmer famously branded ‘a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches’, to a sophisticated economy of value and the basis of our Algorithmic Age?

To explore this question and others, I spoke with Rodrigo Mendoza. Rodrigo is co-founder and CEO of Quine, a company building hyper-fluid interfaces between software developers and the labour markets. Previous to Quine, Rodrigo was an academic, a venture capital professional, and a freelance data-scientist. Rodrigo holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oxford, where he was also a postdoctoral researcher in Machine Learning.

I came across Rodrigo from a fascinating article he wrote on the open source community, which I highly recommend that you read. As he writes, ‘Developers have eaten the world. Their work has not only become a main driver for economic expansion, but a key supporting vector for civilization.’

In this episode, you will learn

1. The origins of the open source movement and why software has eaten the world(2:07)
2. The software economy and how open source produces economic value at scale (07:24)
3. The rise of GitHub and marketplaces for coding talent (09:55)
4. Why open source has become the new battle-ground where companies signal influence, creativity, and innovation (13:16)
5. How ideas from open source like version control will influence other areas of work and collaboration, other than coding (21:48)

My earliest memory of using a computer was in the early eighties, playing text adventures like Zork or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on an Apple II computer. Those early games had no graphics, limited commands and often infuriating bugs - and yet they provided a tantalizing glimpse of the power of computers to create an immersive world (even with just text!) Thirty years later, it seems appropriate that one of the first examples of an AI-powered game is once again a text adventure. In this week’s podcast, I talk with Nick Walton, who created AI Dungeon, an AI-generated game that utilizes GPT-3, a text transformer engine built by OpenAI.

Nick is CTO and Co-Founder at Latitude. He has been working on deep learning technology for the last several years, working at autonomous vehicle companies and in a deep learning research lab at Brigham Young University. As I’ve written about previously, we are just at the beginning of a new era of more natural, intuitive computer interfaces powered by AI. With 175 billion parameters, and trained at a cost of over $12 million, OpenAI’s GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. What makes AI Dungeon so interesting and relevant to the near future, is that it demonstrates the radical creativity that is possible when you combine a good idea with the heavy lifting of a Cloud AI system that can be generally applied to multiple use cases.

In this episode, you will learn

1. An introduction to AI Dungeon, how it works and how it began (3.40)
2. Text transformers explained, and why GPT-3 is a game-changer (7:00)
3. Symbolic AI, knowledge and mental models (12:00)
4. How AI will shape the future of games (14:08)
5. The infrastructure and engineering challenges of running massive AI models in the Cloud (22:17)

Workplace transformation has never been more important than now, in this time of crisis. So what does it take to build and sustain a culture that is not only innovative and creative, but capable handling constant reinvention? Is the fact that it is difficult and uncomfortable, the very reason we should do it anyway? Dr Adam Fraser is a human performance researcher and consultant who studies how organizations adopt a high performance culture to thrive in this challenging and evolving business landscape. He is the author of Strive: Embracing the gift of struggle and The Third Space: Using Life's Little Transitions to find Balance and Happiness.

Austin Grossman is one of my favorite authors. His books (including my personal recommendation, ‘Crooked’) typically reveal an alternate version of the reality you thought you were living in. Given that, his side gig as a design consultant to the video games and mixed reality industry makes total sense. Most recently, he also served as Director of Interactive Design at Magic Leap. We spoke about the emergence of XR (or extended reality), and the challenges of creating content and telling stories in multiple dimensions. According to Grossman, at Magic Leap, they often spoke of preparing for a future world ‘without screens’. So, just how far are we from that world of augmented experiences, and what will it mean for brands and storytellers when we get there?