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When Piyush Gupta took over as the CEO of DBS Bank in Singapore in 2009, he said DBS needed to think of itself not as a bank, but as a technology company providing banking services. Gupta challenged his entire workforce to raise their innovation game. Gupta and his team invested significantly in technology, restructured to improve collaboration, and, most critically, drove a series of cultural interventions to encourage innovation friendly behaviors. Over the next 15 years DBS Bank transformed from an under performer in its local market to the best performing bank in the world. How did Gupta and other leaders who look to foster innovation do it? As a researcher, advisor, (DBS was a consulting client of mine from 2017 to 2019), executive, and now teacher, I have spent 25 years practicing and studying disruptive change. Here are some essential takeaways for nurturing disruptive teams. Recognize the importance of teamwork Innovation stories typically celebrate charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. That sometimes leaves leaders thinking they have to carry the reins of disruption, or need to find a lone genius to drive disruption. Innovation isnt the job of the few. Its highly dependent on teamwork. For example, in the 1960s, Procter & Gamble launched Pampers disposable diapers, which went on to become the first brand in P&Gs storied history to cross $10 billion in revenue. Vic Mills (a decorated scientist) chartered a team led by Bob Duncan (whose grandfather played a key part in the development of Tide laundry detergent) that included researchers like Harry Tecklenburg, who went on to have a 30-year career at P&G and wrote a wonderful retrospective about the launch of Pampers in 1990. The job of the leader isnt to be charismatic and do the work alone, it is to create conditions that enable teams to do disruptive work. Embrace uncertainty One key to success is to recognize that disruption is predictably unpredictable. Julia Childs 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking enabled a broader population to enjoy French dishes. Her pioneering cooking shows on television further brought cooking to the masses. Her story echoes every disruptive journey I have studied. Most notably, success required overcoming false starts, fumbles, and failures. She started working on Mastering the Art (with coauthors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) in 1951. The goal was to publish the book in 1953. It took an extra eight years, two publisher switches, and one stinging rejection in 1959 that almost killed the project. While you cant predict the specific path a disruptive innovation will follow, you can predict there will be twists and turns along the way. That means that leaders need to make sure that their environments accept and encourage the kind of intelligent failure that accompanies disruptive success. Celebrate failure Disruptions predictable unpredictability also means leaders need to make sure that their environments accept and encourage the kind of intelligent failure that accompanies disruptive success. One technique that can help is to have a formal ceremony to celebrate failure. Thats what Finnish gaming company Supercell does. Every time a team successfully launches a new game, everyone gets together, and cracks open a beer. Every time a team admits defeat and decides to shut down a project, everyone gets together and pops a bottle of champagne. The reward for the failure is greater than the reward for success. Saying cheers to failure has two clear benefits. First, it shows that a good, not bad, thing has happened, encouraging other teams to continue to push frontiers. Second, it shows that the effort is finished. Many organizations suffer from what I call zombie projects. The walking undead. Projects that everyone knows will not move the needle but they shuffle and linger on, sucking all of the life out of the organization. Zombies exist because failure carries such a stigma that organizations avoid killing projects. Saying cheers to failure stops zombies from ever spawning and allows teams to move onto the next projectwhich might actually be the disruptive innovation for which your company has been searching. Accept risk Pursuing disruption is risky. The first reference to gunpowder appears in the book The Kinship of the Three in 142 CE. Its development over the centuries involved alchemists, blacksmiths, peasants, gunners, philosophers, and scientists. There were farmers and fighters experimenting with different uses. There were leaders allocating time and money and directing work. As one historian noted, success required the work of daredevils, visionaries, madmen, many of whom found not fortune but disfiguring burns and death. The burns are more metaphorical todaydoubts from colleagues, the pain of a hypothesis proved wrong, the discomfort that always accompanies doing something newbut they still sting. Doing new things is hard. Having things not work out as expected is painful. Disruptive innovators question the status quo. Some people inside organizations love it, some are indifferent to it, some actively seek to subvert or sabotage it. Disruption casts a shadow. When you see someone in your organization who is pushing disruption, encourage them. Celebrate their courage, and tell them how much you appreciate their work. Its a small thing, but big things come from a collection of small things.
Category:
E-Commerce
There are many regional terms for a submarine-shaped sandwich. One of them is hero. On Monday, as President Trump ordered 800 National Guard troops to descend upon the streets of Washington, D.C., plenty of social media users were using that termnot to describe such a sandwich, but the man who wielded it. A viral video taken in D.C. over the weekend shows a man in a jaunty pink button-up and north-of-the-knee white shorts confronting heavily armed federal officers. He appears at first bouncing in and out of a slight crouch, his head swaying from side to side, looking spectacularly undaunted by the agents all around him. Its unclear what he is saying, though a longer video shows the man ranting about fascism moments before the confrontation, so its easy to imagine what he may have been saying. Soon enough, the man pulls back his arm to reveal, incredibly, an as-yet unglimpsed footlong Subway sub. He hurls the enormous sandwich at one of the officers, right in the chest, before breaking into a flat run. The video ends with the extremely confident, questionably athletic man seeming to evade capture, though subsequent photos suggest he was later apprehended. The federal takeover of D.C. is something Trump had been threatening since at least August 5, after a former member of DOGEEd Big Balls Coristinewas beaten up by two 15-year olds in an attempted carjacking. If D.C. doesnt get its act together, and quickly, the president wrote on Truth Social following the attack, We will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that theyre not going to get away with it anymore. Considering hed previously dispatched National Guard troops to Los Angeles just two months ago, it was clear this was no idle threat. Sure enough, Trump eventually sent agents from the DEA, FBI, and ATF into the city late last week, ahead of Mondays press conference announcing a deployment of the National Guard and his taking control of the Metropolitan police department, putting its 3,100 officers under his direct command for at least 30 days. For much of Monday, social media users shared surreal footage of DEA officers in tactical gear patrolling the leafy walkway of the National Mall as joggers jogged by. It served as a counterpoint to the doomsday dirge on conservative media, with one GOP senator after another talking about how unsafe and scary they find Washington, D.C. The emerging footage seemed to instead reflect data collected by the Metropolitan police department showing that violent crime in the city last year was down 35% from 2023, and at its lowest level in over 30 years. And that was before Bluesky and Reddit got a better look at some of that violent criminal elementin the form of assault with a hoagie. Thats when the jokes and memes began. guys its really not funny that the fbi agent took a footlong to the chest. stop laughing. its NOT FUNNY that an fbi agent in head to toe tactical gear tried to chase the guy who hucked a sandwich straight at his bulletproof vest but couldnt outrun him— rax levon honkers king (@raxkingisdead.bsky.social) 2025-08-11T23:20:39.021Z Oh no! Is the sub all right?— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-08-12T00:21:47.876Z Most social media users werent necessarily cheering for the battery of police officers, but rather admiring the assailants fearlessness and laughing at his choice of projectile. Beaning an authority figure with a footlong sub, after all, seems more like a means of conveying disrespect and creating a spectacle than inflicting injury. In any case, whether because the man gave voice to their own lack of respect toward the deployed feds, or just because it gave them a much-needed laugh, users on Bluesky and Reddit quickly elevated Footlong Guy to folk hero statusa sort of non-homocidal Luigi Mangione, or way-less violent Waymo-destoyer. to every generation is born a folk hero who will perfectly channel the will of the people. his weapon will be harmless, even laughable, like say for example a shoe, or a footlong sub,— alix e. harrow (@alixeharrow.bsky.social) 2025-08-12T00:35:35.213Z
Category:
E-Commerce
The AI search startup Perplexity has tendered an unsolicited offer to buy Googles Chrome browser for $34.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. The bid comes as the Justice Department has asked a federal judge to require Google to sell off Chrome to end an ongoing antitrust case. But its questionable that a startup valued at half that amount on paper ($18 billion) can afford to buy Chrome; and Google, of course, almost certainly has no intention of selling itat least not yet. (Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.) A federal court in Washington, D.C., decided last year that Google holds a monopoly in the internet search and advertising markets and is now considering a Department of Justice demand that the search giant sell off its Chrome browser. Google called the DOJ proposal wildly overbroad and part of a radical interventionist agenda (language that could draw some negative attention from the Trump administration). Perplexity testified in that same case last spring, at which time it expressed a desire to buy Chrome. OpenAI also testified, and its ChatGPT product lead, Nick Turley, testified that his company would be interested in buying Chrome if the court required Google to sell. Indeed, owning the Chrome browser would immediately catapult Perplexity from being a long shot for winning, placing, or showing in the internet search wars, to being a real contender. In theory, Perplexity could use the Chrome browser in the same way Google doesas a widely popular front door to its AI-powered search engine. “A clever publicity play” With Chrome, Google fused the ideas of web browsing and web search into one thing that could be done in one place. Chrome changed the browsers URL to act as a search bar, too (the omnibox, as it’s called). A huge portion of Google searches come from Chrome, and Google makes the lions share of its revenues from showing ads around search results. Google can place ads more effectively because of its access to all kinds of user browsing behavior in Chrome. Perplexitys bid is very likely something less than a serious strategic gambit. “This is a clever publicity play by the startup, but no one should take this stunt seriously,” says Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission and current head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute. Chilson adds that the bid will have no bearing on the remedies that Judge Amit Mehta is currently considering in the antitrust case. Perplexity is talking like it has every intention of buying Chrome. “Multiple large investment funds have agreed to finance the transaction in full, so we have a wide range of options,” the company said in a statement to Fast Company on Tuesday. “We are confident in our ability to close quickly.” Interestingly, Perplexity says it commits “never to stealthily replace the default search engine of Chrome (Google).” Perplexity is good at what it does, but still small Perplexity employs some very talented AI engineers, its answer engine product works surprisingly well by most accounts (including mine), and the company has been agile about releasing new products that augment its core service. (It recently released its own browser called Comet.) But in the face of Google Search, Perplexity is still small-fry. It serves only a fraction of internet searches and sends only a fraction of the product search referrals that go to brand websites. Perplexity looks more like a company to be acquired, not like an acquirer. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reportedly held talks to acquire Perplexity earlier this year, but an agreement couldnt be reached. It’s likely that other suitors have approached the startup. And yet the existing rules of market dominance in tech could be shifting under everyones feetbecause of generative AI. During this seminal period in the potentially transformative technology (when the next Googles and Apples may be being decided), optics matter. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas seems to have a keen sense of this. He knows he needs to keep his companys name in the conversation with other up-and-comers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as the so-called AI revolution unfolds. Hes done an admirable job of itas evidenced by his many podcasts, public appearances, and viral tweets. So Perplexitys Chrome bid may come out of the same playbook. Its about posturing. For a company of Perplexitys stature to convince consumers that it could really be the heir to Googles search throne, it may want to puff itself up to appear to belong in (roughly) the same weight class as the incumbent. Putting in an offer to buy a key piece of Googles business may serve that end.
Category:
E-Commerce
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