CHAPTER 1

THE DNA OF THE BOLD ONES

In 1991, Sony announced a partnership with Nintendo. The two companies agreed to create a world-changing video game masterpiece, combining both their areas of expertise into one, powerhouse, Japanese-engineered console.

For Sony, this was a timid step into a new venture. Previously, the company had looked down on video gaming as a notch beneath its highbrow electronics company. To the staunch businessmen running the top of Sony, video games were simply “toys, so why on earth would they join the toy business?”¹

But after much negotiation with Nintendo, and after consulting with a bold man who happened to work for both of them—Ken Kutaragi—they’d been talked into it. They would dive into the business of child playthings. And they were going to do it with the number one video game company in the world, Nintendo. Sony announced the partnership at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago on May 28, 1991.²

That was Tuesday.

On Wednesday, everything changed.

Nintendo had other plans. It reversed course without warning. It was ditching its agreement, and Sony, altogether. Instead, it was going to go with one of Sony’s foreign competitors—the Dutch company, Philips. It’s no wonder that many speculate Sony’s next move was purely out of revenge.

Kutaragi, the individual who’d been partially responsible for pushing for the partnership, was working for Sony but moonlighting for Nintendo simultaneously. He stood up in a Sony meeting that was designed to kill off the video game console idea entirely. He looked directly at Sony’s CEO, Norio Ohga, and he asked the one question that changed video game history:

Are you going to sit back and accept what Nintendo did to us?

Game on.

Sony started the PS/X project, and the result was the first CD-ROM–based game console, the PlayStation. The second version, the PlayStation 2, would go on to sell over 155 million consoles, becoming the most popular game console ever created.³

Kutaragi’s question sparked a Japanese business war—and changed the history of video gaming.

Kutaragi was in the right place at the right time, but his attendance was built on decades of tinkering, of hammering away with an engineering mind.

Far away from the hotbed of Japanese electronics, he’d been interested in engineering and mechanics since childhood, taking apart various mechanisms in his house, no doubt to the chagrin of his parents.

After college, he chose Sony because he saw it as the most “creative.” When the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, he did what he’d always done since childhood; he took it apart, piece by piece, asking himself, How can I improve this?

His interest in electronics—along with his drive for innovation—would become a cornerstone throughout his career.

Legend has it that Kutaragi stayed up at all hours of the night to finish the first Sony PlayStation. In fact, he’d supposedly been working on it before Sony gave him the green light. He just couldn’t help himself.

Kutaragi’s interest kept pushing him to tinker. His courage kept enabling him to challenge the status quo: He did a side job for Nintendo, while employed at Sony, a move that almost got him fired. Later he challenged the executives at Sony to enter the video game space; many told him that “it’s a terrible idea.” And later he pushed Sony to broker a deal with Nintendo to enter into a new space. When that fell through, he told Sony to go it alone.

Kutaragi’s idea kept him up at night, working in his basement. Then his willingness to speak against the status quo allowed him to partner with exactly the company he needed to develop what would become the world’s greatest video game console.

What if that young engineer, Kutaragi, hadn’t been willing to pursue his passion projects? Then what if he hadn’t had the boldness to challenge the status quo thinking of his bosses at Sony?

THE BOLD ONES

The PlayStation’s dominance sounds like the epitome of a timeless tale—an innovative upstart has an idea, and maybe some technical chops. Frequently such people overcome organizational obstacles, conquer their own failures, and even rise above their socioeconomic status. The reward of their perseverance is often total upheaval of a company, an industry, or even a country—in a word, they disrupt.

We can glance around and find these innovators everywhere.

In politics, there’s Margaret Thatcher, who stepped into a world of men, took on a country in economic recession, and challenged a mentality trending toward softness. She danced on their sexism and overthrew their agendas. In sports, there’s Steph Curry, whose three-point style upended everything incumbents thought they knew about basketball. In video entertainment, there’s Mr. Beast, who invested millions of dollars into each of his YouTube videos and catapulted himself into fame. The military has Julius Caesar and Kublai Khan. The arts has Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo. History discusses Rosa Parks, Galileo, and Cleopatra.

In every time period, every industry, every corner of our society, disruptors have tinkered, have destroyed, and have risen. You can hate them, love them, vilify them, or idolize them. But you can’t write a history book without them.

Gone or still with us, playboys or scientists, engineers or consultants, day workers or doctors, influencers or artists, lawyers or software developers, they all have some things in common:

For one, they’re unafraid.

They challenge incumbents, dismiss traditional thinking, and reinvent themselves. No matter where they go, whether into an office, a prison cell, or their own enterprise, they change everything.

I call them Bold Ones.

Bold Ones are those who are brave enough to fundamentally reinvent themselves, challenge norms, and revolutionize their worlds. Bold Ones think, act, and build for a future they see, one that others close their eyes to. They form their own understanding, confront ingrained ideas, innovate toward the future, and evolve in their careers.

Not only are these Bold Ones ready for change, but they actively anticipate it, adapt as necessary, and even create change themselves. They take advantage of new technologies, marketplace crashes, geographical changes, and political opportunities to disrupt their own fields and cement lasting legacies.

And here’s the kicker: The Bold Ones of the past left us all the breadcrumbs, ideas in the dark, secrets on the wall. Buried within their sometimes seemingly erratic or random successes, they gave us all a map to our own disruptive future.

In this book, I want to expose you to those secrets, those breadcrumbs, through stories, experiences, ideas, tactics, and strategies, so you can innovate on your own, right where you are, and begin to flex your disruptive muscles.

THE ERA OF THE ONES

Disruption is a common topic in modern professional circles. From finance to software to healthcare to consumer packaged goods, we’ve all heard the stories of Blockbuster, Kodak, and Netflix. Every time, the story reads like a script: “Once-successful incumbent moves slow; fast-moving upstart defeats incumbent.” There’s no lesson conveyed, no depth of imagination.

The deeper story—the “disruption conversation”—feels reserved for the few established leaders who run empires and protect institutions. In this way, the message portrayed is only “thought leaders” can show other “thought leaders” how to protect traditionalism from Bold Ones, defend against disruption, and overcome the fallout.

That script is tired, the narrator is missing the point, and the audience is all wrong.

I want to (finally) flip the script, uncover the truth, and speak to a new breed of people. Because the truth is there, lurking—there are lessons to be learned, ideas to be copied, and processes to be replicated. Don’t worry; we’ll get to all that.

But first, let me say this about the audience: It’s time for a reorientation. Let’s change who we’re talking to about disruption.

Let’s start the conversation by talking directly to the individuals—you and me—who can truly create tomorrow’s industries.

Every company seems to concern itself with defending against a Kutaragi upset, a new entrant like LIV Golf, a Warby Parker play, or (insert your favorite disruptive story here). But what if we changed the conversation and started embracing the Kutaragis of the world? In fact, what if we, the ones sitting in the offices, doing the work, feeling the changes, actually became the disruptors?

The next true disruption isn’t going to happen in an office of traditionalism anyway, so let’s bring the conversation out into the streets.

The next person who disrupts the accounting world will be a solo accountant. The next big media entity will be one person with a mic. The next game-changing venture capitalist will be a solo operator. When someone rethinks factory floor plans to create a speedier, safer, and more efficient production method, that person will have a first and last name without the suffix of “incorporated.”

In his book Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi says it like this: “For much of the last 150 years of economic history, the smartest people gravitated to where the money was. The money, today, is looking for where the smartest people are.”

No longer are individuals attaching themselves to companies; companies are attaching themselves to individuals.

Today we have an entire industry called the “creator economy,” brands built around personalities that attract real people and real dollars. In 1984, when the Chicago Bulls rookie Michael Jordan signed a $500,000, five-year shoe deal with Nike, it was shocking. Rookies simply didn’t get that kind of deal. Today it’s a no-brainer. I advise some companies in the direct-to-consumer space, and their primary method of customer acquisition is leveraging individuals like Michael Jordan to gain market share. Not advertisements, not billboards, but individuals. Because individuals hold all the power. That’s why you have YouTubers such as Logan Paul or the Nelk Boys who can create their own consumer packaged goods companies, or why solo writers like Ben Thompson are generating millions through their own blogs. It’s why Udemy instructors like Rob Percival are making seven figures teaching kids how to code, and finance TikTok stars have lucrative financial planning businesses.

We are living in the Era of the Ones.

INSIDE OR OUT—YOU MUST INNOVATE

Let’s clarify something from the jump: being a Bold One doesn’t mean we must, or even should, all become solo flights of brave entrepreneurism. That life may be for some, but for most of us, the best path forward is to start innovating right where we are, inside our offices, within our companies. That’s another reason Kutaragi’s story offers such fresh insight—today when people are in a rush to start their own business, Kutaragi reminds us that innovation can happen not just in spite of, but within, an incumbency.

The resources, feedback, and collaboration that institutions provide are invaluable catalysts for disruptors. Bold Ones take advantage of these resources to accelerate their ideas and give legs to the future.

When Kutaragi pushed the PlayStation, he wasn’t just saving himself, but the company he worked for. And it’s a good thing he did; the PlayStation would go on to deliver 90 percent of Sony’s profits for several years.

You aren’t just a small cog in the wheel of your company’s future—you may be the solution their survival.

When you become a Bold One, you find fulfillment. You stop thinking that somewhere else will make you better. You realize that anywhere you go, you can make it better.

Inside or outside, innovators push the envelope. The point isn’t where they are; it’s what they have on the inside—a desperate need to upset the status quo. You may be a speechwriter wanting to bring honesty into the political spectrum, an electrician hoping to utilize modern project management processes, or a corporate buyer wanting to overhaul your distribution model.

Sometime around 500 BC the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The only constant in life is change.” The ancient world did evolve, but to modern humanity, it evolved annoyingly slowly. It took nearly two millennia before a printer was invented that could mass-produce Heraclitus’s words into books. Yet from the time the printing press was invented, it only took half a millennium before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the book that defined evolutionary biology. And only a century after that, Peter Diamandis keenly added to Heraclitus’s words, noting, “The only constant is change,” but now “The rate of change is increasing exponentially.”

Change always occurs more quickly than some are ready for, which is the definition of disruption: a change that occurs so rapidly that it displaces the unprepared. The only difference between our world and Heraclitus’s is that disruption now occurs at a rate never before anticipated.

Entire industries, such as banking and software, are converging, creating new marketplaces and displacing others. Modern technologies, such as artificial intelligence and Web3, are spreading across the entire globe to the most distant corners, driving adoption in countries that don’t even have access to clean water. Roles such as content creation and sales are combining to create new jobs, requiring skills that academia is struggling to understand, much less teach. Individuals with established tenure are demanding flexibility and lifestyle changes, leaving organizations at an unprecedented rate to reinvent their own careers and lifestyles.

In their individual workplace, future disruptors may be unable to articulate exactly what’s happening, but they can feel it nonetheless. You may not have the words, but like the pull of an undercurrent before it’s visible from the shore, you can sense that the waters are changing.

If you want to redefine an industry, or if you simply want to get your boss to listen to you about a small change, there are two keys you will need to unlock your own inner disruptor.

The first is an insatiable need to innovate.

Let’s revisit Kutaragi. Well before his foray into video game technology, he’d bumped up into the firewall of the status quo. After working on an early LCD screen and a floppy disk, Kutaragi kept pushing the envelope, wanting more creative, futuristic projects. He found the edge of what his company’s mindset would allow, and asked one too many questions. (Once, a coworker even told him, “You must never say that at Sony.”⁴)

How Kutaragi landed the side gig at Nintendo is the stuff of legend: Apparently Nintendo called Sony because Nintendo needed help with the sound engineering for the audio chip inside the Super NES. Kutaragi happened to answer the phone. He said yes to the request, and without asking for permission, he worked on the project in secret. He just couldn’t help himself.

When Misty Copeland took her first ballet class, she’d missed the normal timetable to become a good, much less a great, ballerina. Plus, she didn’t look like most of the others in ballet classes. But she didn’t care—she kept practicing anyway, until she eventually became the first black prima ballerina in the American Ballet Theater’s 75-year history.

When Volodymyr Zelensky decided it was time to change Ukraine’s politics, it didn’t matter that he was simply an actor who played a president on TV. He just had to make a move.

Bold Ones are haunted by one unstoppable thought: “I don’t want to get left behind.”

If you’re reading this book, you probably have something inside of you—something that’s screaming about innovation. You may feel intimidated or exhilarated, but you can hear the internal ghost screaming, “Innovate or die.”⁵

If that’s you, I know a little how you feel. That’s exactly how I’ve felt for a long time.

MY STORY

When I began my 12-year stint at Deloitte, I started in accounting. After a couple of years, I transferred to management consulting, where I had the chance to advise leading organizations and governments.

I immediately recognized that my colleagues at Deloitte gave every single deliverable and pitch with old-school PowerPoint decks, complete with lackluster visuals and a laser pointer. Seriously, we’ve been doing this for decades? I thought.

I considered asking if we could update our deliverable method. But while I had great bosses who typically gave me a long leash, I could just “feel” that questioning wouldn’t go over well.

So I didn’t ask.

I just jumped.

Instead of the nearly templatized decks my cohorts used, I leaned on my visual chops and created film documentaries for my clients to offer a stunning visual appeal. I also used my personal credit card to purchase new hardware and software. I bought video equipment and a Mac. I tapped my own network to develop digital prototypes. I used crowdsourcing and freelance marketplaces to create prototypes and develop other assets. Bold? Yes. But did I get in trouble? No. Here’s a secret I discovered early on about innovation:

Bosses don’t say, “I was wrong.” They say, “We were right.”

When you make a bold bet and others love it, bosses celebrate you and take part in the congratulations, as if the idea were their own.

Over time, employees frequently requested to join my team, and clients started coming to the firm specifically asking for me. I challenged old-school thinking wherever I found it.

At one point my team was talking about hosting a business roundtable and inviting innovative movers and shakers from across the continent. When we were discussing who the participants would be, I blurted out, “Let’s get the premier.”⁶ My colleagues looked at me as if I were insane, but I called the premier anyway. And she agreed to come.

What next? I thought.

I cold-called Apple.

This was 2013, and Apple wanted to flex one of its latest disruptive technologies—the iPad—for the business world. Wanting to be part of the action, Apple immediately mailed a ton of its hottest iPads to be featured at the event, pro bono.

I soon built a reputation for moving fast, and not always asking permission. The firm’s partners were fairly agreeable, but don’t worry—I still managed to ruffle feathers a few times. Once, after a particularly bold move, one of the managing partners called me to simply say, “Just give me a heads-up next time before you do anything crazy.”

Alongside my work at Deloitte, I continued to explore new frontiers. I teamed up with outside colleagues to launch a film production group, Nelson Spooner Productions. Although our films won just three local awards, being part of the process allowed me to fall in love with video. In 2013, I also cofounded a mobile application firm that created a couple of brief but buzzworthy apps (Pressmoi and Roman).

At Deloitte I eventually moved into the role of senior manager within strategy, where innovation became my brand. Third-party companies started inviting me to speak at conferences across the globe on innovation and disruption strategy.

By 2018, I’d left Deloitte and dedicated my time to speaking and advising companies on disruption. But the turning point really came in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. By then I was giving close to 60 keynotes a year, but overnight, conferences were universally canceled.

My team and I seized the moment by asking a simple, bold question: “How do we create the best virtual keynote anyone has ever seen?”

Using the Myer Horowitz Theatre in Edmonton, and my understanding of videography and visual appeal, my team reinvented the look and feel of a virtual keynote. We managed to give more keynotes in 2020 than in any year prior. We did it again in 2021.

Why does it matter? As I’ve traveled the globe, connecting with hundreds of CEOs and frontline workers, sitting in hundreds of boardrooms, and meeting with creators at every level, here’s what I can tell you:

Bold Ones are everywhere.

They’re sitting in cubicles, creating spreadsheets. They’re pouring steamed milk into coffee at Starbucks. They’re typing away at their laptop sitting in the lobby. They’re at a boardroom meeting listening to the same pitch they heard last year, knowing it’s exactly what will put their company into a “has-been, once-was” category. They can feel the tides turning. If you can feel it too, let me tell you:

It’s because you have what it takes to be a Bold One.

You just need permission, and a path forward.

I’ve been studying the world’s greatest disruptors—innovators who were unafraid to challenge ideas, create new processes, and even sacrifice their own reputations to do so. They pop up everywhere, since humanity’s genesis: from Joan of Arc to Hasan Minhaj, from Madame Curie to Elon Musk, from Copernicus to Lil Nas X, from Angela Merkel to Queen Elizabeth. I’ve learned something: They all left clues.

If we refuse to accept these examples as one-in-a-million David-and-Goliath triumphs, we can put their individual stories together to create a map, one that will lead us to individual success.

Galileo taught us to challenge incumbent thinking. Shakespeare showed how to democratize the arts. Oprah Winfrey demonstrated how to create a voice more powerful than an incumbent media company.

In this book, I’ve distilled these lessons into eight main paths, trailblazed by eight of the world’s unlikeliest innovators. We’ll explore history’s heroes and villains; we’ll learn from artists and scientists, the living and the dead, businesses and athletes, intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs.

Each chapter will open by highlighting the Bold One. Then I’ll guide you through how we can emulate their strategy in our own roles and society.

FROM AUBREY TO DRAKE

I’ve always been fascinated with individual disruptors—people that could change their industries forever. In one of my first presentations on disruption back in 2014, I dissected a rapper’s rise, and I asked the audience a simple question about them: “Was he truly disruptive?”

He broke records set by the Beatles and Michael Jackson, at one point claiming 9 out of the 10 top songs in the country.⁷ He beat out Rihanna and Madonna—having created 54 top-10 hits. He’s performed alongside legends such as 2 Chainz, Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne, outselling artists like Tupac and Eminem.

His parents called him Aubrey Graham, but you probably know him as Drake.

Drake didn’t grow up in a hip-hop haven like Los Angeles, New York City, or Dallas—he grew up in Toronto, Canada (a fellow Canadian!). He didn’t even start out in music.

In 2001, his million-watt smile landed him a role on Degrassi: The Next Generation, where he was making a decent living, at about $40,000 a year. As it turned out, it wasn’t what Drake was doing during the day that mattered, but what he was doing under the shadows of the moonlight.

While on the phone with his imprisoned father, his dad’s cellmate started rapping for Drake, who started jotting down lyrics in response. That lyrical moment ignited a fire. As GQ put it in 2013, “He dropped out of high school, acted all day, and rapped all night.” He released Room for Improvement in 2006, with 23 tracks on it, while still working at Degrassi.

The rest is history, still in the making,

One day, he was a Canadian actor with charisma and good looks. The next, he was one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time.

Earlier we discussed the first of two keys you need to start your own journey to innovation, to becoming a Bold One. The first one was an insatiable desire to innovate.

Now we define the second key. It’s one you’ll need to access again and again as you turn these pages—it’s your own hidden desire, the skill you have that you aren’t quite showcasing to the world, the one thing you really want to pursue. The wild idea that eats in your brain, “like a splinter in your mind,”⁸ while you’re sending in reports, attending Zoom meetings, and finalizing project documents.

Your true passion may be in the role you’re currently in, or it could be in an adjacent category, or perhaps it’s in something else altogether. I’ve met insurance brokers locked into a nine-to-five who are Googling “Ethereum” on their lunch break, lawyers who have a diehard passion for real estate, and rocket scientists who are fascinated with the beer made in distilleries.

That thing you’re Googling, that quirky interest you have, isn’t an accident. When you’re diving into those Reddit forums or Discord servers, your innovative gene is calling out. It’s a not-so-hidden desire to disrupt, and it’s itching for expression. That draw to a new technology or process, or something that can’t be explained just yet, is the connecting point between your uniqueness and the future. It’s a convergence of today’s technology, coming trends, and your unique makeup.

THE BOLD ONES

Take one more look at the names of history’s Bold Ones. Remember that they’re names of people, not companies. That matters to you and to me. We are real people, with real names, with real gifts, talents, and unique views of the marketplace based on our geographies, our experiences, our clients, and our skill sets.

You already have the DNA of a disruptor, and here’s how I know: Those nights when you’ve stayed up late designing a business model or researching a new technology prove it. So do those times when you bite your tongue at work. Or those moments when you daydream about how a fresh idea could upend your industry. If you’ve felt the waters shifting, then you have something in common with a Bold One.

I want to give your internal desire the chance to express itself.

If you don’t find a way to express your creativity, someone else will. You’ll watch as the marketplace changes and leaves you behind. You’ll never execute on that genius plan you had. You’ll never speak to your boss about how your company could revolutionize the way it does business. I already know you’re thinking about making a move—in April 2021, about 4 million people in the United States quit their jobs voluntarily. The largest share of them (after retail) were professionals, working in offices, listening to bosses, clocking in at nine and leaving (maybe) by five. I’m willing to bet the top reason they left is because they’re unfulfilled. They’re searching for something. I don’t think the solution can be found in the simple act of quitting. I think what moves people in our modern world of work is the desire to be great. To achieve. To disrupt and stand out.

When you become a Bold One, you find fulfillment. You stop thinking that somewhere else will make you better. You realize that anywhere you go, you can make it better.

I hope this book gives you the inspiration, the courage, and the pathway to disrupt your field. I want you to feel confident that your ideas are the next big ones. I want you to speak up at your next meeting and offer an insight to your bosses that only you can see. I want you to reinvent your field right where you are, whether in a corporate office or in a coffee shop. I want the incumbents to pay attention to you, the individual, because that’s where the next great idea will come from. I want you to become the next Bold One.

Let’s get bold.

SECRETS OF THE BOLD ONES