A few years ago, I stood up at an Economist Corporate Network event in Tokyo, surrounded by executives from some of the best-known companies in the world. And the entire session was about one thing: how to avoid being disrupted.

I couldn't sit still for that. So I said it out loud: somewhere in Tokyo, right now, there's a parallel event happening. A room full of people talking about how to disrupt every business represented in this room. Why on earth should we just stand for that? We should be disrupting them.

That's the whole premise of my book, Disrupt or Be Disrupted. And it's the reason I brought it to my CEO Roundtable last week at The Peninsula Tokyo — not as a lecture, but as a lively, provocative discussion and debate. Forty minutes of pushback, real case studies, and at one point, a room full of chief executives trying to figure out, live, how they'd take down Rolex.

Here's what stuck with me.

Disruption is a strategic offensive weapon used to dominate a market. It's not an accident, and it's not polite — not even in Japan. If you want unconditional love, get a dog. Disruption repels as much as it attracts. But it's also the only real path to rapid growth. Show me a business that grew fast without disrupting something, and I'll show you the exception, not the rule.

One executive in the room pushed back hard on risk. He had a client — a major automotive company — whose big disruptive bet, a fully electric platform, had just blown up. Expensive, public, painful. Fair question: how do you take that kind of risk without wrecking the business?

My answer: innovation has a brutal failure rate, full stop. Most good ideas don't work. That's not a bug, that's the cost of admission. But staying conventional carries its own failure rate — it's just slower, and quieter, so it's easier to ignore. Treat disruption like a portfolio. Some businesses go all-in. Others carve out ten, maybe twenty percent for the new bets. Either way, if you're optimizing to avoid failure, you will never innovate. I've told clients before: put up an award for the best idea that didn't work.

Then there's the Trojan horse.

One entrepreneur in the room has spent decades bringing disruptive products into Japan — including one of the first C.B.D. brands in the country. When his brand got invited into a major airport and into department stores, they didn't invite him to open a C.B.D. shop. They invited him to open something food-related. So he built one of Japan's first vegan restaurants — with almost no intention of selling vegan food. The whole point was to package C.B.D. inside something the market, and his own organization, could accept. No cannabis imagery anywhere. Nobody sees a cannabis company. They see a wellness company.

That's the real lesson for anyone trying to disrupt inside a large, cautious organization. You don't announce it. You wrap it in something familiar, and you let people discover what's actually inside.

And here's the piece that mattered most for anyone doing business in Japan. Someone in the room called out that Japanese caution gets misread constantly. Japanese has far more precise language for uncertainty than English does — the capacity to weigh risk is already there. What's usually missing is the communication of it. Tell people clearly what's known, what isn't, and what to prepare for, and the resistance drops. I'd go further: what looks like risk aversion is often an acute sense of personal responsibility. Stop fighting that instinct. Use it.

Then we ran the exercise. I asked the room: if you wanted to disrupt Rolex — kill it — how would you do it? Someone said go after the wholesalers, cut the distribution. Someone else pointed to Swiss luxury watchmaker Odemar Peegay, disrupting through service, not product — private boutiques where owning the watch doesn't even guarantee you get in the door. And someone else nailed the emotional core of it: customers willing to pay full price, standing on a waiting list, saying, give me my damn watch.

That's disruption. It's not abstract. It's specific, it's personal, and it's aimed at exactly the thing your competitor is most proud of.

So here's the challenge I'll leave you with, the same one I left the room with. Somewhere, right now, someone is thinking about how to disrupt your business.

The only real question is whether you get there first.

My book Disrupt or be Disrupted is available on Amazon. The link's in the description.