Dare to Disrupt
A Playbook for Transformational Business Growth
An illuminating business book, Dare to Disrupt charts a course for corporate innovation.
Brendan P. Keegan’s instructive business book Dare to Disrupt is a blueprint for transforming a business.
About innovating, besting competitors, and attaining exponential growth, the book introduces a formula for scaling up a business and achieving sustainable success. It is systematic, its work built upon eight pillars, including leadership, intelligence, and fearlessness. Ideas about transformation and overcoming fear, uncertainty, and doubt are used to make a case for disruption. There’s also direction for building a scalability plan, identifying opportunities for market diversification, and executing a go-to-market strategy. Throughout, core points are repeated for maximum impact, though some are referenced with excessive frequency.
Some of the related examples are familiar, as with nods to Netflix, to Nike signing Michael Jordan, and to the collapse of Bed Bath & Beyond as a case study of the peril of staying the course in an evolving marketplace. Others, such as a reference to General Motors adjusting to the electric vehicle market, are more piquing. Advice is mined from both the successes and failures of various companies: Strategic plans are needed to make visions a reality, the book says, and the fear of losing can be a great motivator. And the book even goes afield of business examples at times, as with a reference to a quarterback who ended up competing in the Super Bowl despite having been the last draft pick, which is used to argue that it takes the right people to make systems work.
Keegan draws upon personal experience as well, referencing his participation in taking Merchants Fleet from a $500-million-a-year company to a $2.5-billion-a-year company and selling it for ten times its initial value. He addresses corporate functions and names practices to emulate, moving beyond the book’s more general guidance to suggest behaviors like being an active listener when speaking to one’s clients, partners, and employees. Even Keegan’s recapitulations of daily processes like Zoom meetings are made engaging thanks to his active storytelling; of connecting to coworkers during pandemic shutdowns, he writes, “We knew our people were hurting and needed to feel connected and listened to and understood and lifted up, and it was our responsibility to make that happen as best we could.” Everything works toward the book’s succinct ending, in which its key lessons are revisited in addition to reminders of particular success stories.
An illuminating business book, Dare to Disrupt charts a course for innovation, showing how to shake up a market, outperform competitors, and attain transformational success.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
