Disruption is no longer a once-in-a-career problem to be dealt with. It's a constant cycle. Technology is increasingly creating the tools your competitors - incumbents and entrepreneurs alike - are using to build new digital products and services that target and release latent demand and serve unmet needs. The authors, senior leaders at Accenture, call that potential revenue 'trapped value' - and they argue that if you don't get to it before others, you may find not just your future growth disrupted, but your current business as well.

Accelerating technological improvements have changed the speed with which new innovations penetrate markets. Graphed over time, the market adoption of innovations now resembles a dramatic shark fin--a dangerously deformed version of the classic bell-curve model of diffusion. Two forces have compressed the bell curve: near-instant market saturation by new products and the rapid obsolescence of digital components. As a result, many companies struggle to find new sources of revenue after a big-bang success. The authors describe seven mistakes that make enterprises--incumbent businesses as well as start-ups--highly vulnerable to such flameouts: (1) The company is too lean. (2) Its capital structure is built to fail. (3) It has lost its founder. (4) It's overserving investors. (5) It "won the lottery" by getting lucky with a big-bang disrupter. (6) It's held captive by regulators. (7) It anticipates customers who don't exist. They offer some tactics for ensuring that your business is a second-act survivor: Abandon the successful product before it runs out of steam. Build a platform, not a product. Turn your initial product into a service. Invest in or acquire nascent disrupters.

To survive over the long haul, a company must reinvent itself periodically, jumping from the flattening end of one business performance curve to the rising slope of another. Very few companies make the leap successfully when the time comes. That's because they start the reinvention process too late. Once existing business begins to stall and revenue growth drops significantly, a company has less than a 10% chance of ever fully recovering. Accenture's Nunes and Breene, reporting on the results of their long-running High Performance Business research program, point to a striking difference between companies that have successfully reinvented themselves and those that failed. High performers manage their businesses not just along the growth curve of their revenues but also along three much shorter, though equally important, S curves: tracking the basis of competition in their industry, renewing their capabilities, and nurturing a ready supply of talent. By planting the seeds for new businesses before revenues from existing ones begin to stall, these companies enjoy sustained high performance.