I recently attended the 1% Better Conference, which I think will fast become one of my favorite events of the year. The kind of gathering where you walk in thinking you know what you’re about, and walk out realizing you’ve been sleepwalking through some part of your life. But one session hit differently. Dr. DérNecia Phillips took the stage and dropped something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
She titled her talk “The Art of Disruption” and right out of the gate, she explained exactly why she put those two words together. Disruption, on its own, sounds negative. Disruptive kid in class. Disruptive employee. Something that causes problems. But art? Art is beautiful. Creative. It makes you feel something. And when you combine those two words, you’re already being challenged before Dr. Phillips even gets to her first point. That oxymoron is the whole lesson. I’ve always liked the word “disruption” I like pushing the envelope and seeing how disruption can change an entire industry or the world!
Disruption Is Not a Dirty Word
Here’s the thing nobody tells you, the people who changed the world weren’t really trying to burn it down. They were trying to build something better in its place. Dr. Phillips made this crystal clear. You’re not a disruptor just because you’re unhappy with the way things are. Complaining isn’t disruption. Criticizing from the sidelines isn’t disruption. Disruption requires something more. She laid out a three-part framework she calls the ART of Disruption, and it’s elegant in its simplicity.
First comes the Awakening. Something has to shake you out of your default thinking. It could be a moment, a conversation, a pattern you’ve been normalizing for years that suddenly makes you go “wait, why do we do it this way?” Dr. Phillips was clear that disruption has to start within yourself. Not outside. Within. You have to first change what you’re believing before you can change anything else. You have to interrupt your own assumptions.
Then comes the Response. Knowing something is wrong isn’t enough. You have to speak up about it, act on it, push toward it. Dr. Phillips called this responding “with strategic clarity.” It’s not about being unruly or creating chaos for chaos’s sake. Disruption done well is intentional. You have to be able to communicate your vision to other people. You have to be willing to say the unpopular thing, to stand up before it’s cool, buck the trends and go with your own flow. To wear that new band tee just because you like it. You can be the one person everyone else is watching while they decide whether to join in.
Then comes the Transformation. This is what separates a disruptor from a critic. You’re not just tearing something apart, you’re truly building a new alternative. Maybe it’s a new process or workflow. Maybe it’s a new company or new heavy metal musical sound! Or, maybe it’s a new school. Dr. Phillips shared her own story here, working to found what is set to become the first Black-founded school approved in the state of Nebraska, Identity Preparatory Academy, opening in fall 2026 for 4th and 5th grade girls in North Omaha. She saw a problem, a staggering 11% literacy rate for Black students in Nebraska by 8th grade, and instead of just talking about it, she started building.
Awaken. Respond. Transform. That’s the ART.
Metal Has Been Doing This Since 1970
Look, I’m a guy who’s into finance stuff. But I also have a deep love for heavy music and technology. I cannot hear a framework like this and not immediately start mapping it to the historic events in tech and metal. You may already know much of this but let’s look at it from a disruptive lens, because the genre of music I like most is, quite literally, a 50-plus-year story of disruption. And every chapter of it follows the ART model almost perfectly.
Black Sabbath: The Original Disruptors
In 1970, four guys from Birmingham, England, walked into a tiny recording studio and spent eight hours recording an album that the critics absolutely hated. Back then music and more of a psychedelic blues-rock sound. But on one Friday the 13th in February, Black Sabbath’s first album hit shelves in the U.K. and everything shifted. The rock music world was disrupted.
Rolling Stone dismissed it as just noise. Critics were scathing. And yet the public embraced it immediately. Black Sabbath is credited with creating heavy metal. The success of their first two albums marked a paradigm shift in the world of rock. Not until Black Sabbath upended the music scene did the term “heavy metal” enter the popular vocabulary to describe the denser, more thunderous offshoot of rock!
What was their awakening? They looked around at the psychedelic blues-rock dominating at the time and thought, this isn’t what we feel. They grew up in a world that felt dark and heavy and sometimes downright scary. Tony Iommi, who had lost the tips of two fingers in a factory accident, literally had to rethink how to play guitar. He tuned down, invented new techniques, and in doing so helped create a sound the world had never encountered. Their response was to put it all on record and release it regardless of what anyone thought. Their transformation? An entirely new genre of music that has spawned thousands of bands and tens of millions of fans over the past five and a half decades.
Metallica: Disrupting Disruption
If Black Sabbath created the blueprint. Metallica took it and set it on fire.
Kill ‘Em All has since been regarded as a groundbreaking album for thrash metal, because of its precise musicianship, which fused new wave of British heavy metal riffs with hardcore punk tempos. When Metallica dropped that record back in 1983, they weren’t just playing heavy music. They were playing it faster, with passion, more technically demanding than almost anyone thought was even possible! They were barely out of their teens, and they sounded like a freight train with a grudge. They disrupted the metal scene.
But their disruption didn’t stop there. Three years later, they totally leveled up in a way that shocked even their most devoted fans. On March 3, 1986, Metallica’s third album, Master of Puppets, arrived and changed heavy music at a moment when thrash metal was still dismissed by critics as noise. Metallica altered the course of thrash by channeling raw aggression through technical discipline and clear deliberate musical composition.
This is what the ART framework looks like in practice. The awakening was recognizing that speed alone wasn’t the point. The response was raising the bar with complex musical arrangements, acoustic passages, and themes about addiction, control, and manipulation that thrash metal had never touched. The transformation was when In 2015, Master of Puppets became the first metal recording to be selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” So, the United States government deemed it important enough to preserve for future generations. That is not nothing.
Pantera: Reinventing Themselves to Reinvent Metal
Here is one of my favorite disruption stories in music history, because it started from within. Pantera spent most of the 1980s playing glam metal. Yeah, with hairspray and spandex glam metal. The whole deal. And if you’ve heard those early recordings, you know they weren’t exactly setting the world on fire lol. But they were hungry, and when Phil Anselmo joined in 1986, something clicked. They had an awakening.
Because then, with Cowboys from Hell, Pantera embarked on perhaps the greatest career second act of the ’90s. They buried years of futility in hair metal, in order to rise as groove-metal leaders and arguably the biggest heavy metal band of the f’n decade.
The band is credited for developing and popularizing the subgenre of groove metal in the 1990s. With Dimebag Darrell’s guitar tone, Vinnie Paul’s thundering drums, Phil Anselmo’s guttural delivery, it was something nobody had quite heard before. Far Beyond Driven debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in 1994. A band that couldn’t get a major label deal in the glam era had become the defining and influential heavy metal act of the decade. That’s what happens when you stop trying to fit in and start building the thing only you can build. You disrupt things!
The 2000s and Beyond: Disruption Never Stops
Heavy metal kept finding new ways to shock people who thought they’d seen everything. Mastodon and Lamb of God arrived in the early 2000s and pushed the heaviness and technical complexity of the genre into territory that even hardcore fans hadn’t imagined. Gojira emerged from France with an environmentally conscious, spiritually dense sound utterly unlike anything else on the planet. A historic moment was Gojira’s performance at the Paris 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony, marking the first time a metal band played at an Olympic opening event. Let that sink in. A metal band, performing at the Olympics. That is disruption transforming an entire culture.
Spiritbox built a sound so impossible to categorize that they earned Grammy nominations and headlining festival slots before most people knew who they were. Spiritbox’s national U.S. TV debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! delivered a crushing performance of one of their heaviest songs to a mainstream audience, indicating a growing confidence in metal’s acceptance without compromising its identity.
Every single one of these stories follows the same arc. Awakening. Response. Transformation.
Silicon Valley Learned the Same Lesson
When I think about disruption as a concept it kinda blows my mind. The exact same pattern that built heavy metal into a genre spanning 50-plus years has also played out over and over in the technology industry. Different industry, same ART.
Apple in 1984: Hello, World
In January 1984, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage at a College in Cupertino, California, and pulled a cloth off a small box. The computer said “Hello.” The audience went f’n nuts. And nothing in personal computing was ever the same. They disrupted the an industry!
When Apple announced the Macintosh personal computer with a television ad titled “1984” it more resembled a movie premiere than a technology release. The commercial was directed by Ridley Scott, the same filmmaker behind Blade Runner, and it aired exactly once. It’s still considered one of the greatest advertisements in history.
But here’s the thing. The Macintosh revolutionized personal computing and everything that was to follow because of its emphasis on providing a simplified user experience. Back then computers had crazy complex input sequences in the form of typed commands, the Macintosh used a “desktop” metaphor and it changed everything.
The awakening was Jobs and his team looking at personal computing in 1983 and realizing that every computer available required users to basically learn a new language just to operate it. Things like command prompts and text-based interfaces. Ya know, the blinking cursors with no visual feedback. The Macintosh was the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse. The response was to throw out everything that existed and build something human. The transformation was an entirely new relationship between people and technology, one where the machine adapted to the human rather than the other way around.
The iMac: Disrupting Yourself
It happened again! Apple’s story gets really interesting, and it parallels Pantera in ways I genuinely love. By the mid-1990s, Apple was in serious trouble. The company had lost its way after Jobs was pushed out in 1985. In 1996 to 1997, the media pronounced Apple all but dead. The company lost $878 million in 1997. ohhh man! Dead man walking.
Then Jobs came back. And in May 1998, he walked onto another stage and announced something that would totally save the company and even rewrite the rules of consumer tech all over again.
Computers were just ugly beige boxes wired to other beige boxes. The iMac felt like a revolution. The original iMac was a translucent Bondi Blue all-in-one machine that looked unlike anything anyone had ever put on a desk. It was beautiful. It was playful. And it worked right out of the box without requiring a f’n PhD to set up. The iMac became Apple’s fastest-selling computer, selling more than six million units during its lifetime, and the company earned $414 million in 1998, its first profit in three years.
Apple disrupted themselves. They looked at their own declining product line, had an awakening, responded with something nobody asked for but everybody wanted, and then transformed the company from a cautionary tale into the foundation of what would become the most valuable company on earth! Hell yeah!
The iPhone: The Disruption of Everything
You may be sick of me talking about Apple. But, I like the stories and it’s my blog so like my mom used to say, “tough cookies!” Anyway, When Steve Jobs walked onstage at Macworld in San Francisco and told the audience: “We’re going to make some history together today.” For once in the history of tech keynotes, the hyperbole was actually a total understatement.
Before the iPhone, every smartphone had a physical keyboard, a small screen, and browsing the internet meant squinting at a garbled, nearly unusable approximation of a webpage. Nokia was dominant. BlackBerry was king of the corporate world. I had a Blackberry Curve and it was the worst experience I’ve ever used. But, nobody thought there was anything fundamentally wrong with any of this.
Jobs looked at all of it and saw the same thing Tony Iommi saw when he looked at blues rock in 1970. He saw the status quo masquerading as inevitability.
Jobs described the iPhone as an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. This wasn’t three separate devices, but one revolutionary product. The iPhone sold its first million units in only 74 days, showing that consumers weren’t just buying features, they were buying into a fundamentally different vision of mobile technology.
The transformation was staggering. Nokia, the company that sold 7.4 million phones in a single quarter in 2007 and was considered unbeatable, but then collapsed within a few years. BlackBerry, which laughed at the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard, watched its market share evaporate.
In July 2008, Apple launched the App Store, enabling third-party developers to create and distribute applications directly to iPhone users. This ecosystem expansion turned the iPhone into not just a communication device, but a platform for an ever-growing range of services that now form the backbone of modern mobile computing. And, again disrupting software and application delivery. As of 2025, more than 3 billion iPhones have been sold. The App Store enabled entirely new industries and business categories that didn’t even exist before, including companies that would go on to disrupt other industries entirely.
Uber and Airbnb: Disruption Built on Disruption
This is where it continues to get fun, because the iPhone didn’t just change phones. It made possible a whole new wave of disruptors who built on top of what Apple created.
For example, Uber launched in 2009. The awakening was simple. When getting a taxi it was frustrating, unreliable, and an often overpriced experience. You called a dispatch number and hoped someone showed up. In some neighborhoods, particularly poorer ones, cabs simply didn’t show up at all. The idea of knowing where your driver was, when they’d arrive, what it would cost, and being able to rate the experience afterward was revolutionary. Uber revolutionized the taxi industry by offering both cheaper and more convenient options while also allowing millions of people to convert their vehicles into a means of business.
Airbnb’s story is equally compelling. Founded in 2008 by two guys who couldn’t afford their San Francisco rent and decided to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to conference attendees, Airbnb had the audacity to look at the entire hotel industry and say “we can do this differently.” The awakening was noticing that millions of people had spare rooms, spare properties, or even just a couch, and millions of other people were paying inflated hotel prices for generic, impersonal rooms in tourist districts. Now, spanning across 191 countries, Airbnb has an impressive total of 4 million listings, a number that eclipses the collective listings of the five leading hotel brands!
What Uber and Airbnb prove is that disruption doesn’t require inventing something from scratch. Sometimes the disruption is simply asking, sincerely, whether the way something has always been done is actually the best way to do it. And then having the courage to build an answer.
The First Follower Changes Everything
Back to Dr. Phillips, she showed a short video during her talk about how movements start, and it’s one of those things you’ve probably seen before but that hits completely differently in the context of disruption. The leader who stands alone looks like a lone nut. A goofball! It’s then the first follower who makes that person a leader. It’s the first person willing to stand up and join that turns a solo act into a movement.
Black Sabbath had first followers. So did Metallica. The kids who showed up to tiny sweaty clubs and spread demo tapes and wore the shirts before the bands were famous. Those people are why those bands survived long enough to change the world. Steve Jobs had first followers at Apple, designers and engineers who believed in the vision when everyone else thought the Mac was just a toy, the iMac was a gimmick, and the iPhone was stupid.
Dr. Phillips is building her school right now with a community of first followers are believing in the vision when it was still just an idea. She didn’t start with a building or a budget. She started with a belief that the status quo wasn’t working for the girls she wanted to serve, and she found people who shared that belief.
What’s Your Sound?
Dr. Phillips wasn’t just giving us a music and business history lesson. She was giving us homework. She asked every person in that room to think about one thing they want to disrupt. One belief to challenge. One system that needs breaking. One new thing to build.
It could be something personal and private, just between you and the mirror. It could be something at work, a process nobody questions because “that’s how we’ve always done it.” It could be something bigger, a community, a school, a nonprofit, a movement.
What every band and company in this article had in common wasn’t genius or luck. It was a willingness to look at what was established, and say “this isn’t right, and I’m going to build something better.” Black Sabbath didn’t set out to invent heavy metal. They set out to make music that felt honest to them, and the rest of the world caught up. Metallica didn’t plan to be preserved by the Library of Congress. They set out to make the most ambitious, demanding album they could imagine. Pantera didn’t plot a second act. They had an honest reckoning about who they were and what they were actually capable of. Apple didn’t know the iPhone would enable the entire app economy. They knew the existing phones were terrible and they could do better.
Okay. this is getting kind of long. Sorry about this. The point is, none of them waited until conditions were perfect. They started with the awakening. Then they responded. Then they built.
Remember disruption is the art, not the chaos. Not the destruction. The intentional, strategic, beautifully human act of building something better than what was there before.
So what’s your disruption? What’s the sound you’ve been holding back because you weren’t sure the world was ready?
The world is never ready for disruption until it is. And then, all of a sudden, it can’t imagine anything else.
Horns up. Now go build something my friends \m/ \m/
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