The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri – Episode 478 of The Action Catalyst Podcast
- Posted by Action Catalyst
- On February 4, 2025
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- Adam Outland, AI, author, Business, dealing with failure, disruption, entrepreneur, futurism, leadership, regret, reward, risk, speaker, success, technology

Terence Mauri, acclaimed author and founder of Hack Future Lab, shares the accident that changed the trajectory of his life, explains how risk and reward travel in the same elevator and why regret minimization is important, and talks about the 3 time horizons of AI as a disruptor, warm AI vs cold AI, being a self-confessed failure pioneer, and why we are living in an Age of Wonder, Age of Possibility. Bonus: a bit of philosophy from Mike Tyson.
About Terence:
Terence Mauri, one of the world’s leading experts and keynote speakers on Leadership, AI and Disruption, inspires and motivates teams to thrive in ever-changing contexts. Thinkers50 has described Terence as “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.”
Terence is a MIT Entrepreneur Mentor, a visiting Professor at IE Business School, the Founder of Hack Future Lab, and a 5X Bestselling Author that has been seen in Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, and more.
Prior to his current role, he was a managing director for one of the world’s largest advertising agencies working with clients such as American Express, JP Morgan and Apple, and emerged as a battle tested director who understands the challenges of turning volatility into value creation.
Learn more at TerenceMauri.com.
The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!
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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):
Adam Outland
Today’s guest is Terence Mauri, a global expert on the future of leadership, AI and disruption. He is the founder of the future trends think tank, Hack Future Lab, and also an acclaimed author. Mauri spearheads a movement for leaders to rethink leadership in a post AI world. His newest book is called The Upside of Disruption. It’s out right now. Terence, great to meet you.
Terence Mauri
Thank you so much, Adam for inviting me.
Adam Outland
Absolutely. Well, listen, there’s so many amazing present things to ask you about in terms of your work and the work you’re doing this moment. But one of the things I always love hearing about from people who have generated a lot of success in life in their different paths, is their their roots and their beginnings.
Terence Mauri
You know, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that life is best lived forwards, but is best understood backwards. And I can really relate to that. I had my whole life and career mapped out in a very linear way. But as as another famous philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, you can have the best laid plans until somebody punches you in the mouth, and this is what happened to me. So I had a successful career management consultancy. Things were going well. I was making good progress. One day, I walked into a store, it was in the middle of the day, and a car driver lost control and drove a car into the store. He mounted the car. It was actually a terrible accident. Nobody lost their lives that day, but many people were injured, including myself. I woke up under the car in the store with the wheel of the car still going, burning my legs. It was one of those kind of accidents where your life flashes past. You spent a number of weeks in hospital, and you know when you have time to think when you’re out of the building, that’s when you you get to reflect at a deeper level. And you know, for me, I really sort of it was a reawakening. I connected with, reconnected, actually, with, you know, my values, legacy, who I was, who I who I was becoming. And I realized there was a gap. There was a gap between who I wanted to become and what I was doing right now in the world of management consultancy, which is a very transactional world, a very profitable world, but I wanted to pivot to a transformational world, a world where actually, I could bring my life and my values to life in a visceral way and visible way as well. So that happened about 20 years ago, and since then, I’ve been on a mission, a higher mission, to inspire leaders around the world ranging from NGO and non for profit to S, p5 100, to harness the upside of disruption. What I mean by that is, you know, sort of turning disruption. It could be career disruption, technology, disruption, industry, disruption, life, disruption, whatever the disruption is, big or small, life changing or professional. How do we turn that into a tailwind or a platform for focus, laser light, focus and strategic courage and a more sustainable values driven life.
Adam Outland
There’s a lot of risk in going out and doing something on your own, so I guess what kind of process did you go through?
Terence Mauri
I think it’s such a great question. It’s what I call a catalytic question, and it’s a question that we should all be thinking about, because our relationship with risk is often not a good one. Our appetite for risk taking is often squeezed out of us like a lemon from an early age. By the age we leave college, you know, we’re risk averse, and then we’ve got this paradox of companies now demanding that we’re all courageous risk takers, and it’s there’s a big rhetoric to reality gap there. And for me, I think that accident reconfigured my relationship with risk, that you know life is inherently risky. You can you can die at any moment. Basically the worst thing we can do is actually not take any risk, because being addicted to certainty can make us feel comfortable. But if that certainty is also causing a stagnation or inertia, we’re not learning anymore. We’re not moving anymore. We’re accept accepting a status quo that’s not healthy or does not giving us happiness. Well, that’s not a good place to be, and we know that if you look at different statistics around the world, whether it’s the game. Develop engagement survey. I mean, that hasn’t changed for decades. Now, majority of the global workforce disengaged, but still go to work, but have mentally quit the job, right? You know, life is short, like we’re lucky. We get about 960, months to live, which is just 80 years of age. And when you think of it that way, when I frame it that way, it’s not to make people feel scared. It’s this idea that it’s never been easier to waste time and waste energy, because this is the age of abundance. Also, we have technology that’s incredible, but technology can make the trivial seem urgent. Think about when you look at your day, reacting to emails all the day, everything seems exciting and urgent. Probably less than 5% is actually important. So I think for me, what it did was a couple of things. Number one, it was a great reawakening, and it helped me to reconnect with the idea that not taking a risk is a risk sometimes. Number two, that actually the world will always be uncertain, will always be volatile, and risk and reward always come together, wrapped together. We forget that risk and will reward travel in that same elevator, and sometimes we forget that actually, you know this idea that we always overestimate the risk of trying something new could be a new way of working. It could be taking a career break. It could be applying for a new job and a new sector, whatever it is, we always overestimate the risk of doing something new, and we always underestimate the risk of standing still.
Adam Outland
I love that. You founded a Hack Future Lab, which is focused on future trends as a think tank. How do you define disruption?
Terence Mauri
Disruption, for me, is a secular and structural here to stay, inflection point. But there’s different types of disruptors out there. If we look at mega trends, for example, we’ve got optimizer reality that’s moving from doing AI to being AI. That means, for example, five to five we’re moving from IT spending as a percentage of global GDP, moving from five to 10% over the next seven years to optimize reality. That’s a big here to stay, disruption that will impact and reshape and redefine value creation, but also redefine completely new industries and companies. Another example would be decarbonization, the whole the whole transition to the green economy around the world. So these are big bang disruptions, but if we take it down to a more granular level, you know, disruption can also be a family disruption. It could be a divorce, a sudden death. Could be a career type disruption. But actually, how we deal with them? I think it’s this kind of point of view that asking this question, how do I turn these disruptors into platforms, into tailwinds? You know, how do we turn these into upside.
Adam Outland
It’s a great skill to have for anyone, but in particular for leaders, I feel like to be able to recognize that every obstacle has inside of itself the key to its own solution.
Terence Mauri
I think so. I think constraints are often opportunities in disguise. You know, for example, Hermes, the global luxury company, one of the big constraints facing, you know, the fashion industry is this, you know, the idea that they’re not sustainable business models. They waste a lot of a lot of money. They’ve got high carbon dioxide emissions. So for Hermes, what they’ve done is turn that constraint into upside by creating new strategic partnerships with biotech companies. They develop and kind of produce mycelium, which is a non leather based form of leather. It’s kind of like a mushroom based type of leather, alternative to leather. And the big, the kind of big, audacious goal at Hermes now is that at least half its global revenues will be mycelium based leather by 2030 now, that wouldn’t have happened without turning a disruption into a tailwind.
Adam Outland
So you know, one of the big disruptors that we keep hearing that’s AI. So how are you seeing leaders react to AI? And how can we best harness this trend without getting caught up in it?
Terence Mauri
I think it’s helpful to take a historical perspective first of all. So we go back to 1956 Professor Marvin Minsky, for example. He was one of the pioneers of AI. And originally it was going to be called Applied Statistics, but that wasn’t sexy enough. I think there are three kind of time horizons to be aware of. So the first one was excitement phase. It took chat GBT two months to reach 100 100 million users. It took the cell phone 16 years to reach 100 million users. And so the excitement phase, I think, has happened over the last couple of years, especially, we’ve seen over a trillion dollars of CapEx going. To AI infrastructure, over two $50 billion of VC money as well. That’s going up exponentially. So at that excitement phase, we’ve now moved to the experimental phase, for example, T Mobile and open aI have just formed a partnership for a sort of proactive AI decision in making model that will be able to proactively help solve customers pain points. You know, three phases. Number one, excitement phase, exuberance. Excitement. Number two is the experimental phase that I believe we’re in right now. The next phase, the next horizon, which we’ll be entering over the next 18 months, is the embedded phase, and that’s where, you know, actually AI eventually will be just become invisible. Every great technology, if it’s truly great, should be invisible. It’ll be embedded in our cell phones, in our toothbrushes, in our TVs. A trillion sensor economy connected together, amplifying intelligence, cross pollination, helping tackle some of the world’s biggest existential challenges, from climate change to healthcare. And we’re at the embryonic stage of that. But you it doesn’t take much imagination to to think about where we’re going with this over the next couple of years, that the the sort of cost of production, the cost of knowledge production, is going to reach zero in the next 15 years. It would take you a lifetime to read 8 billion words. Now imagine that you know the fastest AI today can can do that in the blink of an eye, and again, we can start to see the exponential opportunity of this platform. But I want to say as well that we have to be careful of artificial idiocy. Am I investing in warm AI or cold AI? So warm AI is humanity first AI? It’s a humanity first future enabled by AI. It maximizes, elevates what makes us more human, and it protects Well, being, loneliness, democracy, truth and transparency. That’s warm. Ai, the bad news is right now, most governments, most organizations, are not investing in warm. Ai, they’re investing in cold. AI, cold. AI is machine first future enabled by AI. It elevates division, disinformation, truth decay, it erodes well being. And so that’s the difference. Are we investing in a warm tech future or a cold tech future?
Adam Outland
For so many of our listeners that are business owners themselves. You talk about the return on intelligence, what are some things leaders can do to prepare their organizations for AI and adopt it effectively?
Terence Mauri
What a great question. I think, the question every leader, every manager, should be thinking about right now, which is to use AI in the right way and an inclusive way, sustainable way, in a way that sharpens the growth and talent agenda. We should be thinking about ROI, which is not just return on investment, but this new human centric KBI, key behavior indicator, which is return on intelligence, return on imagination. Imagine a cognitively enabled enterprise where your talent gets to solve the biggest problems, the biggest challenges that it faces. That means 10x productivity, 10x engagement, 10x execution. We know that that’s not the reality for most organizations right now. I just had an article published a few weeks ago in Fast Company called the rise of bore out, which is the opposite of burnout. Bore out is cognitive or emotional under load. It’s boredom at work, and it’s at record levels. And so if AI is just doing parts of the job which we’re already doing, and what we’re left with is other boring parts of the job that’s not return on intelligence. And so that’s a big question. We should be using AI to speak to insight, speak to innovation, speed to decision, velocity for creating new scenarios, new you know, new products, new services, new platforms, testing out hypotheses. You know, it’s a generative tool. The clue is in the name, but my worry is that many C suite are just looking at AI to automate, to make cost savings and to just focus on a very narrow metric, which is shareholder return.
Adam Outland
Sure. This is just maybe a quick question for you. Is a form of disruption, to disrupt technology by being more in person?
Terence Mauri
Yes, I think so. I really think so. Because, as I said, when the cost of this technology is coming to zero and everybody has access to the same tools, the same technologies, it’s more difficult to stand out. Ironically, everyone’s got access. Everyone can set up the great website, the great. Podcast, the great YouTube channel, but how do you stand out? The value of that goes down. This is one of the ironies, and I think a lot of people don’t think about that. And it’s there’s a reason why naught point naught. 1% of people make money on Spotify or tick tock or YouTube, and that number is even going down more. We’ve got to be so careful. I call it the curse of sameness. Write about it a lot in the new book, The upside disruption. So yes, ironically, sharpening your human edge, your in person edge, is going to be the superpower that differentiates you. Gives you that distinctive quality in the sea of sameness and sea of commoditization that we’re in, and that’s why making the effort to go to these in person events, speaking at them, contributing to them, panels. This is a part, an important part, of the human edge. Yes, use the tools around us. You’d be stupid not to. But don’t think that it’s going to be easy just doing it that way. Yes, there’ll be a percentage that managed to do it. But my fear is that when everything come comes to zero cost. Everyone has access to the same incredible tools. Well, actually it’s much more difficult to stand out and so that in person, human edge, the that social skills, emotional intelligence, conversational listening, being fully present. These going to be important. Human skills, human skills, Courage skills, these are the skills that we need to nurture and sharpen for the next generation.
Adam Outland
What walls have you encountered in building something? I love allowing our listeners insight that when you choose to take a risk, that it doesn’t necessarily mean a pathway paved in gold, it comes with a lot of potholes.
Terence Mauri
I love that question because disruption is about humility. And what I mean by humility is the ability to the capacity, the awareness to know your blind spots, to be aware of the blind spots that you’re blind to, but also understanding that failure and setback and obstacle is one half of of success. And as Ryan Holiday says so eloquently, you know, the obstacle is the way, disruption is the way. And you know, I’m a self confessed failure pioneer. Yeah, I failed multiple times in order to get where I am today, multiple setbacks, multiple rejections, book rejections, client rejections. You know, 30% of what I do is keynotes conferences around the world. But you know often you’re you’re, you know, when you’re chosen, you’re, you’ve been chosen out of like maybe five or six or eight other great speakers. So you get rejected a lot. You know, 90% of the time it’s a rejection. Now I could choose two ways to respond to that. I could say, one, I’m going to give up because I’m good. You know, my ratio of rejection is so high, so I’m just not going to do that. Or two, recognize that actually anything worthwhile in life requires resilience, requires persistence, requires grit, and that’s been the big lesson for me. I’m here because I’ve overcome probably more failures than the average person, and that’s been painful, but I’ve made pain part of the process and understand that if I’m not hurting, I’m not growing.
Adam Outland
You know I just want to spend one more minute on this; people, and their relationship to risk is that they don’t understand that a lot of life can be, a little bit like a game of baseball, and that if you’re batting 20 to 30% it’s good batting average.
Terence Mauri
Yeah.
Adam Outland
Most of life, we’re not trained to embrace rejection or misses or missed swings that way we’re treated. We treat it as an ultimate failure, which then generally means I’m not good enough.
Terence Mauri
Yes.
Adam Outland
For you, where did this light switch flip? Or where do you? Where could you trace it back to say, this is the moment where I kind of changed my relationship to failure?
Terence Mauri
I think it goes back to that life disruption, life or death moment, life flashing past you, which you realize you can have your whole life that mapped out that linear way become obsessed with success and avoidance of failure, and that’s not real life. You know, being stripped down and being made very vulnerable, nearly losing my life, actually was the wake up call to me that, you know, we’ve life is about. Life is risk. And actually the biggest regret, one of the things to help our listeners and viewers today is when you get to the end of your life, and I hope it’s a long life, 8090, years of age, or 100 the number one regret, according to research, is a lack of courage. That when you look back, the biggest regret you’ll have in your lives, when you look back at your 90 years will be the amount of times that you didn’t you didn’t step up. The lack of courage, the courage to think bit bolder, the courage to say no, the courage to walk away from something that wasn’t working for you, to courage to start over. This is our number one regret at the end of our lives, and we can use this knowledge in advance of getting to 90 years of age to our advantage and do what you know. Steve, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos used to do very well, which is regret minimization. To get to imagine that you’re 70 years old and say, what would I regret most not doing when I look back? Is it not having kids? Is it not starting that business? Is it not, you know, yeah, hitting that C level in my company. Whatever it is, success is very personal. But just remember, you know, at the end of our lives, the number one regret is a lack of courage. And actually, one half of courage is the ability to embrace failure and recognize that that is a stepping stone to where you want to be. It’s not necessary. And of course, there are different types of failures as well. By the way, productive failures, intelligent failures, stupid failures. So we have to be careful here as well and understand the nuances. But the one thing to take away is we need to reframe our relationship with productive failure and recognize that it’s also an important part of success.
Adam Outland
What do you think when you are spending time as an entrepreneur mentor for MIT, or you’re you know, you’re speaking at some universities and engaging with this next generation that’s coming out, what do you see there? Do you see a group of young women and men that are have that new definition of failure? Or do you feel we need to be able to manufacture somehow, for some of these people, maybe not a life threatening situation, but something that that shakes them up in how they perceive what we’re discussing?
Terence Mauri
What I love about Generation Alpha is this incredible vision aspirational, and I think it’s very nuanced, the culturally context and culture demographics, whether it’s Africa or North America or Europe, there’s a different risk appetite out there depending on geography, and so that’s that’s a big deal. But the good news is, it can be unlearned and relearned as well, for sure. And what I love about my work at MIT is every year we host MIT solve, and the purpose of MIT solve is to create a generation of solvers. We post Grand Challenges, global challenges that the world faces, for example, climate change, lack of literacy, healthcare challenges, and we give people anywhere in the world, the opportunity to pitch tech based solutions to those global challenges, and one of those examples recently was for people with Alzheimer’s. There was a young student called Emma Yang. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, or dementia. It’s a terrible disease. One in seven people will get it in their lifetime. And you know, being a very an introvert and a mathematician, she framed this as a hypothesis, and she created an app called Timeless. The purpose of the app timeless is to help people with dementia stay reconnected to their memories, reconnected to their families through geo tagging, facial recognition gamification, received over a million dollars of wealth of investment since she since inception. This is a great example of generations solve. This is a great example of what can happen when the cost you imagine, the costs of doing this 10 years ago, would have been prohibited. It would cost millions of dollars to set up an app and test it, scale it. Now, you can do all of this. You can go from idea to iteration to implementation within hours or days, and obviously that’s accelerated even more with AI. So for me, this is not the age of disruption, by the way. This is the age of wonder, the age of possibility, and the only limit is our imagination.
Adam Outland
Yeah, I was at a longevity dinner, and it was very interesting to hear people talk about how quickly and exponentially medical and health disruption is occurring, and that the key takeaway from this speaker was that if you can live 10 more years, you’ll solve most of your problems that you’ll have in the future, and probably add another 20 to your life.
Terence Mauri
It’s so exciting, isn’t it? Ray Kurzweil, Singularity University has written a book recently where he really deep dives into this as well. And you know, I was in Doha big you know, future of tech, future of AI Summit, and you know, just some of the stats, you know, the facts and insights coming out are so exciting. This idea that, you know, we’ve now got, you know, chips that are the it can be scaled to DNA, and they can hold billions of transistors. That’s actually happening. It’s not, it’s not science fiction. So science fiction has become science flag. And I think you’re right. If we can hold on for at least another time, 10 years, it’s going to be one hell of a ride.
Adam Outland
And stay tuned. We’ll continue this conversation with Terence in Episode 479 of The Action Catalyst.
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