I’m often told, “You don’t have to break everything, Seth.”

I think you do. All businesses and industries could probably benefit from being broken down and put back together better. In some cases, it’s continuous improvement; in others, it is wholesale disruption or positive destruction.

My work life began in the early 1980s when I worked as an intern on Wall Street. Wall Street seemed to me like the center of the universe. The whole world revolved around it. It was fast paced and exciting. It was either where all the smartest people were or where all the smartest people wanted to be. But only a few weeks into the internship, it became clear to me that it was a bit like the Land of Oz. The outside was a picture of well-structured sophistication and complexity. On the inside it was more like the man behind the curtain. I wasn’t sure if I was the only one who knew the reality or if I was the only one who wanted to change it.

Either way, seeing past the curtain was the start of my entrepreneurial career, which began at age 24 with my first business, Merrin Financial, a software company that created the first order management system, which automated much of the clerical trading process and ushered in electronic trading. The order management system has since been adopted and is used at every asset management firm around the world. The second company I started was a middleware software company based in New Jersey; the third was a health care technology firm in Silicon Valley; and the fourth is Liquidnet, a global, institutional, electronic brokerage firm, and by far my largest and best company. It’s not that I’m a serial entrepreneur as much as I’ve learned enough from my previous experiences to finally get it right with Liquidnet.

In the pages that follow, I’ll tell you my personal story and through it offer real, actionable advice that will resonate with anyone who aspires to be a catalyst of change. You will learn to see the inefficiencies and everyday problems that others dismiss as the cost of doing business, and how to create “unfair competitive advantages” to stack the deck—and win. You’ll see how problems in current business models are really opportunities of which to take advantage and learn what you need to know and do to seize those opportunities—no matter where you work. I’ll break down my process step-by-step to show you how to successfully start a company and transform an industry.

My voracious appetite for business books has resulted in a lot of knowledge about how others built their businesses and achieved their successes. But most of what I have learned has come from my many mistakes and successes in the four businesses I’ve started over the years. I believe if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough. I’ll show you what I learned from my missteps: how to build a different kind of company—one that has no titles, no assholes, and not only makes money but gives some of that money back to make the world a better place.

I’ll show you how I created several disruptive businesses and reveal how you can, too. With The Power of Positive Destruction, you will:

• Discover how to identify problems and turn them into opportunities.
• Understand how to stack the deck in your favor to achieve the best possible chances of success.
• Learn how to build and run a company and design a culture for constant change.
• Acquire new and critical skills to create strategy, sell your disruptive product or service, and negotiate effectively.

Positive destruction can disrupt or transform any company and any industry. It’s happening faster and more broadly now than ever before, creating an unlimited number of opportunities for any entrepreneur. But winning in this new world is not easy. The incumbents fight mightily against it and even those who will benefit from change may first express fear. I know firsthand that having a business plan does not mean things go according to plan. I’ll give you the real, unpolished version of the struggles we went through, the fights with incumbents, with board members, with investors. I’ll reveal the techniques employed, from identifying the opportunities to designing and executing the strategy that you’ll need to succeed.

Maybe you’re an investor who follows the market and are intrigued by the drama of it and want an inside perspective. Maybe you have no interest working in the financial industry but you believe another industry is ripe for disruption and are interested in strategies and processes that work. Maybe you want to start a business and you know it’s no longer good enough to build a company to last but want to build a company of constant change.

In any case, I believe there’s something for you in this book, and I hope it inspires you to think differently and tap into your inner change agent to transform your company, your industry, and the world.