Every story needs a conflict. Take it from Tom Stewart, former editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, former columnist at Fortune, former book publisher, and one of the co-architects of the AlixPartners Disruption Index, alongside the Head of Content, Jason Cox. Tom has been tracking, and documenting, major inflection points—you could call them crises—for decades.
Years ago, at the GE office in Connecticut, former CEO Jack Welch told him, “I know a train is coming through this building, I just don’t know when it’s coming or from which direction.”
"That," explains Tom, “is disruption.”
“It’s the new business driver,” he says. “It’s these things that come out of left field, things that come unexpectedly. They’re not the same as swings in the business cycle. They have a different quality and demand a different response from leaders—and advisors like us.”
The firm first launched the Disruption Report in 2020. Tom was brought in to support the work in year three, after it had expanded to include the eponymous “index” with a suite of data that could benchmark different industries and flag early shifts in sentiment among global executives.
Major disruptive forces are the “villains” of the report, but the power of the report lies partly in the insights into what successful companies do to exploit or combat those forces. In a given year, around 20% of respondents say that they lead their industry in terms of growth. “Those growth leaders are our heroes, our Henry the Vs,” says Tom. “Those are the guys who go out and succeed.”
In 2026, the overall Disruption Index declined slightly year over year, not because disruptive forces are in retreat—new technologies, tariffs, inflation, regulation, and other factors are challenging firms across the board—but because executives have gotten more comfortable with disruption.
That strain of agility has served Tom through—at his count—three careers. He attended Harvard College, majoring in English because, at the time, “if you did not know what you wanted to be when you grew up, you majored in English,” and serving as a member and eventually president of the Harvard Advocate, the nation’s oldest college literary magazine.
Having adopted New York as his home, he passed his early career in publishing before moving into career #2, magazines—Fortune and HBR. Career #3 has been thought leadership: He joined Booz & Company as Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer 2008, ran the National Center for the Middle Market at The Ohio State University for half a dozen years, and then came to work at AlixPartners. His deep immersion into canonical texts has never left him: “The best books for executives are Shakespeare's history plays (for leadership), Machiavelli’s The Prince (for strategy), and the epistles of St. Paul (for mission, vision, values, and how an entrepreneur can scale a multinational organization).”
Tom is happiest at 39,000 feet looking at patterns, and consulting has proven an industry that provides a good narrative to dive into, as well as the opportunity to exchange knowledge with younger colleagues. “One of the cool things about consulting as an industry is it’s multi-generation and multi-industrial,” he says, adding, “My danger is becoming a garrulous old man, right?”
Tom’s first official day as a full-time Director within Marketing was two days after his 76th birthday, which, he says, amused him. At the firm, he has written for multiple CEOs, overseen several iterations of the PE Leadership Survey, and helped place more than a dozen articles in HBR—something that hadn’t happened before in the history of the firm. No one, no single possible person, has as deep a library of references ready to be frisked for a quote in a conversation about how to evolve a piece, or as keen a sense for how to bring things home for the reader.
“What's the biblical line, the rain falleth on the just and unjust alike? You know, disruption falleth on everybody alike,” he says. “The question is what you should do about it. And the strongly implied answer: Dial 1-800-AlixPartners.”
We can say, “Here's this chaotic, disruptive world, and you're all living in it.”