Business transformation and disruption are not new concepts. But our clients' advisory boards are expressing a new urgency to grapple with them. These boards are helping our clients (and us) understand what leaders believe they need to succeed.

IBM recently released its 2015 C-suite study, which surveyed 5,000+ C-suite leaders from 21 industries and 70 countries. It emphasizes the same dominant theme we heard in the hundreds of c-level interviews we conducted this year—an obsession with disruption. We share some of the related issues—and specific quotes—from our own 2015 conversations that relate to and reinforce the findings in IBM’s newest study.