Our French president is in Japan this week and addressed a small group of the French community in Tokyo yesterday at the ambassador’s residence.

It was a refreshingly honest discussion, relatively devoid of the airy platitudes to which we’ve become accustomed to hearing from our political leaders.

I won’t focus on the politics of it, and I know people have a variety of political opinions about the job that President Emmanuel Macron is doing for France, however I would like to mention parts of the discussion which struck me as particularly relevant and timely.

President Macron acknowledged that today’s political and economic systems in the world are broken. One need not look very far to find evidence of this. In fact, it’s hard to think of a developed country in the world right now that is not facing potentially existential questions about its very model.

When reflecting on how to break the cycle, President Macron distinguished inventing from merely adapting.

Adaptability is a virtue, but adaptability alone is not sufficient to solving today’s monumental problems. We need to invent a new system which recognizes the transformative nature of current technologies, which is coherent with the interdependencies of our globalized world, which provides a sustainable future for our planet, and which works for everyone (with the implication being that France intends to take a leadership role in this).

There is a lesson in here, of course, for France (which faces challenges of economic inclusion), for Japan (which leads the world in the challenges stemming from its demographic inversion), for the US and UK (who are facing isolationist tendencies), and for every other member of the G20.

There is also a lesson in here for business leaders. I subscribe to the wisdom that the first IT revolution — the invention of the semiconductor and its ensuing proliferation of computing resources — represented a boon to large companies, whereas the subsequent waves of innovation represent a threat to them.

In other words, the innovation of the silicon revolution was dramatic, but it was sustaining in nature rather than disruptive. This sustaining innovation wave disproportionately benefited large companies by enabling them to leverage new efficiencies into their economies of scale.

In contrast, the subsequent waves of innovation, ushered in first by the internet and now arguably by decentralized technologies, are radically disruptive. The first ripples of this wave appeared in the technology sector (look what Slack and Google have meant for Microsoft Office, or what MongoDB meant for Oracle, or what AWS meant for Cisco, etc.).

Now, technology startups conceived in the paradigm of the internet and unshackled by legacy baggage are going after large, non-tech industries, whether it be transportation (Lyft, Uber), consumer products (Dollar Shave Club), finance (Curve, Revolut, TransferWise), agriculture (The Climate Corporation), etc. As I’ve written in the past, the increasing connectivity to the physical world is enabling us to close the loop in industry, agriculture, and the environment.

Perhaps it’s time to re-think the corporate model.