DISRUPT YOU

But what does “disruption” mean exactly?

Merriam Webster tells us that “disruption” means a “break” or “interruption”. For Cambridge, disruption in the business world describes a complete transformation in the usual way that an economic sector works. This ultra-modern term refers to a phenomenon that is as old as time. Throughout history, we can even distinguish several major phases of “disruption”, or the replacement of one economic model by another, such as the agricultural revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, or the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. Each phase starts by developing a better response to consumer needs.

My motivation to write about this is when I was reading the book “Disrupt Yourself” written by Whitney Johnson, what a phenomenal book. I am happy to share my rendition of this book.

Not everyone has to abandon the traditional path, of course. Certainly, if you‘re working toward an ambitious and potentially achievable goal, such as managing a division at your firm or winning a C-suite job in your industry, disruption is unnecessary. But if as an individual you‘ve reached a plateau or you suspect you won‘t be happy at the top rung of the ladder you‘re climbing, you should disrupt yourself for the same reasons that companies must.

First and foremost, you need to head off the competition. As you continue to improve along the dimensions of performance that the employment market has historically valued, you risk overshooting demands. What you do reliably, if not brilliantly well, can be done just as effectively by many peers—and perhaps more swiftly and affordably by up-and-comers.

Second, consider the greater rewards that disruption may bring. It‘s true that disruptive innovation in business tends to start out as a low-cost alternative to existing products or services, and of course, you don‘t want to embrace a career strategy that reduces your own price point. But when you disrupt yourself, you vector to a new set of metrics. In some cases, you might initially take a pay cut in return for a steeper trajectory; after all, the endgame of disruption is a higher demand for what you produce. In other cases, you might even boost your pay while still undercutting the competition in your new role, organization, or industry. Remember, too, that when it comes to personal disruption, compensation is not just financial. Psychological and social factors also matter.

“When you disrupt, you are walking into the unknown, exposing yourself to the risk of failure… If you welcome failure as a guide and teacher, you‘re more likely to find your way to success.” However, “One lesson you might learn from failure is that you are on the wrong curve for yourself.”

The author adds a distinction between failure and our reaction to it. “Failure itself doesn‘t limit dreaming and personal innovation—shame does. Once we pull shame out of the equation, we eliminate the drag and gain and the lift we need to accelerate back into daring.”

“It is unrealistic to believe that you can get there without a detour or two; flexibility becomes an important attribute. Hence, disruptors have to be driven by discovery… When you are driven by discovery, you take a step forward, gather feedback, and adapt.”

Four Principles of Self-Disruption

1. Target a need that can be met more effectively.
2. Identify your disruptive strengths.
3. Step back (or sideways) in order to grow.
4. Let your strategy emerge.?

1. Target a need that can be met more effectively.

A core principle of disruptive innovation is that customers control resource allocation and that they don‘t buy products but instead “hire” them to fulfill a need. Disrupters look for needs that aren‘t being met well. They play in markets where no one else is or wants to be. A classic example is Salesforce.com: A simple, inexpensive, cloud-based system—initially intended to serve small and medium-size businesses—is now disrupting the leading providers of customer resource management software.

Martin Crampton‘s real estate portal was also a disruptive venture. But his personal disruption started well before that launch when he realized that marketing strategy, not development and sales, drive usage of software products. He seized the opportunity, thereby positioning himself for a series of big marketing jobs before his next disruptive move. Alex McClung targeted his own industry‘s need for people who could move fluidly across functional borders, such as from science to finance and logistics to regulation. Then he sought roles in a variety of health care organizations, ranging from biotech start-ups to Fortune500 pharmaceuticals, which would help him develop those skills.

Moreover, there‘s Heather Coughlin‘s story of giving up an equity-sales VP position at Goldman Sachs to help launch Hudson Street, an independently operated subsidiary offering investment research to clients. The group was formed partly as a response to court settlements requiring that salespeople in big banks rely on more than just their in-house analysts‘ reports. Coughlin got in on the ground floor not only because she thought demand for that service would grow—which it did—but also because she knew that the fledgling group needed someone with her deep experience to serve customers.

“Being cognizant of the world around me and rolling the tape forward was critical,” she explains. “I watched two downturns and lots of layoffs, and swore that I would always try to be one step ahead.” Many colleagues thought she was crazy to leave her comfortable perch for an amorphous role—and to let her pay and status take a hit. However, the operating skills she built in helping to launch and run Hudson Street are what propelled her into a business development job and ultimately the CEO‘s seat at Isis Parenting.

2. Identify your disruptive strengths.

When disruptive companies identify unmet needs, they make sure those needs match their distinctive strengths. They realize that market risk (trying and potentially failing at something new) is better than competitive risk (competing against entrenched, established players). A textbook example comes from the Mexican wireless telephony provider American Moville. Instead of going head-to-head with the wire-line incumbent, it went after more than 80% of the population who wanted to communicate but couldn‘t afford a landline.

Zigzagging career paths may be common now, but the people who zigzag best don‘t do it randomly.

As you look to disrupt yourself, don‘t think just about what you do well—think about what you do well that most others can‘t. Those are your disruptive strengths. For example, I was a good financial analyst, but plenty of folks can build models. What people have said they value most about me is what psychologist Howard Gardner calls ‘searchlight intelligence”: the ability to discern connections across spheres and see opportunities for cross-pollination. David was a good developer, but more notably he was a standout marketer in a world that required cross-functional fluency. Martin was successful at sales but exceptional at bringing customer focus to a small, entrepreneurial business.

Designer and strategist Adam Richardson discovered his disruptive strength early. In the 1990s, working at Sun Microsystems in his first job as an industrial designer, he realized that firsthand knowledge of customers' needs was missing from many designers' tool kits. He, by contrast, wasn‘t the strongest stylist but was enthralled with market research and good at capturing it. (Consider that at age 6 he was sketching designs for cars; by age 9, he was surveying neighbors about their driving habits and measuring their car interiors.)

?“I‘m a good listener, and I like finding patterns in chaotic qualitative data,” he explains. He looked for a graduate program to help him hone those skills, but because popular ones like IIT, in Illinois, and Stanford‘s Graduate School of Design didn‘t exist then, he ended up cobbling together a course for himself via the University of Chicago‘s self-directed Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. He veered from the traditional industrial design path to study anthropology, ethnography, sociology, cultural theory, and art history—disciplines that are now the bedrock of his work that blends design with customer insights and product strategy.

Consider also Gregory Sorensen, who resigned his positions as co-director of Massachusetts General Hospital‘s biomedical imaging center and as a professor of radiology and health sciences at Harvard Medical School to become CEO of Siemens Healthcare North America. Sorensen was well established in his medical and academic career when he discovered that his particular strengths matched up well with the needs of Siemens. Sorensen wasn‘t a salesperson or a seasoned business executive, but he was a respected doctor who had a deep knowledge of health care equipment and understood how to manage an organization. A few colleagues at Harvard and Mass General questioned his decision, but Sorensen embraced the disruption. He realized it would allow him to use his distinctive skills in a new, potentially more rewarding way.?

3. Step back (or sideways) in order to grow.

Just as a company‘s survival depends on revenue growth, an individual‘s well-being depends on learning and advancement. When organizations get too big, they stop exploring smaller, riskier but perhaps more lucrative markets because the resulting revenues won‘t affect their bottom line enough. Just as Borders was slow to embrace e-commerce in the bookselling industry, where it had been successful, people who rise to a certain tier in their careers may allow themselves to plateau. Personal growth often stalls at the top of a classic S curve. Disrupters avoid that problem by jumping to a new role, industry, or type of organization and putting themselves on an entirely different growth trajectory.

Adam Richardson did just that when he quit his Sun Microsystems job to enroll in a graduate program unknown to people in his industry. So did Liz Brown, when she left her hard-won job as a law firm partner. And let‘s not forget Clay Christensen, who at age 40 left a corporate career at a materials science company to pursue his doctorate at Harvard Business School. That ―step down‖ allowed him to develop a theory that has changed the business world and has thrust him into an extremely successful career as a teacher, consultant, and investor.

Disrupting yourself doesn‘t have to mean leaving your organization, however. Take IDEO executive Dave Blakely, who has been with the design consultancy for two decades but worked his way up in a decidedly unconventional manner. A software engineer with a master‘s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, he could have built a successful career in his core area of expertise, perhaps eventually moving to a similar role at another Silicon Valley firm or working his way up to manage technical staff. Instead, Blakely volunteered to become a project manager at IDEO. His peers dismissed the new job as an escape from the rigor and detail of engineering. But the backward move allowed Blakely to broaden his skills and get comfortable with a more diverse group of colleagues, including executives. He started climbing a new ladder and is now head of the technology strategy at IDEO. Alex McClung, the health care executive with 15 job changes behind him, has had a similar experience. “The sideways moves accelerated my career by five years or more each time,” he says. “Sideways always turns into a slingshot.”

4. Let your strategy emerge.

Disruptive innovation also rests on what has been described as an emergent strategy. Rather than performing detailed market analysis and developing a step-by-step plan to achieve a goal, disrupters are flexible. They take a step forward, gather feedback, and adapt accordingly. As Professor Amar Bhide at Columbia University has shown, 70% of all successful new businesses end up with a strategy different from the one they initially pursued. A well-known example is Netflix, which started as a door-to-door DVD rental service but now focuses on the digital streaming of movies.

A parallel exists in disruptive careers. Because we‘re not following traditional paths, we can‘t always see the end from the beginning. As John D. Rockefeller wrote, “If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel worn paths of accepted success.” Crampton, the science teacher, never expected to become a marketer or an online entrepreneur. When Liz Brown was furiously billing hours and winning cases in her quest to make partner at her law firm, she never imagined she‘d soon become executive director of Golden Seeds, an investing network for women entrepreneurs, and teaching law at Bentley University.

Another great example comes from Sabina Nawaz. As a young computer engineer at Microsoft, she was moving deftly up the corporate ranks, taking on increasing responsibility, and probably positioning herself for a coveted VP role. But after getting some positive feedback about her management skills and emotional intelligence (perhaps a disruptive strength in the software industry), Nawaz decided to disrupt herself.

“I had been moving up in a traditional step-function way and I knew the formula for success, but I no longer wanted the next title or promotion,” she recalls. “I wanted to stretch my boundaries.” She asked to move into the role of a human resource, which she held for almost six years. Then, rather than continuing to climb at Microsoft, she left to start a leadership development consultancy. That had never been her career ambition, but Nawaz let her strategy emerge. The Engine Is You.

?According to Christensen‘s research on disruptive innovation, when a company pursues growth in a new market rather than an established one, the odds of success are six times higher and the revenue potential 20 times greater. It‘s impossible to quantify the effects of personal career disruption in the same way, but anecdotal evidence suggests it can yield similar results—dramatically improving your chances of finding financial, social, and emotional success.

?The status quo has a powerful undertow, no doubt. Current stakeholders in your life and career will probably encourage you to avoid disruption. For many of us, though, holding steady really means slipping—as we ignore the threat of competition from younger, more agile innovators, bypass opportunities for greater reward, and sacrifice personal growth.

We give a lot of airtime to building, buying, and investing in disruptive companies. They are vital engines of economic growth. However, the most overlooked economic engine is you. If you really want to move the world forward, you need to innovate on the inside—and disrupt yourself.

Jay Samit teaches people how to master personal transformation, seize the opportunity, and thrive in this era of endless innovation.

“Only those people who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly” — Robert F Kennedy