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This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Praise for Disrupt Yourself and Whitney Johnson “Playing it safe is not safe in today’s fast-paced marketplace. Disrupt Yourself is a must-read for anyone looking to stand out from the crowd and pursue innovation in our highly uncertain business climate.” —Eric Ries, best-selling author of The Lean Startup “I have used the word ‘disruption’ to understand how some companies blossom while other wither. Whitney has applied the word in a different context—to context – to understand why some individuals succeed in remarkable ways. Enjoyed this book!” —Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business School, New York Times bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma “If you have gone through your career thinking that it is smarter and safer to ‘stick with what you know,’ get ready to have Whitney Johnson change your mind. Often what we already know can get in the way of what we don’t know. Disrupt Yourself will inspire you to make the jump onto new learning curves, innovate, and stay at the top of your game.” —Liz Wiseman, best-selling author of Multipliers and Rookie Smarts This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. “Disrupt Yourself reads like a handbook for innovation: it shows the incredible value of recognizing what you are good at and finding unexpected ways to apply those strengths to the marketplace. The dramatic ‘jumps’ that Johnson encourages us to take truly form the basis of creativity and success.” —Steve Wozniak, cofounder, Apple, Inc. and chief scientist, Primary Data “Too often we’re told that to be successful in leadership or business, we must fit a certain mold. Whitney Johnson knows better. Applying the lessons of disruptive innovation to personal growth, she shows us how to pursue roles suited to our own strengths, to follow our own unique way of thinking and doing—and to dramatically increase our productivity, creativity, and happiness.” —Susan Cain, New York Times best-selling author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking “Wow! Disrupt Yourself wins the ‘plain English’ award—which is to say I’ve seldom if ever read a better written business/career development book. The advice is compelling, clear-as-a-bell, research-based, and actionable. And it’ll work as well for a fortysomething as a twenty-something.” —Tom Peters, best-selling author of In Search of Excellence This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. “A motivating, compelling case for shifting gears right when we’ve reached our peaks. Whitney Johnson not only explains the why and how, but cheers us on along the way to greater meaning, learning, and innovation.” —Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times best-selling author of Give and Take “Leaders at all levels are often reminded that continuous learning and personal growth are key to successful careers and meaningful lives. In Disrupt Yourself, Whitney Johnson shows how to pursue them, purposefully building a foundation to keep oneself and others learning, changing, and thriving in the long term.” —Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behaviour, INSEAD “Whitney Johnson’s Disrupt Yourself provides clear guidance that will help you both boost your career and become a driving force in market evolution. Her innovative approach proves that staying true to your own strengths can be groundbreaking, and often take you further than following established paths. I highly recommend this book.” —Michelle McKenna Doyle, SVP, CIO, National Football League This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. “You already know that to have the career—and life— you always wanted, you’ll need to be innovative, take risks, and spot and seize opportunities. But how do you actually do any of those things? Because it’s not at all obvious to most of us. Luckily, Whitney Johnson knows exactly how disruptive innovation gets done, and her brilliant new book Disrupt Yourself is the how-to guide you’ve been waiting for.” Grant, Columbia —Dr. Heidi—Dr. GrantHeidi Halvorson, Business School, best-selling author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently and No One Understands You and What to Do About It This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Disrupt Yourself This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION Master Relentless Change and Speed Up Your Learning Curve Whitney Johnson Harvard Business Review Press Boston, Massachusetts This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts Harvard Business Review Press titles are available at significant quantity discounts when purchased in bulk for client gifts, sales promotions, and premiums. Special editions, including books with corporate logos, customized covers, and letters from the company or CEO printed in the front matter, as well as excerpts of existing books, can also be created in large quantities for special needs. For details and discount information for both print and ebook formats, contact [email protected], tel. 800-988-0886, or www.hbr.org/bulksales. Original edition published 2015 Harvard Business Review Press edition 2020 Copyright © 2020 by Whitney Johnson Disrupt Yourself is a registered trademark (TM) of Whitney Johnson. All rights reserved. All rights reserved Find more digital content or join the discussion on www.hbr.org. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163. The web addresses referenced in this book were live and correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnson, Whitney (Whitney W.), author. Title: Disrupt yourself : master relentless change and speed up your learning curve / Whitney Johnson. Description: Boston, MA : Harvard Business Review Press, [2019] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029441 | ISBN 9781633698789 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781633698796 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Success in business. | Disruptive technologies. | Career changes. | Organizational change. | Strategic planning. Classification: LCC HF5386 .J655 2019 | DDC 658.4/09—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029441 ISBN: 978-1-63369-878-9 eISBN: 978-1-63369-879-6 This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. To my husband, who always says jump This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction to the New Edition Introduction ix xiii xxi 1. Take the Right Risks 1 2. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 19 3. Embrace Constraints 39 4. Battle Entitlement, the Innovation Killer 61 5. Step Down, Back, or Sideways to Grow 77 6. Give Failure Its Due 95 7. Be Driven by Discovery 111 Afterword Notes References Index About the Author 128 131 143 153 161 This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Acknowledgments Kantor of the New York Times once told me, Jodi “The first place I go in a book is to the Acknowledgments section.” Me too—so here goes. To Clayton Christensen—thank you for the opportunity and privilege of working with and learning from you for nearly a decade—you inspired me to write this book. You inspire me to be a better person. Thank you to Erika Heilman and Melinda Merino for championing this new edition. After a long journey that began with an article in Harvard Business Review (thanks to Sarah Green Carmichael and Alison Beard), these ideas have come home; this book is right where it should be. A big shout-out to Scott Berinato, Anne Starr, Stephani Finks, Julie Devoll, Felicia Sinusas, and Sally Ashworth––it is a pleasure and delight to work with you. A huge debt of gratitude to my business partner, Amy Humble, for bringing this edition to life. You have a brilliant strategic mind––and you always see the glass as half full—that is a gift. Thank you to editors Amy Jame- This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. x Acknowledgments son and Heather Hunt––you are indispensable, alternatively editors, therapists, and cheerleaders. To Sarah Green Carmichael, my former editor at Harvard Business Review, I am continually in awe of your deft editorial touch. Thank you to David Wan and Eric Hellweg for taking a chance on an unproven writer. To Juan C. Méndez, how I loved collaborating with you. Thank you for helping me apply the S-curve to personal disruption. Stephanie Plamondon Bair, I am so appreciative that you were willing to share your expertise in neuroscience. To Macy Robison: for you, everything is “figure-outable” when it comes to marketing and branding, whether it’s producing the Disrupt Yourself podcast, launching a book, showing up on social media, or developing our website. Your talents appear neverending. Thank you to Brandon Jameson; I love the graphics that grace these pages. You always bring my ideas to life, better than I could have imagined. A big thank you to the WLJ Advisors A-Team–– Whitney Amaro, Jennifer Brotherson, Emilie Davis, Brigham Doxey, Sarah Duran, Christine Goodwin, Whitney Jobe, Miranda Johnson, Mark Matheson, Richard Miller, Libby Newman, Brian Rhea, Kristen Robbins, Melissa Rutty, Heather Schafer, Corey Smith, Tim Weeks, and Nancy Wilson. Huge appreciation to Brandon Rodman and the Weave team, and to Scott Pulsipher and the team at Western Governors University for your commitment to This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Acknowledgments xi surfing the S-Curve of Learning. It’s an honor and delight to partner with you. Thank you to mentors Marshall Goldsmith, Alan Mulally, Scott Osman, Tom Peters, Bob Proctor, Garry Ridge, and Jesse Lyn Stoner––the lives you have changed number in the millions, including mine. Thank you again to all of you involved in the first edition: Jill Friedlander, Erika Heilman, Shevaun Betzler, Alicia Simons, Sue Ramin, and the entire Bibliomotion team for your professionalism: you were what every publisher should be. Appreciation to Josh Getzler for your great advice, and to Amy Gray for your kind, caring, and calm chearleading as I got started speaking. Thank you to Becky Robinson for being so excited about evangelizing Disrupt Yourself—I loved working with you. To those who were willing to endorse this book, I am deeply indebted, and to the many readers of Build an A-Team; Dare, Dream, Do; and our weekly newsletter–– you made this book possible. Finally, to my husband, Roger; my children, David and Miranda; my many dear friends (you know who you are!); and to God, thank you for gently encouraging me to always, always, always show up. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction to the New Edition W hen Disrupt Yourself was first published in 2015, the Boston Globe called it “the What Color Is Your Parachute? career guide for the entrepreneurial age.” With this accolade came the inaccurate perception that Disrupt Yourself only applies to entrepreneurs and career changers. Our research shows that it applies to strong performers in all situations. In my book Build an A-Team (2018), I expanded on this premise. If you want to retain your high performers—whether early career, mid-career, or seasoned professionals—you will allow, encourage, and even require personal disruption; you will make it possible for them to learn, leap, and repeat. It’s a manager’s responsibility to help them jump to something new or risk losing them. Take the pulse of your workforce. If you have too many people who have learned all they can in their current role and aren’t leaping to a new one—disrupting This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xiv Introduction to the New Edition themselves—then your team and organization are at risk. Many fast-growing companies—startups, growthstage companies, private-equity-backed firms—even Fortune 500 companies—on the rise have found Disrupt Yourself and Build an A-Team valuable. They understand they will only get where they want to go by making sure their people grow. Perhaps your company is taking off. You have a great business strategy in place and the future looks bright. But, if you don’t have high-growth individuals engaged in a constant state of personal disruption, they won’t be able to carry the heavy load of exponential growth. Disrupt Yourself lays out a seven-point framework of personal disruption––a proven algorithm for developing the high-growth individuals you need. Below is a brief review of each step with links to podcast interviews of related inspiring stories. Take the Right Risks It’s been said that amateurs compete, professionals create. That sentiment applies to helping people take the right risks. High-growth individuals seek avenues to create. Managers who want to develop those individuals help them find the right opportunities. They don’t pit people against each other; they pit them against themselves. Podcast links: This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction to the New Edition xv In-depth exploration of the topic: https://whitney johnson.com/right-risks/ Interview with Beth Comstock, former Vice Chair of Innovation at GE: https://whitneyjohnson .com/beth-comstock/ Play to Your Distinctive Strengths For high-growth companies and individuals, this is increasingly important. It’s human nature to obsess about weaknesses. In a typical 360-degree review, weaknesses are identified, and the focus placed on how to eliminate them. It is more effective to focus on distinctive strengths. Dianna Newton Andersen, an entrepreneur turned social-good activist at Younique Foundation, shares a story of her college basketball coach who had the team take shots from different places on the court. He would record individual percentages and then have every person on the team memorize those percentages. This allowed each team member to literally play to each other’s distinctive strengths. It is possible to do this with business teams. When people feel strong, they are more willing to venture into new territory—to play where no one else is playing. Podcast link: Interview with Benjamin Hardy, author of the book Willpower Doesn’t Work: https://whitneyjohnson .com/benjamin-hardy/ This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xvi Introduction to the New Edition Embrace Constraints Through hundreds of interviews for my books and podcast episodes, I saw a pattern: I was gravitating to the stories of first- or second-generation immigrants. Immigrants embrace the constraints of their experience— alien culture, foreign language, financial limitations, negligible networks, and so forth—as an accelerant to growth. Constraints give us something to bump up against. They make us stronger and more focused. Whether we lack time, money, buy-in, or expertise, constraints can help us develop resourcefulness and use the lack to our advantage. Podcast link: Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, shares how constraints honed his craft as a novelist: https://whitneyjohnson.com/orson-scott-card/ Battle Entitlement, the Innovation Killer This is the hardest—and most crucial—accelerant to embrace. It is possible to become a high-growth individual without some of the other competencies, but without this one, your efforts will inevitably fall short. All of us place our own interests above others in small, insidious ways, such as showing up late for meetings, assuming things will go as we expect, feeling jealous of another person’s success, and a myriad of other things. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction to the New Edition xvii But the world does not revolve around one person. The story cannot be “It’s all about me.” Gratitude is the way forward because the focus is on what we already have and what is going right. Pay attention to what’s going right, and you’ll grow faster. Podcast links: Interview with Paul Hill, formerly with Mission Operations at NASA: https://whitneyjohnson .com/paul-hill/ Interview with Dave Meltzer, CEO of SportsMarketing1: https://whitneyjohnson.com/ david-meltzer/ Interview with Donna Hicks, a Harvard professor and conflict and resolution expert whose work emphasizes treating others with dignity: https:// whitneyjohnson.com/donna-hicks/ Step Down, Back, or Sideways to Grow The whole point of disruption is to move up the y-axis of success over the x-axis of time. When you disrupt yourself, you are making a conscious decision to leave a comfortable spot and move down the y-axis, on the premise that the slope of your next curve will be even steeper, leading to another period of rapid growth and success. Managers can make this possible––a carefully calculated step back can be an employee’s slingshot to a highgrowth future. Podcast links: This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xviii Introduction to the New Edition Interview with Dave Hollis, a former Disney executive: https://whitneyjohnson.com/dave-hollis/ Interview with Carine Clark, a serial CEO: https:// whitneyjohnson.com/carine-clark/ Give Failure Its Due Failure doesn’t limit disruption; shame about failure does. High-achieving people need to be reminded of this. Failures are inevitable and can be educational. Whether we see an experience as a failure or success is always our choice. Both the up and the down are part of personal disruption. These podcasts address the value of failure in poignant ways: Interview with Maren Kate Donovan, founder and former CEO of Zirtual, which went from rapid growth and success to shutting down almost overnight: https://whitneyjohnson.com/ maren-kate-donovan/ Interview with Brené Brown, best-selling author and expert on vulnerability and shame: https:// whitneyjohnson.com/brene-brown/ Be Driven by Discovery Disruptors take the right risks and play where no one else is playing. They are constantly iterating––figuring it out as they go. Companies need people who can do a This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction to the New Edition xix dogleg pivot and change direction as new data emerges. Seventy percent of all successful new businesses end up with a strategy different than the one they initially pursued. Just as this is true for successful companies, it is true for people. It’s okay to end up in places you didn’t expect. When you do, it’s the best kind of surprise. Podcast links: Interview with Susan Cain, best-selling author of Quiet, who began her career as a Wall Street attorney: https://whitneyjohnson.com/ susan-cain-disrupt-yourself-podcast/ Interview with Jason Jedlinski, a senior executive at Gannett Media: https://whitneyjohnson.com/ jason-jedlinski/ Maureen Chiquet, former CEO of Chanel: https:// whitneyjohnson.com/maureen-chiquet/ Applying Personal Disruption in Your Team and Company Revisiting Disrupt Yourself four years after its initial publication has reminded me of the powerful effect the principles of personal disruption can have on the success of individuals, teams, and companies. The seven steps are discussed in sequence, but you may want and need to tackle them out of order. Taking the right risks, playing to your distinctive strengths, and embracing constraints tend to be important first steps in disruption. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xx Introduction to the New Edition Stepping back to grow may happen mid-disruption, but it can also be a first step. The same is true of giving failure its due. Being driven by discovery needs to happen throughout the process of disruption—at the beginning, middle, and end; while battling entitlement is especially relevant as you become increasingly successful. High-growth organizations need high-growth individuals. Whether you work for a Fortune 500 company and need your people to get comfortable with being uncomfortable so that growth can happen, a billion-dollar company growing at 30 percent a year, or a growth-stage company doubling revenue this year alone, you need people who know how to grow. The Personal Disruption framework is a road map that will get you where you want to go. Because companies don’t disrupt, people do. Whitney Johnson Lexington, VA June 22, 2019 This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction We’re all equal before a wave. — Laird Hamilton, professional surfer I n 2005, I was working as an equity analyst at Merrill Lynch. When one afternoon I told a close friend that I was going to leave Wall Street, she was dumbfounded. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked me. This was her polite, euphemistic way of wondering if I’d lost my mind. My job was to issue buy or sell recommendations on corporate stocks— and I was at the top of my game. I had just returned from Mexico City for an investor day at America Movíl, now the fourth largest wireless operator in the world. As I sat in the audience with hundreds of others, Carlos Slim, the controlling shareholder and one of the world’s richest men, quoted my research, referring to me as “La Whitney.” I had large financial institutions like Fidelity Investments asking for my financial models, and when I upgraded or This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xxii Introduction downgraded a stock, the stock price would frequently move several percentage points. I was at the pinnacle of my Wall Street career, but getting to this place of power and respect had been hard won. My husband and I had moved to New York in 1989 so that he could pursue a PhD in molecular biology at Columbia University. While he was in school, we needed to pay our bills. I had to get a job. I’d majored in music (piano). I had no business credentials, connections, or confidence, so I started as a secretary to a retail sales broker at Smith Barney in midtown Manhattan. It was the era of Liar’s Poker, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Working Girl. Working on Wall Street was exciting. I started taking business courses at night and I had a boss who believed in me, which allowed me to bridge from secretary to investment banker. This rarely happens. Later I became an equity research analyst and subsequently cofounded the investment firm Rose Park Advisors with Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. When I walked onto Wall Street through the secretarial side door, and then walked off Wall Street to become an entrepreneur, I was a disruptor. “Disruptive innovation” is a term coined by Christensen to describe an innovation at the low end of the market that eventually upends an industry. In my case, I had started at the bottom and climbed to the top—now I wanted to upend my own career. No wonder my friend thought I’d lost my sanity. According to Christensen’s theory, disruptors secure This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction xxiii their initial foothold at the low end of the market, offering inferior, low-margin products. At first, the disruptor’s position is weak. For example, when Toyota entered the U.S. market in the 1950s, it introduced the Corona, a small, cheap, no-frills car that appealed to first-time car buyers on a tight budget. No one was worried about an upstart Japanese car manufacturer taking over a huge chunk of the American automobile market. In the theory of disruption, the market leader could have squashed this fledgling disruptor like a bug. But market leaders rarely bother. It’s a silly little product that would add nothing to the bottom line. Let’s focus on bigger, faster, and better. Early on, it didn’t make sense for GM to defend against the Toyota Corona. The problem is that once a disruptor gains its footing, it too will be motivated to move upmarket, producing higher-quality, higher-margin products.1 By the time a counterattack did make sense to GM, it was already too late. Toyota then moved happily upmarket with cars like the Camry and then the Lexus, eventually ceding the low end to Korea’s Hyundai. Now, waiting in the low-end wings are India’s Tata and China’s Chery. From Wall Street’s perspective, these disruptors are the companies and people you want to invest in early on because their potential for growth is huge. Don’t we all wish we had invested in Toyota back in the 70s? But it’s so easy to miss low-end disruptors. I first started covering America Movíl, the Mexican telecom company, in 2002, building a financial model This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xxiv Introduction to determine whether the stock was over- or undervalued. To do this, I needed to predict how quickly wireless telephone adoption in Mexico would occur. In 2002, 25 percent of the Mexican population had adopted wireless, up from 1 percent just five years earlier, while standard landline penetration was about 15 percent. I now had to decide how much more wireless could grow. In analyzing who could afford a phone and who had access to credit, I thought wireless penetration could potentially reach 40 percent—or forty million people—by 2007. Enter Carlos Slim, controlling shareholder of America Movíl. He saw a much bigger opportunity. In addition to the forty million people I saw, he saw the other sixty million people in Mexico who wanted to communicate but couldn’t afford to. So what did Slim do? He offered subsidized handsets and prepaid cards, making credit a nonissue. Sound quality was poor, but bad sound was better than no sound. Over the next decade, landline penetration increased a paltry five percentage points, from 15 percent to 20 percent, while wireless penetration roared past my projection of 40 percent to 90 percent. And in the pursuit of profit, the technology got better. That’s disruption. When I first heard Clayton Christensen speak about disruption at an industry event, I recognized immediately that his theory explained why mobile penetration was repeatedly beating my estimates. Part of the reason disruption can be so hard to spot is the timing; the growth curve can look totally flat for years, then spike upward very steeply. In Mexico, wireless became This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction xxv available in 1988. For almost a decade, penetration was less than 1 percent, but in the five years between 1997 and 2002, penetration ramped to 25 percent. As the pace of disruptive innovation quickens and you are in the midst of a crashing wave, what is unsettling can also be an amazing ride. This book isn’t about simply coping with the force of disruption, but harnessing its power and unpredictability, learning to ride its waves, and to disrupt yourself. You may be trying something new, like leaving an established career to become an entrepreneur, as I did when I left Wall Street. You may be changing jobs within your current industry or company, or jumping to an entirely new field. As you’ll learn in the chapters that follow, disrupting yourself is critical to avoiding stagnation, being overtaken by low-end entrants (i.e., younger, smarter, faster workers), and fast-tracking your personal and career growth. Understanding the S-Curve Our view of the world is powered by personal algorithms. We observe how all of the components of our personal social system interact, looking for patterns to predict what will happen next. When systems behave linearly and react immediately, we tend to be fairly accurate with our forecasts. This is why toddlers love discovering light switches: cause and effect are immediate. But our predictive power plummets when there is a time delay or a nonlinear progression. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xxvi Introduction One of the best models for making sense of a nonlinear world is the S-curve. This model has historically been used to understand how disruptive innovations take hold—why a growth curve will stay flat for so long and then rocket upward suddenly, only to eventually plateau again. Developed by E.M. Rogers in 1962, the S-curve model is an attempt to understand how, why, and at what rate ideas and products spread throughout cultures. Adoption is relatively slow at first, at the base of the S, until a tipping point, or knee of the curve, is reached. You then move into hypergrowth, up the sleek, steep back of the curve. This is usually at somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of market penetration. At the flat part at the top of the S, you’ve reached saturation, typically at 90 percent. FIGURE 1-1 This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction xxvii Facebook, for example, based on a market opportunity of one billion users, took roughly four years to reach penetration of 10 percent. But once Facebook reached a critical mass of a hundred million users, rapid growth ensued due to the network effect (i.e., friends and family were now on Facebook), as well as virality (e-mail updates, photo albums for friends of friends, etc.); over the next four years, Facebook added not one hundred million but eight hundred million users.2 I believe the S-curve can also be used to understand personal disruption— the necessary pivots in our own career paths. In complex systems like a business or a brain, cause and effect may not always be as clear as the relationship between the light switch and the lightbulb. There are time-delayed and time-dependent relationships in which huge effort may yield little in the near term, or in which high output today may be the result of actions taken a long time ago. The S-curve decodes these patterns, providing signposts along a path that, while frequently trodden, is not always obvious. If you can successfully navigate, even harness, the successive cycles of learning and mastering that resemble the S-curve model, you will see and seize opportunities in an era of accelerating disruption. Self-disruption will force you up steep foothills of new information, relationships, and systems. The looming mountain may seem insurmountable, but the S-curve helps us understand that if we keep working at it, we can reach that inflection point where our This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xxviii Introduction understanding and competence will suddenly shoot upward. This is the fun part of disruption, rapidly scaling to new heights of success and achievement. Eventually, you will plateau and your growth will taper off. Then it’s time to look for new ways to disrupt. One story that shows how the S-curve model can help us better forecast the future is the experience of golfer Dan McLaughlin. Never having played eighteen holes of golf, McLaughlin quit his job as a commercial photographer in April 2010 to pursue a goal of becoming a top professional golfer through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice. During the first eighteen months, improvement was slow as McLaughlin practiced his putting, chipping, and drive. Then, as he began to put the various pieces together, he moved into a phase of dizzying growth. Within five years, he had surpassed 96 percent of the twenty-six million golfers who register a handicap with the US Golf Association (USGA). Though McLaughlin was keen to move from the top 4 percent to the top 1 percent of amateur golfers, as he achieved mastery, S-curve math predicted his rate of improvement would decline more and more sharply over time. The Psychology of Disruption The S-curve also helps us understand the psychology of disrupting ourselves. As we launch into something new, understanding that progress may at first be almost imperceptible helps keep discouragement at bay. It also helps us recognize why the steep part of This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction xxix the learning curve is so fun. When you are learning, you are feeling the effects of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in your brain that makes you feel good. It’s an office dweller’s version of thrill seeking. Once we reach the upper flat portion of the S-curve and things become habitual or automatic, our brains create less of these feel-good chemicals and boredom can kick in, making an emotional case for personal disruption. At a career peak, there is certainly the specter of competition from below, but just as importantly, there’s the risk that if we aren’t on a curve that satisfies us emotionally, we may be the cause of our own undoing. When we are no longer getting an emotional reward from our career, we may actually end up doing our job poorly. With learning, our progress doesn’t follow a straight FIGURE 1-2 This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. xxx Introduction line. It is exponential and expands by multiples. Instead of learning a fixed number of facts and figures each day, what we learn is proportional to what we’ve already learned. We needn’t merely plod along, moving one up and one over on the graph paper of existence. If we apply the right variables, we can explode into our own mastery. I’ve identified seven variables that can speed up or slow down the movement of individuals or organizations along the curve, including: Taking the right risks Playing to your distinctive strengths Embracing constraints Battling entitlement Stepping back to grow Giving failure its due Being discovery driven FIGURE 1-3 This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Introduction xxxi We’ll devote a chapter to each. This book is about surfing the S-curves of your own personal disruption. Yes, disruption can feel a bit scary, but the payoff of career growth and personal achievement makes overcoming the fear factor well worth it. We all start at the low end of the learning curve. This book will teach you how to shift into hypergrowth and, when your learning crests, to do what great disruptors do: catch a new wave. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Disrupt Yourself This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 1 Take the Right Risks Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thoughts. — Henry David Thoreau Y ou’re trying something new: you’ve made a lateral move, been promoted, or started a new job. You are confident that you can be successful, but so much is unfamiliar. It’s easy to become frustrated. Take a deep breath, and remember that at the beginning of this S-shaped growth curve, progress will be slow. Very little is habitual at the low end of a learning curve. Considerable effort may seem to yield few results. Mapping new mental territory and creating new neuronal and electrochemical connections take time.1 But, as you practice, new neural networks are formed, and stimulating one neuron in a sequence This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 2 Disrupt Yourself stimulates others. The basal ganglia, an oval of brain cells about the size of an apricot, bursts with activity, analyzing everything— every interaction with stakeholders, every piece of data— and begins to detect patterns. To maximize efficiency, the human brain converts these patterns or sequences of actions into a routine known as “chunking.” For instance, I’m guessing that you simply “brush your teeth” without breaking that task down into disparate parts like reaching for the tube of toothpaste, picking it up, unscrewing the cap, and so on. The more chunking occurs, the more reflexive an activity becomes.2 But if a task is not both meaningful and relevant, your brain will have little motivation to learn it— and thus to move up the S-curve. Therefore, the first thing you need to ask is, “What is it that I am trying to accomplish?” Or, in other words: What job needs to be done? Understanding the Job-to-Be-Done The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of “to hire” is “to give work to a person in exchange for wages or payment”. payment.” But “hiring” can have a much broader definition, extending to every product and service we use. Whenever we buy something, we are “hiring” that product or service to take care of an unmet need, to do a “job.” This is an essential part of the outcome-driven innovation process introduced by Anthony Ulwick3 and popularized by Clayton This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 3 Christensen, who calls it the “jobs-to-be-done” theory. To develop a new service or bring a new product to market, an innovator applying this theory doesn’t focus on a customer’s age or gender. Instead, she focuses on what problem the customer needs solved, and who or what can be hired to do that job. Every job that people want done, with few exceptions, has both functional and emotional elements. Take, for example, buying a home. There is an obvious unmet need—putting a roof over your head. However, if you buy a larger house than you require for shelter or spend hours planting a garden in the backyard, there’s also an emotional job afoot. Consider your use of social media. Perhaps you, like me, hire Twitter to help you expand your network. JP Rangaswami, chief data officer for Deutsche Bank, described tweets as the “knowledge worker’s pheromones,”4 a means of sending signals to others. I also hire Twitter to prototype my ideas in real time and to learn to think more concisely. Now that LinkedIn has added a publishing platform, I can hire it to help me hone my personal voice via blog posts, in addition to consulting its repository of résumés when I am on the hunt for talent. Because Because the the list list of of jobs jobsthat thatLinked-In LinkedIn can do for me has expanded, like an all-purpose cleaner, I seem to hire LinkedIn at least once a day. As a professional investor, I hire an investment to do the functional job of making money. But whether I realize it or not, I am also hiring the investment to do an emotional job for me. To illustrate my point, let’s This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 4 Disrupt Yourself take a look at the U.S. reality show Shark Tank, which features budding entrepreneurs presenting their business plans to five self-made multimillionaires, hoping to convince them to invest. During the second episode of season 6, Mark Cuban invested in a company called Roominate, an award-winning line of toys designed to inspire innovators, founded by two female engineers out of Stanford and MIT.5 One of Cuban’s conditions was that the founders mentor his two young daughters. In addition to a financial return, he was looking for an emotional return for himself, and an educational return for his children.6 Identifying the Job You Want Done When you are beginning a new project, you need to figure out what “jobs”—both functional and emotional—this new endeavor will do for you. It’s best to clarify this either before you switch to a new role or as soon as possible thereafter. As executive coach Pam Fox Rollin shares in her book 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role, “Many flameouts can be traced to missteps during [the] first quarter . . . [F]or the 60–75% of leaders that survive into a second year (one third fail within the first year), their effectiveness and trajectory are powerfully affected by choices made in the first year.”7 To make better choices early on, take the time to figure out why you’re really making a move. For a concrete way of thinking about this, I always This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 5 come back to a lecture given by Steve Kaufman, former CEO of Arrow Electronics, at Harvard Business School in 2010. Like job role changes, corporate mergers are a time of transition— and hence anxiety. Kaufman recounted advice from the former head of Arrow’s acquisition integration team, Betty Jane Hess: “When we make an acquisition, every employee has just three questions: (1) Do I have a job? (2) Who do I report to? And (3) How will I get paid? Until they get answers, nothing else matters.” Let’s take each in turn: 1. Do I have a job? In psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one of the most basic is to feel secure. But once we’ve got the paycheck that will put food in our stomachs and shelter over our heads, we need to feel that we belong, that what we do matters,8 and that we are learning. These are needs not often covered by our formal job descriptions. Similarly, our companies and coworkers need things from us that go beyond our job titles. If you’re a producer at an ad agency, your job is ostensibly to bring marketing assets to life. If you’re a computer programmer, your job is to write code. But perhaps it’s also your job to do the emotional work of achieving consensus among stakeholders, or the logistical job of keeping people on track. For the person who says, “I just want to do my (functional) job,” the realization that he will not be rewarded solely on his domain expertise can come as a shock. When people decide to make a change, it’s This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 6 Disrupt Yourself often because the work no longer does the emotional job they originally hired it to do, or because they want to shed some of the unspoken “jobs” that came with the role. So when you’re planning a move, be very clear on what the job is, from the company’s perspective and yours, both functionally and emotionally. 2. Who do I report to? If you’ve been through a merger, you know just how blurry the reporting structure can be. But uncertainty can be found in any work situation, not just after a takeover. When people don’t know to whom they answer, or the metrics by which they will be measured, there will be chaos. Research from Colin Camerer, a neuroscientist at Caltech, and his colleagues indicates that people prefer known risks to ambiguity. When test subjects were asked to make decisions based on little or ambiguous information, they exhibited substantially more activity in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with fear, than when they were asked to make decisions they knew were risky. It’s this inexplicable fright— an irrational by-product of not knowing—that keeps us from focusing on the possibility of future rewards.9 Once you solve the problem of where you fit, to whom you’ll be accountable, and how your contributions will be measured, your brain can spend less time worrying and more time learning. 3. How will I get paid? Notice that the question here is not how much. We all want to be paid in cold This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 7 hard cash, and preferably a good amount of it. That’s the functional reason people work. But how else will you be compensated? What about the emotional rewards that are worth far more to most people than dollars and cents? Wouldn’t you stay at a job longer because of intangibles such as long-term opportunities, the belief that you are building something important, or the feeling that you have a seat at the table? Are you more motivated by pride (seeing your name on the brass plaque) or by gratitude (hearing a customer say “thank you”)? By problem solving or by praise? You can’t go after the rewards that matter to you— or properly reward your colleagues—if you don’t first know what those rewards are. This is probably a good time to answer that lingering question my friend, my husband, and probably you, had: why did you walk away from Wall Street? Knowing that work does a functional and emotional job, the logic becomes clear. I was at a point where I could continue to hire Merrill Lynch to pay the bills, but I could no longer hire it for the emotional rewards. Not only had I reached the top of a learning curve with no prospects for jumping to a new one because management liked me me ‘right right where I was,’ was, I discovered that notwithstanding performance metrics that were 20% better than my peers, we all received the same bonus. The emotional cost of staying had become too high when I could no longer bring my dreams to work.10 This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 8 Disrupt Yourself Nature Favors Risk Takers Starting something new means taking a risk. But in our society, the word “risk” has assumed mostly negative connotations. When someone tells us “that’s risky,” most of us have a visceral, fearful reaction. But Mother Nature seems to have built a loophole into our sense of well-being, because embedded somewhere within the human genetic makeup is an inclination to take risks. Of course, in order for evolution and natural selection to favor risk-taking as a behavior there has to be a benefit, and that benefit has to outweigh the outcome of doing nothing. Many examples from the animal kingdom support this hypothesis. According to research by Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, who was trying to understand a continuum of risk-taking, fish willing to take risks were likely to mate better.11 Guppies, for example, engage in what is known as predator inspection behavior. Predator inspection is akin to guard duty. A few fish break away from the group and slowly approach the predator to obtain information. In taking risks in the presence of a predator, a guppy is more likely to get eaten, but a male guppy that takes this risk is more attractive as a mate to females.12 The bolder guppies are also better at learning. Fortune may favor the brave guppy, but what if you aren’t a risk-taker by nature? According to psychologists Tory Higgins and Heidi Grant Halvorson, people This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 9 can be divided into two personality categories: those who are promotion focused and those who are prevention focused.13 Those whose motivation is promotion focused are comfortable taking chances, like to work quickly, dream big, and think creatively: they are natural risk-takers, focused on maximizing gain. In contrast, people who are prevention focused tend to concentrate on staying safe, work slowly and meticulously, worry what might go wrong if they aren’t careful enough, and focus on preserving what they have. So for the risk averse who are trying to convince themselves to try something new, the trick is not to focus on what will be gained by venturing forth, but to instead focus on what might be lost by standing still. For example, if I’m a really prevention-focused person thinking about asking for a promotion, I shouldn’t try to psych myself up for it by imagining all the accolades I might win or the new projects I might take on. I should focus on what I might miss out on—the great projects I might not get assigned to, or the money I’m leaving on the table. Identify the Right Risks As you gear yourself up to take risks, it’s also important to distinguish between competitive risk and market risk. Competitive. If a colleague comes to you, and says, “The opportunity for this product is huge and I’ve This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 10 Disrupt Yourself got the projections to prove it,” it’s quite likely that a competing company or individual has scoped out the opportunity. There’s probably already a kingpin. It’s not you. You can be confident there will be customers for your product or service, but you have to assess whether you can compete and win. This is competitive risk. Market. If instead your colleague says, “I don’t know if there’s a market, but I think there’s a need not being met,” you are looking at market risk. You have no idea if there will be customers for your product or idea, so a forecast of what you might earn in the future is fiction. However, if you can find customers who want to hire your product, as the first mover you are favored to own the market. Because our brains make a mountain out of a molehill of uncertainty, we tend to prefer competitive risk because it feels more secure. But the empirical evidence says that market risk is less risky than competitive risk.14 The classic example is Clayton Christensen’s analysis of the disk drive industry. He divided the eightyplus firms that entered the disk drive industry from 1976 to 1993 into two major categories: firms that sought growth through a disruptive strategy, introducing a new product and creating a market for that product (market risk), and companies that pursued growth with proven technologies in established markets (competitive risk). Of the fifty-two firms that This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 11 entered established markets, only three (6 percent) ever reached $100 million in revenue. In contrast, of the thirty-two firms that entered a market that was less than two years old, twelve (37 percent) surpassed $100 million in revenue. In addition, the firms that created new markets logged $62 billion in accumulated revenue between 1976 and 1994, compared with $3.3 billion for those that moved into established markets. Based on this research, when you take on market versus competitive risk, the odds of success are six times (37 percent versus 6 percent) higher and the revenue opportunity twenty times greater.15 Another hack for helping your brain reconsider market risk is to take a look at stock market valuations. In analyzing forty companies that were identified as disruptive (i.e., took on market risk) in the ten years after they went public, the average price/earnings multiple for these stocks was 30x, or double that of the broader market. Because this basket of stocks initially looked overvalued, one could understandably argue that competitive risk is a safer bet. However, when the high price of these disruptors was compared to their much higher growth rate, these stocks didn’t look so pricey. Relative to companies that were taking on competitive risk these disruptors looked expensive, but relative to their own growth rate (which was initially underestimated because the market had yet to be created) the stocks were actually a bargain.16 In other words, market risk is the right kind of risk when you’re looking for a new learning curve to scale. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 12 Disrupt Yourself Here’s another way to think about it. When I evaluate an investment, one of the first questions I ask is: “Is this company flying under the radar?” Meaning, is it unattractive enough that competitors have no incentive to either co-opt it or gun it down? It’s better to be treated as a paper airplane than a fighter jet. When you are disrupting, the best possible start-up scenario is to be dismissed, even ignored, just as Blockbuster ignored Netflix—right up until Blockbuster was “netflixed.”17 Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is a good example of an organization that took on flyunder-the-radar market risk.18 A decade ago, SNHU was a two-thousand-student college with declining enrollment. Instead of trying to increase enrollment by competing for Ivy League– caliber professors at the high end or with government-funded community colleges at the low end, the university chose to play where no one else was playing— online. There was no guarantee that students would be interested in online degree programs. But because SNHU took on market risk, playing where no one else was playing, and there were many students looking for the flexibility provided by online courses, it is now considered the Amazon of education, with thirty-four thousand students enrolled. SNHU is in the process of jumping to yet another growth curve to decrease the cost of a college degree by measuring competencies rather than credits. One student demonstrated all This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 13 120 competencies in one hundred days. His associate’s degree cost a grand total of $1,250. A good example of taking on market risk in personal, career terms is Amy Jo Martin, founder of Digital Royalty. In 2008, of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on advertising and publicity by the NBA, very little was allocated to social media. Martin saw an unmet need, and leveraged her expertise to persuade the Phoenix Suns to hire her as director of digital media, a first-of-its-kind position within the NBA. Martin’s clients have included Shaquille O’Neal, and she has more than a million Twitter followers. Her gig sounds fantastically fun, but at the outset people wondered if it was even a job. Avoid the Wrong Risks In 1996, when I was working for Smith Barney, I moved from banking to equity research, having been hired to cover the cement and construction sector in Latin America. Within weeks of my move, Smith Barney bought Salomon Brothers, and Salomon Brothers already had a highly regarded Institutional Investorranked analyst in cement and construction. Rather than knocking on a door that was closed, I opened a window: there were a number of media companies going public with no analyst to follow them, so I volunteered for that beat. Rather than trying to outcompete the incumbent construction analyst, I took on This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 14 Disrupt Yourself market risk, as disruption theory would dictate. Of course, it was a lot messier and more painful than the narrative makes it sound, but within a year I also was an Institutional Investor-ranked analyst. By venturing into an unmarked market with few competitors, I was able to scale this new curve quickly. A classic mistake made during venture capital booms is to fund start-ups that have good ideas but no staying power because an established player will have the incentive to co-opt the idea and squash the up-and-comer like a bug. TIVo, for example, was co-opted by cable and telecom companies that poured millions of dollars into embedding digital video recorders into their set-top boxes, making TIVo hardware redundant. TomTom GPS was a great idea until GPS functionality was built into smartphones. These brilliant new ideas became services that are now broadly offered, but the firms that started developing them have ceased to exist as independent entities. Competitive risk cancelled their climb up the S-curve of disruption. Here’s what that this scenario can look like for an individual: one firm I’ve consulted with had hired a new portfolio manager to make investment decisions for the firm. There was a senior person on staff who thought that was his job. To succeed, the new hire needed the senior staffer to cooperate. But the senior staffer saw the new hire as an interloper. It turned into a game of chicken. The senior staffer was eventually let go, but the new hire suffered a huge loss of political This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 15 capital early on as he competed with an established employee to accomplish the same job. Brain science also supports market risk over competitive risk. The stressed out, “on-guard” or fearful state of mind associated with competition wears down our cognitive functioning over time. When you compete, it’s as if you are going into battle. Your sympathetic nervous system mobilizes the body for a fight-or-flight response, activating the hypothalamus, stimulating the pituitary gland, and releasing cortisol. Your body likes the cortisol initially. This is why studies have found that soldiers in combat are more effective their first month on the front lines. But as that cortisol rush levels off, cognitive functioning deteriorates. Judgment, memory, and even the immune system all decline, while irritability, depression, moodiness, and gastrointestinal ailments increase.19 Taking a market risk involves a much healthier mental state. In my own experience, even though I crave certainty and the control of a focused task to complete, moving into terra incognita feels better. It is restorative, both emotionally and physically. A study done by Kennon M. Sheldon and colleagues suggests that opportunities for self-expression—for example, creativity—may increase feelings of agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness, leading people to act more responsibly, cooperatively, receptively, and cheerfully.20 While we perceive a new-fangled idea as more risky than an established one, what happens in our brains tells us otherwise. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 16 Disrupt Yourself Identify a Job No One Else Can Do For real staying power, it’s important to specialize in such a way that there is no one else doing the job.21 A few summers ago, my friend’s eleven-year-old triplets wanted to earn some money. They set up a lemonade stand. Instead of setting up in front of the house, like kids usually do, they set up next to a high school football field after practice on a hot summer day. There was no guarantee there would be a market for the lemonade at the football field. But there was no competition either. If there were customers, the entire market was going to be theirs for the taking. It was. These eleven-year-olds earned $75 in about twenty minutes. You’ll know you’re dealing with market risk when you realize there is no one else doing a job that needs to be done. Rachael Chong saw social good organizations recruiting skilled volunteers but then doing little except asking them to give money or directing them to do mind-numbing tasks like stuff envelopes. Chong came up with a plan to templatize the various functions of a nonprofit so that professionals could actually donate their expertise, not just their time and money. A marketer may help a nonprofit rebrand its website, while an HR person helps a social enterprise set up a time-off policy. In just five years, Chong’s company, Catchafire, had more than five thousand social good organizations as clients, more than twenty thousand skilled volunteers, and was one of the largest talent providers for nonprofits in the world. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Take the Right Risks 17 When you make the decision to start something new, first figure out the jobs you want to do. Then position yourself to play where no one else is playing. Despite our love affair with the certainty of competitive risk, the natural world, business research, and brain science all tell us that trying something new is less risky and ultimately more satisfying. It’s the difference between a friends-and-family lemonade stand that earns a few dollars and one that takes in multiples of that—because customers are truly thirsty for what you know how to do, and because you’re the only one serving it up. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 2 Play to Your Distinctive Strengths Each bird must sing with its own throat. — Henrik Ibsen D isruptors not only look for unmet needs, they match those needs with their distinctive strengths. A distinctive strength is something that you do well that others within your sphere don’t. Pairing this strength with a need to be met or problem to be solved gives you the momentum necessary to move into hypergrowth, the sweet spot of the S-curve. In this chapter, we’ll review what a distinctive strength is, talk about how to identify yours, match them with unmet needs, and then explore how this pairing allows you to accelerate up the curve. In nature, it is abundantly clear that playing to distinctive strengths is what provides sustenance This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 20 Disrupt Yourself and allows an organism to thrive. I am stunned by the incredible diversity that exists within the animal kingdom, for example. Each organism has evolved to exploit a specific niche or adapt to a different climate. Sometimes the strength is specific and obvious. Think about the cuddly little koala, sleeping up to twenty hours a day. One might have serious doubts about its ability to survive. However, the koala can do something that almost no other animal can: it uses eucalyptus leaves, which have minimal nutritional and caloric value, as a food source. Sometimes the strength will be less obvious. Consider Charles Darwin’s finches, a subject you may vaguely remember from high school biology class. When Darwin first encountered these birds on the Galapagos Islands, he gathered numerous specimens, not quite realizing what he had discovered. Upon his return, he presented these specimens to the famous English ornithologist John Gould for identification. Gould’s analysis revealed that the specimens Darwin had submitted were in fact highly variable. What at first glance were all just “finches” turned out to be twelve different species. There were similarities, but evolution had allowed each to develop a distinctive strength. Each species had a novel beak structure that allowed it to exploit a specific food resource. Some evolved to eat seeds, others fruit, others insects, and others grubs. In business terms, they all had similar core competencies (feathers, wings, feet, beak), but it was a distinctive, seemingly subtle strength—the type This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 21 of beak—that allowed the finches to effectively compete for a specific type of food. Identify What You Do Well What are you good at? Do you have an obvious advantage like the koala, or will you need to do a little hunting like Darwin’s finches? The following list of questions is not exhaustive, but it will get you started: 1. What skills have helped you survive? Like the finches whose beaks are adapted for the birds’ survival, you have skills you’ve developed out of necessity. Scott Edinger is a highly successful consultant and CEO advisor— a role he could not have conceived of in his youth. He never knew his father, grew up broke and living in a trailer park, and at age nine, his mother left and he was adopted into less than ideal circumstances. Scott learned to survive his challenging childhood by becoming an expert in communication, conflict resolution, attunement to others, and raw persuasion. In college he put the paint and polish on his communication skills, placing in the top five in over a hundred debate tournaments, and earning bronze medals at the national championships, while completing a bachelor of science in communication and rhetoric. Fast forward: prior to starting his own consulting firm, Edinger was an Executive Vice President of Sales, and has been globally ranked #2 in sales in a This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 22 Disrupt Yourself division of a Fortune 500 company. He is the author of two books and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Review, for for which he wrote a popular and oftenquoted magazine article, “How to Make Yourself Indispensable.” As a consultant, he has repeatedly helped Fortune 500 companies turn around underperforming divisions by focusing on a critical survival skill in business—how business – how to sell. What unique skills have you developed to survive and then applied within your career to thrive? 2. What makes you feel strong? Marcus Buckingham, the author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, explains: “Our strengths . . . clamor for attention in the most basic way: using them makes you feel strong. Take note of the times when you feel invigorated, inquisitive, successful . . . these moments are clues to what your strengths are.”1 If you identify and focus on what makes you feel strong, you can also expect to be happier, which, according to researchers, “leads to more flexible and adaptive thinking and to enhanced innovative ability and problem solving in a wide range of circumstances.”2 Do you feel strong when you’re teaching or learning, when you’re buying or selling, when you’re leading a team or creating on your own? 3. What exasperates you about others? When I wrote about this topic for Harvard Business Review, reader Alana Cates pointed out another way of This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 23 identifying our hidden strengths: “When are you exasperated? The frustration of genius is in believing that if it is easy for you, it must be easy for everyone else.”3 Whether you are an engineer, musician, scientist, or professor struggling to manage the work of subordinates or peers, it may not be that they’re deficient, just that you’re unusually skilled. Where does your “genius” emerge? 4. What made you different, even an oddball, as a child? As children we do what we love to do— even if that makes us an oddity. When you look back to childhood passions, you are likely to discover an innate talent. In elementary school, Candice Brown Elliott’s classmates teasingly called her “Encyclopedia Brown” after the character in the children’s books. She recounts, “All the kids thought I was the smartest kid in school, but most of my teachers were deeply frustrated with me, because I got only average grades. I was labeled an underachiever.” She found schoolwork boring, so she didn’t pay attention. Instead, she says, “I daydreamed of having animated conversations with famous people like Madame Curie or Benjamin Franklin. I daydreamed about building the first true Artificial Intelligence (AI) that would reside in my bedroom closet. I daydreamed about how to build floating cities, great inventions, and new forms of art.” High school was a similar experience; Elliott was reading two or three novels a week, but she flunked This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 24 Disrupt Yourself English class because she didn’t want to participate in dissecting literature that was “trashy and juvenile.” The second semester she was placed in “Survival English,” the school mistakenly taking her failing grade as evidence that she couldn’t read. Despite not doing her schoolwork, Elliott continued to ace her exams and was muddling through with a C average. “Senior year, one instructor cornered me in the hallway angrily demanding to know why I never did the work. I replied, ‘It interferes with my studies.’ Thinking that I was being a smart-aleck kid, he angrily asked what I was studying… so I told him. He was dumbfounded that I was self-studying at an advanced university level, using my father’s university textbooks, among others. He then challenged me and said, ‘I want you to take my third semester Chem AP class.’ To which I objected, ‘But I haven’t taken the first two semesters.’ He overcame my objection by informing me that the third semester was by invitation only, would have only five students, and we each had to do only one semester project, of our own choosing. That final semester I had the same teacher for both Chem AP and English.” Elliott was on the honor roll that final semester, earning straight As. Four decades later, Candice Brown Elliott holds ninety U.S.-issued patents. Her most famous invention, PenTile, color flat-panel display architecture, is shipping in hundreds of millions of smartphones, tablets, notebook PCs, and high-resolution televisions. She founded a venture-backed company to develop This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 25 this technology, and later sold it to Samsung. She says, “If you see me at my desk, you’ll likely catch me daydreaming still.” As a child, Elliott’s daydreaming was considered odd by her classmates and tremendously frustrating by her teachers. As an adult, her daydreaming, autodidactic approach is her superpower. Is there something that made you peculiar when you were young? Could it be your superpower? 5. What compliments do you shrug off? All too frequently, we are oblivious to our own strengths. The trouble with certain strengths is that you do them so reflexively well they can be easy to overlook. Perhaps you’ve had an experience similar to that of Neil Reay, managing director at Cancer Treatment Centers of America. When he asked for recommendations on his LinkedIn profile, he discovered, “Several things that others said about my strengths were not the things I was using as ‘Core Skills’ in my own profile, but were valuable to those around me.”4 Keep an eye out for those compliments you habitually dismiss not because you are being coy, but because this “thing” feels as natural as breathing. It may even be you’ve heard a compliment so many times, you are sick of it! Why can’t people praise you for the thing that you’ve worked really, really hard to do well? A great example is Viniece Jennings, a senior fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program. After taking Gallup’s StrengthsFinder survey, she discovered that she This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 26 Disrupt Yourself was socially outgoing, reliable, genuine, and authentic. She was happy to learn that she was considered emotionally intelligent, but her type A alter ego was disappointed that qualities such as strategic, analytical, or focused weren’t in her lineup. Wondering if the survey was somehow incomplete, she asked friends and colleagues about the results. They responded, “Yep, that’s you” or, “That quality really sets you apart.” Because she has a PhD in environmental science and works as a research scientist, Jennings shares, “I expected to be mechanically analytical, inquisitive about everything environmental, and perhaps walking around with a statistics book.” Given the seeming disconnect between her perceived strengths and the test results, Jennings looked to her past for proof of her supposed emotional intelligence. She’d grown up in Athens, Georgia, where there are a lot of landfills. After starting college in Delaware, she discovered that trash from Delaware was frequently routed to Georgia. She says, “On campus, every time I saw someone waste something I was sick inside because I knew it might be shipped to my hometown.” That’s when she wrote a mini-grant and managed a campus-wide recycling program in her spare time. A college friend recently sent her a picture of the new recycling bins at her alma mater, with the text “all because of you.” Remembering the impact of this experience, Jennings could see just how powerful and important her empathic strengths are, and that these strengths are a distinctive advantage within her chosen field of environmental science. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 27 The tendency to deflect compliments around what we do reflexively well is understandable, perhaps even justifiable, but over the course of a career (or the life of a company), it will leave us trading at a discount to what we are really worth. Nineteenth-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Don’t assume that just because something comes easily or seems obvious to you, it’s not rare and valuable to someone else. What compliments do you repeatedly dismiss? 6. What are your hard-won skills? These proficiencies aren’t necessarily your best skills, but typically they carry a price tag of sweat and possibly tears, and they speak volumes about you. These are the skills you point to when someone asks, “What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” While I was at Merrill Lynch, a résumé came across my desk for a fellow straight out of undergrad named Rob Larson. I liked that he’d majored in math, but what made him an especially attractive candidate for investment banking was that he’d earned money for college as a cowhand. We interviewed him; Goldman Sachs hired him. In a competitive field of candidates, his résumé stood out, not because herding cattle was a requisite skill for the job, but because he was no stranger to hard work. Hard-won skills not only signal an ability to stick with a difficult task, they are often “pay-to-play” skills, This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 28 Disrupt Yourself a hurdle you have to jump to be able to do the job, and are thus vital at the outset of a career or upon reentry to the workforce after an extended leave of absence. Early in my professional life, it was apparent that if I wanted to play in the Wall Street sandbox, I had to pay by learning financial analysis, coursework not covered in my liberal arts curriculum. In almost every industry there are pay-to-play skills. When you muscle your way to acquiring these, they’ll give you the heft you need to scale existing curves and jump to new ones. What skills have you worked really hard to obtain? Identify Your Distinctive Strengths Once you’ve identified your underlying assets or your core strengths, you also need to spot your distinctive strengths, defined as what you do well that others in your sphere don’t, in order to set your hand- and footholds along the curve. Here’s an example: in the film The Hundred-Foot Journey, the Kadam family has sought asylum in Europe due to election disputes in Mumbai, India. After an initial stay in England, they make their way to a small village in France on the border of Switzerland. The father purchases an abandoned restaurant across the street— a hundred feet away—from an upscale French restaurant. Much of the humor in the film is about the rivalry between the two restaurateurs. What is interesting from the perspective of disruption is following the learning curve of Hassan, the This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 29 second-oldest son. He is a talented chef whose specialty is, not surprisingly, Indian cooking. But to gain stature as a chef, Hassan must master the French tradition. Only once he’s mastered the pay-to-play skill of French cuisine can he infuse it with Indian spices and flavors. This French– Indian fusion is his distinctive strength (what he does well that others within his sphere don’t) and wins him the industry’s coveted Michelin star. For a real-life example, consider the story of industrial designer Adam Richardson. At age six, he was sketching designs for cars; by age nine, he was surveying neighbors about their driving habits and measuring their car interiors. Thirty years ago, this was a unique strength—no one was approaching design through the lens of research. When Richardson graduated from college, because he hadn’t yet keyed in on this strength, he took a fairly traditional industrial designer job at Sun Microsystems. He quickly realized that most of his design industry colleagues were brilliantly creative but not particularly attuned to customers’ needs. He, by contrast, wasn’t the strongest stylist but was enthralled with market research and good at capturing it. “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 that at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Stanford Design Program didn’t exist then, he ended up cobbling together This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 30 Disrupt Yourself a course for himself via the University of Chicago’s self-directed Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. Once Richardson was willing to veer from the traditional industrial design path to study anthropology, ethnography, sociology, cultural theory, and art history, he was able to make the leap to a dream job at design consultancy Frog. He is now a financial services disruptor at Financial Engines.5 Lieutenant Joseph “DuckDuck” Geeseman planned on teaching neuroscience at the college level, but when he graduated the job market was abysmal. So he started looking for an unmet need outside of academia. He applied to Facebook and Google (to possibly work with their data algorithms), to Hershey’s and Kraft (to be a food scientist), and to casino game companies (to make algorithms and stimuli that would keep people playing longer). Because his mother was an army officer he also applied to the military. It turns out the military was interested in his PhD in neuroscience; the United States Navy has more than thirty active duty aerospace psychologists. Now that he has obtained the pay-to-play skill of basic flight training, Lt. Geeseman’s expertise in neuroscience and psychology is a distinctive strength as he designs aircraft and pilot interfaces. And he gets to do more science and research than he could have imagined. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 31 Match Your Strengths with Unmet Needs Once you have a clear picture of your one-of-a-kind skills, you can match those skills to unmet needs. Consider jobs where you’d be the wild-card candidate. Or look for ways to combine your passions. Look at problems that the organization needs solved, and ask yourself: Can I fix that? When Jayne Juvan, a partner at the law firm Roetzel & Andress in Cleveland, Ohio, started using social media, very, very few lawyers used these tools. Because her profession is so conservative, many of the attorneys she interacted with didn’t see the opportunity. After only a few months of blogging, Crain’s Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media by lawyers. In her first year of practice, she landed a client via social media. That was a game changer, because her colleagues began to see her as an owner, not just an employee. When she started to land wins, it became harder to navigate her profession because the legal industry was quite competitive. But, as she shares, “I didn’t back off, because I now knew how powerful social media was.” Good thing. When she was a third- and fourth-year associate, in 2007 to 2008, the economy collapsed. Her class experienced deep layoffs across the industry, which she sidestepped, in part because of her social media efforts. Most of the accolades she has received can be traced to social media. When she This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 32 Disrupt Yourself was considered for promotion to partner, the fact that she was being followed by prominent professionals on Twitter bolstered her case in a major way, as the CEO saw the potential of these relationships. According to Catalyst, only 20 percent of partners in law firms are women, and only 16 percent of them have $500,000 worth of business or more.6 Jayne Juvan made partner at age thirty-two, and at thirty-four, her billing reports placed her in the small percentage of women with $500,000-plus of business. Once Juvan had acquired the basic competencies involved in practicing law, social media became her distinctive strength, propelling her into the partnership ranks at her law firm. Greg Sorensen, CEO of Siemens Healthcare North America, was able to solve a problem for both Siemens and himself. As a former professor of radiology and health sciences IT at Harvard Medical School, Sorensen is highly credentialed. If Sorensen had raised his hand for a CEO role, however, it is unlikely he would have been a serious contender. But after Siemens Healthcare North America spent a year trying to fill the CEO position with a traditional sales candidate, one of the division CEOs, Tom Miller, and the CEO of the Managing Board, Hermann Requardt, came up with the crazy idea to hire Sorensen: someone who could comfortably converse with CEOs of hospitals and department chairs at major medical schools, speak knowledgeably to the Wall Street Journal, and influence the conversation in health-care reform. This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 33 Because his unique portfolio of skills met the company’s need, Siemens was finally able to fill a critical position, and Sorensen had the opportunity to embark on a new endeavor. Say Hello to the Low End of the Curve Now that you’ve got a handle on your distinctive strengths and have found an unmet need, it’s time to disrupt, right? Unfortunately, at the low end of the curve, you’re so overwhelmed by new tasks, new people, and new information that finding the right unmet need to fit your unique confluence of skills can be very difficult. It’s tough to discern between something that is difficult to accomplish and something that is just the wrong fit. Tereza Nemessanyi (pronounced Nem u SHAWN e) came to Microsoft from a background of strategy consulting and start-ups with the mandate to rethink how the tech giant engages with start-ups in New York City. She dove into the role with guns blazing, ready to shake things up and confident that her past experience and expertise would be taken at face value. What she found was an organizational structure that was difficult to understand and navigate successfully at the low end of her learning curve— she says it was “like I was speaking French and they were speaking Uzbek.” She couldn’t seem to get anything done. Finally Nemessanyi’s boss assigned her to some projects where she could quickly generate revenue and This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 34 Disrupt Yourself rack up points internally. She leveraged those projects superbly, and gained the necessary credibility and buy-in to circle back to her original mandate of working with start-ups. In 2014, Nemessanyi was able to partner with Suzanne Lee, founder and CEO of Biocouture, a cutting-edge biofabrication company and consultancy, to help sponsor Biofabricate, the first-ever conference organized around the concept of growing live biological materials as an input to manufacture. It was hugely successful; the O’Reilly Radar blog wrote that it “changed their view of the future.”7 Nemessanyi could have thrown in the towel and left Microsoft when she felt stalled at the low end of her new learning curve, but because she worked through the initial phase of learning and achieving pay-to-play milestones, she was able to build credibility, gaining access to the resources she needed to fulfill Microsoft’s unmet needs. Sometimes moving up the curve just takes patience. In 2004, Lauren Zalaznick had arrived at the cable network Bravo as a result of the NBC acquisition of Universal. The network was looking for a show that would appeal to “affluencers”—well-educated, influential, and affluent viewers. Project Runway, a show about aspiring fashion designers, was that show. Bravo chose the airdate carefully. December 1 at 10 p.m. It had a strong lead-in and would air the week after Thanksgiving, when main networks were airing reruns. The network promoted the show heavily. It did This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 35 everything right. But the ratings were bad. Only two out of a thousand people were watching, when the projection was twenty. The ratings were so bad, the team thought Nielsen had made a mistake. Both the show and Zalaznick’s job were on the line. Second-week ratings weren’t any better. The third week, ratings were actually lower. So Zalaznick asked, what can we learn? Bravo had never had original programming in the 10 p.m. time slot, so maybe viewers weren’t used to looking for content there. Maybe the massive ad campaign of a few million dollars was paltry compared with those of the major networks. Maybe competitive reality shows weren’t a thing, and neither was fashion. But instead of pulling back, Bravo doubled down. Instead of airing shows that it knew could get ratings, the network kept airing Project Runway. The idea of binge watching hadn’t yet taken hold, but marathoning on cable had, so Bravo aired the first three episodes as often as possible. By January, the ratings had quadrupled. We know the rest. It was the first competitive reality show on cable to win an Emmy, beating the major networks. It was in the vanguard of reality television, and legitimized creative competition on TV. The show wasn’t a bomb; Zalaznick and her team were simply at the low end of the curve.8 Sometimes you are on the wrong curve. You may see a huge opportunity, or hope to be hired to do a job, but before taking the job or starting that business, make sure that you have the strengths that meet those This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 36 Disrupt Yourself needs. If there isn’t a match, it will be tough to drive toward competence. Best-selling author Augusten Burroughs wanted to be an actor as a child, and was confident he would be “one of the greatest actors of the day, possibly the greatest.” When he finally saw himself on videotape, “it was a stunning revelation. My knowledge that I was giving an incredible performance in no way aligned with what I saw. I sucked worse than anything has ever sucked in the history of suckage.”9 Faced with the truth that he was not an actor, he wondered, what now? Burroughs eventually made his way toward writing. Because he writes well, he was able to do the job that he had hoped to do as an actor: connect with people. He then explains, “When I chose writing over acting, I didn’t give up on a dream, I gave up on my choice of vehicle used to deliver the dream. Dreams are not like spleens, there’s not just one per person.” Like Burroughs, you may find that your distinctive strengths do not align with the learning curve you are hoping to scale. In which case, you’ll want to jump to a curve that is a better fit. There is no shortage of jobs-to-be-done and problems to be solved. But there’s only one of you. The right problems are those that you somehow feel called to solve, and are capable of solving, because of your expertise and accumulated life experience. As you consider making the leap to a new learning curve, examine the assets you’ve acquired, and focus on what you can do that others cannot. Then look for a This document is authorized for use only by Atul gupta ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. Play to Your Distinctive Strengths 37 job that no one else is doing. Just as Darwin’s finch…