Over the past decade, I’ve become something of an expert in personal disruption, after quitting a high-profile position on Wall Street, pursuing several entrepreneurial paths, co-founding two investment firms, and reinventing myself as a writer and speaker. If you are going to disrupt your career there are a lot of questions. But maybe the biggest hurdle is the “can” question: “Can I afford to make the change”?
Read MoreWhat if losing your job to a robot were good for you?
Read MoreConsistently producing value through disruptive innovation is the best way to live your professional life, no doubt about it. Nothing will provide more fulfillment, upward mobility, and compensation. But it's not easy.
Read MoreIf you create value, there will be a payoff.
Read MoreThe people who make the biggest differences in organizations have killer vision. Vision is valuable because it gives you the confidence to know an obstacle can be overcome, and you can see the path forward more quickly than everyone else. Killer vision is a way of thinking that gets you organized and exhilarated. It’s the difference between the people who get it and the people who don’t.
Read MoreAll jobs, regardless of prospects for upward mobility, serve as a vehicle for you to become a rock star, to lead your peers, and create value through disruptive change. The moment you believe you are in a dead-end job, you believe that the only value you can derive from it is your paycheck and that this will never change. If you believe this, then you can’t rock, lead or disrupt. You’re a dead-end person.
Read MoreProcess improvement projects fail more often than they succeed. Even though there are many documented lessons from these failures, organizations continue to repeat the same mistakes. The result is wasted project spend and a process that is as bad (or worse) than when the project started. For would-be disrupters this is detrimental. Launching a disruptive idea and failing in execution makes your company trust you less and your customers are not going to risk their continuity with you anymore.
Read MoreOrganizations introduce management controls to reduce output variance, and managers manage their people to gain productivity. But the best productivity tool is meaning, and the problem is that management limits meaning. Too much management is counterproductive.
Read MoreThe truth is that art doesn’t round us out, it sharpens us. Great artists are among the most effective communicators on the planet, and we can all sharpen our business skill set by consuming and creating art. Here’s how:
Read MoreOn a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every job drops to zero. There are people and companies out there designing substitutes for what you do, and they are going to succeed at some point. The situation is ever more urgent because innovation cycles are getting shorter.
Read MoreMost people have good ideas, but only a very small percentage of these ever sniff execution at all, much less participate meaningfully. This is because most management structures enable mediocrity by providing employees with boxes to check, grading them on that box-checking and then believing things are going great.
Read MoreGreat companies are becoming much flatter, and this trend will accelerate over the next 20 years. Promotion through the ranks won’t involve managing an ever greater number of people; instead it will mean an ever greater amount of accountability for an organization’s success.
Read MoreIt’s the human condition – ideas are easy and execution is hard. To be disruptive, your focus must be on execution.
Read MoreAsk yourself this: what if you staffed your mailroom with rocket scientists? Hired successful executives to be order processors? Put accomplished business process gurus on the customer service hotlines?
Read MoreNice people and incompetent people have at least one thing in common: they equivocate when speaking their ideas.
Read MoreBelow are the most important hard skills for disrupters, starting with the basic building blocks to the more complex. If you lack proficiency in any of these areas, find training as soon as possible even if it is on your own dime.
Read MoreWhat happens to our favorite artists when they get popular? A lot of things do, but the reason they resonate less is that they’re in an ivory tower. The pains and struggles they sang about when they made their first few albums are gone. The unique perspective they drew upon to write in an original way no longer exists. They are different people. They still have problems and struggles, it’s just that now those are ivory tower problems; problems that are meaningless to you.
Read MoreHuman reflexes tell you to be rigid when you are pushed. They tell you to seize control and to settle things down. It is a reflex because it’s overwhelming if you are already busy with something (or several things). You are at capacity, can’t work another 60-hour week and besides, there is enough cool stuff in the pipeline already.
Read MoreFor ideas to become real, support from others is imperative. Disruptive innovations directly affect a number of stakeholders, in some cases across multiple companies. These stakeholders include not only executives and customers, but peers in other departments and frontline employees. All of these people care greatly for the continuity of their processes and outputs, and they are not going to support an idea that threatens to harm them. They need to see confidence to take on the change risk.
Read MoreThe danger with templates isn’t what you think it is – sure, your customer may notice that you used the same clip art as a competitor, or you may forget to find & replace another customer name with theirs. Those things are embarrassing, but the real danger is that you don’t have a vision for what you are trying to achieve. With no vision, you cannot create valuable change design, so you fill in a template with as much unique data as you can muster just so you at least appear competent.
Read MoreCreating value as an entrepreneur through disruptive innovation is one of the most rewarding experiences that can be had. But most of us are not entrepreneurs at the moment: starting a company is still in the future or perhaps not right for us at all. The good news is that disruptive innovation can be practiced by 'intra'preneurs as well. We can apply disruptive principles to create breakthrough value even while working for someone else.
megadisrupter provides guidance on finding the right job, outperforming peers and becoming a disruptive innovator while on the inside of an organization. Articles and resources on job hunting, intrapreneurship, selling and management are published regularly.
Creating value as an entrepreneur through disruptive innovation is one of the most rewarding experiences that can be had. But most of us are not entrepreneurs at the moment: starting a company is still in the future or perhaps not right for us at all. The good news is that disruptive innovation can be practiced by intrapreneurs as well. We can apply disruptive principles to create breakthrough value even while working for someone else.
megadisrupter provides guidance on finding the right job, outperforming peers and becoming a disruptive innovator while on the inside of an organization. Articles and resources on job hunting, intrapreneurship, selling and management are published regularly.
