Guts
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Consistently 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 MoreThe Principle of Monetization in Your Career
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If you create value, there will be a payoff.
Read MoreDevelop Killer Vision
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The 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 MoreHave a Dead-End Job? You’re a Dead-End Person
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All 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 MoreThe Role of Art in Your Disruptive Professional Life
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The 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 MoreEliminate Your Own Job
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On 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 MoreRecognizing Mediocrity and Rising Above It
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Most 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 MoreRocket Scientists in Your Mailroom
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Ask 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 MoreStaying Out of the Ivory Tower
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What 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 MoreCultivate Disruption
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Human 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 MoreThe Confidence to Disrupt
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For 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 MoreTemplates are For Losers
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The 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 MoreRock Star Output: Draw It
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A picture is not worth a thousand words. It’s worth negative a thousand words. Wait…huh?
When it comes to conveying concepts, written words have negative value, so when you reduce them you come out ahead. If a picture were worth one thousand words, no one would want it.
Read MoreDisruption in Your DNA
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Disrupters make impactful change in their organizations as a course of habit. It is not a special effort and it is not daunting or stressful. It is organic because it’s in their DNA. Disrupters are different because of how they view their outputs. They became rock stars and now their vision has expanded.
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