Disrupt Yourself

Disrupt Yourself explains how you can harness the ever-accelerating power of disruptive innovation in your personal life, be it to advance your career or to build a company that thrives, by embracing your limitations, focusing on your strengths and staying flexible and curious along the way.

When you have an idea for a new product or company, you can always put it in one of two buckets:

It already exists. It doesn’t already exist.

Whether what you want to do has already been put into the world by someone else then determines the type of risk you’ll face while trying to get your business off the ground.

If what you’re planning to do already exists in one form or the other, you’ll have to deal with the competitive risk of having to compete against other companies and players in the market. Four Minute Books is a good example of this. Non-fiction book summaries have long been offered by other websites, services and companies. The model is proven to work, but that also means there’s lots of competition going on already (which I’m working hard to overcome :)).

If you’ve come up with something totally new and unique, you’ll face a market risk, meaning you have no idea if the world will want what you have and pay you for it. For example, if you want to make the world’s first self-tying shoes, you can’t know beforehand if people even want them. They might be a big hit – or a total flop.

According to Whitney Johnson, companies that take the market risk fare better (on average). For example, in a 1995 study about disc drive companies, 6% of competitive risk businesses reached $100 million in sales, while 37% of market risk companies did.

Everybody’s good at something. If you love to sleep in and get angry when you wake up feeling groggy, then guess what: you’re good at sleeping. Maybe you can help other people sleep better too. Most people try to iron out their flaws and weaknesses, to make themselves more “well-rounded.” That’s a mistake. Instead, if you just focused on the things you’re already good at and combined those with what the people around you need, you’d have a chance at creating something remarkable. The book uses the novel and movie The Hundred-Foot Journey as an example. An Indian family moves to France, their son being a talented cook. They try to get an Indian restaurant up and running, but it’s hard, because the French don’t feel they need Indian food. Once they combine their skills with the Michelin star French restaurant across the street, however, something new and unseen is created – and the restaurant takes off.…