A Quick Take on Being “The Disruptor and Not The Disrupted”

Pam Harper : What can top leaders gain from the books “The Innovators Dilemma” and “Disrupt Yourself?” Paired together, they not only complement each other, they’re even more relevant. Join us for our special series of book-pairing quick takes on Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper.

Chris Curran: This episode is brought to you by Business Advancement Incorporated -- enabling successful leaders and companies to accelerate to their next level of success. on the web at businessadvance.com. And now, here's Pam and Scott.

Pam Harper: Welcome everyone. I'm Pam Harper, founding partner and CEO of Business Advancement Incorporated. And sitting right across from me as always is my business partner and husband, Scott Harper.

Scott Harper: Hi everybody. It's great to join you again. And as always, our purpose here is to spark new insights, inspiration, and immediately useful ideas that can help visionary leaders accelerate themselves -- and their companies -- to their next level of game-changing innovation, transformation, and growth.

Pam Harper: Between now and the beginning of the new year, Scott and I are featuring quick take episodes, pairing some of our all-time favorite business books -- a special series we call "book pairings from Pam Scott's bookshelf." Like a wine pairing or beer pairing, book pairings can provide you with new perspectives that can produce entirely new insights. Let’s get going.

Pam Harper: Let’s get back to our book-pairing. Scott, I think you have the next one.

Scott Harper: I do have the next one, then we’ll pass it off. We’re talking about uncertainty, right?

Pam Harper: That's right.

Scott Harper: There are few things that are more uncertain than about when to stay the course and when to shift, when to transform personally or transform in the business −, when to wait, when to take action.

Pam Harper: And how did Uber actually figure out that it was time to become Uber?

Scott Harper: The most successful leaders that we’ve worked with have all shown a real facility for not just projecting linearly into the future − this is where we are, this is where we were, and that’s where we are going to be − a straight line. They’re really good at looking around at the environment, reaching into that fuzziness of the future and saying, “Ah, here’s a leap we can make.” It’s not necessarily a continuous linear change − it’s discontinuous very often, but it can take them to real success. I want to talk about one of the granddaddies behind that idea of that discontinuous leap, and that is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard. The book originally came out in 1995, I believe, so it’s been around − what − twenty years.

Pam Harper: There is a new edition in 2013.

Scott Harper: It’s still a goodie and, in fact, it’s a book that I have referred to many times over the years. Virtually everyone who’s out there in business has heard of disruptive innovation.

Pam Harper: We’re all talking about disrupting…

Scott Harper: Disrupting this and disrupting that, and Uber disrupted the cab industry, and Apple disrupted Research in Motion, and so on. Christensen really was the one who came up and popularized the concept of disruptive innovation, first in an article … I think it was in Harvard Business Review … and then in The Innovator’s Dilemma − not the easiest read in the world, but well worthwhile. Unfortunately, sometimes as we talk to people and they talk about disruption, it’s not always represented the way Christensen wrote it.

Pam Harper: Let’s get the big idea.

Scott Harper: The big idea behind Clayton Christensen’ description of disruptive innovation is that companies can be upended when they become married to what they’re doing. A disruptor can come in with something that initially is not as good in many ways, but frequently is less expensive. Christensen uses the example of the watch industry; you had Swiss watches and then the Japanese watch companies came in with electronic watches, and the Swiss watchmakers looked at it and said, “Oh, this is a piece of junk. No one is going to want to wear this.”

Pam Harper: It was a market need that wasn’t yet firmly entrenched.

Scott Harper: What happened was people started wearing electronic watches − watches with electronic movements. A cheap watch could become much more accurate than cheap watches used to be, and eventually it went all the way up, and the Swiss watch market really sort of was upended for a while. They came back, rebounded back by focusing on a new niche, which is the luxury watch.

Scott Harper: The whole point being that disruption starts with something that meets an unmet need, usually for an underserved audience, and then they start this idea of incremental innovation, do that…

Pam Harper: That’s the learning curve.

Scott Harper: Right. Eventually, the innovator − the new company − can get to the point where the old company gets bumped. Now here’s the problem. Companies know they need to innovate. Sometimes they know they need to do something big, but the reward is, “I’m serving my current market, I’m serving my current customer base. Don’t mess with my resources to serve my current customer base.”

Scott Harper: People in the leading company who are saying, “Well, we should be working on this new thing,” often get shot down, because [the response is], “No, that’s not what we do. That’s not our market. It’s not our customer base.”

Pam Harper: We fall in love with our technology or our business model.

Scott Harper: Right. Christensen proposed the idea of something he called a skunkworks, which is take an innovation team outside of the company and away from competing for funding − and sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t if it’s not done right.

Pam Harper: Yes, that’s true. So just kind of to sum it up, if you were to look at this, the big idea here is we have to be able to recognize when there is an emerging opportunity, when we can take advantage of it. We have to be willing to stay with it to grow the company or grow the idea, and also then to recognize when it’s time to start, as they called it, an S-curve. What’s interesting to me is that so many people have heard of this book and have read it in business school and whatever. It’s a classic, and yet to do it is its own challenge.

Scott Harper: Ah − not easy.

Pam Harper: For those of you who have already read this, read it again and read it again with the experience that you have behind you, because it takes on a new meaning-

Scott Harper: It does.

Pam Harper: It’s also led to some interesting offshoots - which is where I want to pick up.

Scott Harper: Okay.

Pam Harper: The offshoot that’s most interesting here is in a book called Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson. This is a brand new book, so you have a granddaddy and a brand new book. What’s really great about what Whitney has done is she actually knew Clayton Christensen-

Scott Harper: Right.

Pam Harper: … who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma. She was a cofounder of Rose Park Advisors’ disruptive innovation fund. They used this theory of disruptive innovation to invest and publicly trade in stocks and private early-stage companies. Whitney was fabulous at doing this, and she applied it to her own career growth.

Pam Harper: Disrupt Yourself is about career disruption, and the idea that in order for us to be able to continue to get not just money or whatever it is functionally from a job, we also have to be able to get the psychic payoffs. We have to be able to have both. That means growth. Even when you’re successful, or maybe especially when you’re successful − if you think about this whole curve of growth − you need to be willing to start looking and saying, “What else is out there that needs to be done, that builds on my strengths? Even if there are things that I need to do to develop myself, to really be a player, what can I do? Whitney takes us through such a very interesting series of ideas to do it.

Pam Harper: What’s interesting about this whole concept of the S-curve − seeing the idea, understanding that there is an initial lag, −think of the letter S and when you’re going around the curves, you’re developing and you’re going into a learning curve.

Pam Harper: Ideally, before you get to the top of that letter S, you have found something new to grow into and you start that S again; so not just business growth but self growth.

Scott Harper: Right.

Pam Harper: Whitney tells us much more about that, how are we going to come up with new models for growth and be in that continuous point of looking at emerging opportunities.

Scott Harper: That’s right, and having our eyes open so that we can look for the unexpected, and that comes from really having a very strong, big idea about what you want to have happen. That serves as a filter, right?

Pam Harper: There’s more, because in order to be able to do that, you need to be able to interact with people in some very new ways and look at people in some very new ways.

Scott Harper: That's our quick take book pairing for today. Thanks to you out there for listening to Growth Ignites Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper.

Pam Harper: If you are enjoying this podcast episode, spread the good word, open Growth Igniters Radio on whatever podcast app you use, and write a review.

Scott Harper: And to find out more about our strategic growth advisory services, learn about Pam's latest keynote speech and access our full podcast archive, go to businessadvance.com.

Pam Harper: Until next time, this is Pam Harper...

Scott Harper: And Scott Harper...

Pam Harper : Wishing you continued success and a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.

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