Introduction
"Psst...What would you do with a million dollars," the sexy disembodied voice would whisper to passersby. After stopping in their tracks and looking around, the surprised pedestrian would see a visual parade of yachts and race cars, mansions and glamorous women in evening gowns dance across the kiosk's 20" screen. The year was 1984 and California was in dire straits. The country was emerging from a recession and California's unemployment rate was at an all-time high. Finally, and with much fanfare, it was decided that the troubled state would run a lottery, the revenues of which would generate the sorely needed funds for the state's schools. A multi-million dollar contract would be awarded to the company that developed the best technology system for selling the new lottery's tickets. My prototype kiosk with built-in motion detectors was going to be my ticket to fame and fortune.
At the time, I was a twenty-four year old with a small multimedia company that did special effects and production work for hire. Our specialty was producing video games and interactive training programs on laserdisc. When the lottery was announced, I had a big idea: why not apply my expertise in the arcade video game business to help the lottery become more interactive and fun? I partnered with Syntech, a lottery machine manufacturer that supplied ticketing hardware to create a player-activated terminal dubbed the PAT 2500. The PAT 2500 would actually talk to potential customers and encourage them to buy tickets. I outfitted the 79-inch tall computer kiosks with laserdisc players, motion detectors and speakers. The kiosk would beckon to anyone who came near it. Using Intel 8031 microprocessors, the kiosk was state-of-the-art. It's hard to imagine this now, but in 1985, this rudimentary contraption was one of the very first commercial machines capable of handling audio and video. At the time, almost no one had a computer in their home or on their desks, and the computers that were used in workplaces were shared by multiple users and had small, monochromatic displays. The PAT 2500 featured a 20" full-color display and capacitive touch screen. I was convinced that my machine and I were going to revolutionize the way lottery tickets would be bought and sold all over the world. At twenty-four years old, I was sure I had figured out how to become a billionaire.
I was competing for the lucrative California Lottery contract against GTECH, who manufactured a primitive adding-machine size unit that displayed greenish numbers on a black CRT. There was no comparison. I was sure my time had come. I was the young Turk disrupting the lottery industry! I was to the lottery what Henry Ford's Model T was to horse buggy makers!
I was wrong.
We weren't awarded the contract. GTECH won the contract and I was stuck with an amazing kiosk in my garage.[i] I was nothing more than a guy with big ideas; I was intent on changing the world, making a lot of money, and having fun along the way, but after I lost the lottery contract, I was broke and dejected.
With no lottery prospects, I spent the night before I was to fly home to Los Angeles from Sacramento tossing and turning. That night, thinking about who I was and how desperate I was to make my mark in the business world, I began what I would later come to call "self-disrupting." I analyzed all the pieces that came together to form my identity. I began to define what unique experiences and knowledge I had that would set me apart from my peers. I thought about the way I made decisions and how I processed and responded to information; how I approached problems. I thought about the way I presented myself to the world and how I communicated my abilities to potential business partners and clients. And I thought about how I was spending my time and energy. If I was going to find opportunities to make a name for myself in the world, I was going to have to change something in my approach. Then I started thinking about my business in those same terms: Where was the value in my lottery machine? How could I put it to use in a different way?
By the time I landed in L.A. the next morning, a subtle shift had taken place. When I arrived at LAX, looking for the cheapest way to get home from the airport, I stopped by the information booth to ask about shuttle times and services. Just my luck, no one was manning the booth and there was no place in the terminal to find shuttle or bus information. I realized, perhaps as a result of my previous hours' of self-questioning, that this problem presented an opportunity. I started to think through my situation from every possible angle: How many of Los Angeles International Airport's 50 million annual visitors shared this problem? How many hours a day where the booths manned and at what cost? How many languages do visitors speak? Instinctively, I was deconstructing the size and scope of the opportunity while re-assembling the strengths only I could bring to solving it. Who else had a prototype for a state-of-the-art interactive kiosk in their garage? Twenty-four hours earlier, I had thought my big idea was interactive lottery kiosks, now I knew I had been wrong. With one pivot I realized what my next business venture would be: automated airport information booths.
I adapted the PAT 2500 into an airport information system that provided taxi, bus, and shuttle data in eight languages and even added an autodial phone (this was years before people had mobile phones) to connect the traveler with the dispatcher. By just touching the screen, every visitor would be greeted to Los Angeles by a friendly woman who spoke their language and could provide them with accurate information on how to cost-effectively get to over 500 local destinations. Within a couple years, my fledgling work-for-hire company had become LAX's sole information service provider, putting in place the systems billions of travelers still rely on today-just think about the last time you were at the airport, didn't you interact with a kiosk to print boarding passes, check luggage, or change your seat? The ticketing agent was disrupted by a failed lottery machine.
I was twenty-four years old and from the ashes of failure, I rose to launch myself on a path of serial entrepreneurship-a path I've now been on for more than thirty years and one that's never let me down.
That early success was not an accident. It was the logical outcome of the introspective process I first implemented that night after finding out I had lost the lottery kiosk contract. I had always been creative and I knew I wanted to make a splash in the business and entertainment worlds. I had lots of ideas but I could never pull the pieces together to make my dreams happen. Like most people, I didn't know how to channel my ideas and energies into positive actions. Frustrated by my lack of progress, I reexamined my assumptions about myself and my personal skills. I came to refer to the intense and introspective process of questioning my beliefs and goals - which has, time and again, led to my biggest business breakthroughs - as self-disruption. Through self-disruption, I have come to see that I can accomplish what I once though impossible. I have discovered that if I am able to express any problem as a series of challenges, I can build a team capable of rising to those challenges. I have realized all businesses-no matter if they make dog food or software - don't sell products, they sell solutions. Over the course of my career, my method of self-disruption has led me to work quickly and easily across entirely divergent industries - automotive, telecommunications, packaged goods, and quick service restaurants -changing the very nature of those businesses. I went from running a twenty-person startup to being a global officer of an international company with over 160,000 employees. I have collaborated with Fortune 500 companies, foreign governments, and even the Vatican. In one year alone, I took stakes in over twenty companies around the world (without investing a dime) and generated over $100 million profit. And best of all, I've never worried about job security or where my next big idea will come from because I can always return to the techniques of self-disruption that have helped me transform myself and my businesses time and again.
[TWEET: all businesses-no matter if they make dog food or software - don't sell products, they sell solutions]
Over the past three decades, I've come to see that I'm not alone in the way I question my beliefs and find opportunity. History's successful innovators have always employed aspects of this approach. Gutenberg's ushering in of the Renaissance and the eventual democratization of knowledge wasn't born from the invention of moveable type, but rather from the way he deconstructed the value chain of surplus German wine presses, enabling him to invent the printing press. Magician Harry Houdini went from doing multiple performances a day in a dime show to being the most famous entertainer on the planet, not because he was the best prestidigitator, but because he disrupted the way entertainment was mass marketed. Nearly a century later, Canadian street performer Guy Laliberté would similarly deconstruct the value chain of the circus, disrupt the industry with Cirque du Soliel, dominate Las Vegas showrooms and become a multibillionaire.
Every successful disruptor employs one or more of these techniques to transform themselves, their businesses, and the world. They look internally, questioning their assumptions about themselves and reevaluating their unique talents. They put themselves on the path to success, even if they didn't know what might lie ahead. And they understand that they cannot fall in love with their ideas, that they must be willing to destroy their concepts and pivot their energies before the market can render their businesses obsolete.
All disruption starts with introspection. The way we understand our internal value chains-how we view ourselves and how we interpret our personal strengths-is at the core of all external success. I have applied these insights to raising over $800 million for startup companies as well as launching new businesses in billion-dollar industries as diverse as telecommunications, music, and ecommerce. I didn't go to the right schools or know the right people, but I did learn how to disrupt my own belief systems to be able to reposition myself to take advantage of opportunity and achieve success. And I've done it again and again - achieving resilience and security in an oftentimes unstable business landscape.
[TWEET: All disruption starts with introspection.]
The self-made billionaire in his twenties, an unheard of possibility a decade ago, now happens with regular frequency. The startup company, with little funding and a small staff, displaces hundred-year-old companies with billions in revenues virtually overnight. The consultant, with no background in technology or operating a business, makes millions of dollars from teaching one course online. The Arab Spring, which peacefully overthrew long-standing governments in Bahrain, Tunisia and Yemen, is able to successfully force rulers from power without weapons or international support. The tightly interconnected world of the 21st century is exploding with new opportunities for personal empowerment and financial independence. What did all of these disruptions have in common? They were led by people who understood how to analyze their internal value chains to pinpoint their unique talents and capabilities and then analyzed the value chains of their industries to find opportunities for disruption.
Richard Branson founded Virgin as a record store only to discover that the real value was in creating, not just selling, records. The most successful serial disruptor in history, He has created billion-dollar companies in eight different industries.
Lowell "Bud" Paxson deconstructed the value chain of his failing Florida radio station. When no one would advertise on his station, be bought surplus goods and sold them on air instead of running commercials. This idea was so successful that he transformed his local station into the billion dollar retailing empire now known as the Home Shopping Network.
A century ago, Joyce Clyde Hall was going broke selling penny postcards until he killed his big idea that people wanted to write to home to loved ones. His realization that most people can't write led him to fill out the postcard for them. With a stroke of the pen he created Hallmark and launched the entire greeting card industry.
A few years ago, the website Tune In Hook Up was designed by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim to disrupt the world of online dating. Most dating sites featured still images of prospective partners, so the former PayPal employees thought showcasing dating videos would be much better. While the dating site was a failure, Hurley, Chen and Karim realized that people really enjoyed watching the uploaded videos. Abandoning their original dating site concept, the team pivoted and renamed the site YouTube. The steps for disruption are not taught in college or business school. Yet every successful entrepreneur's story, and decades of quantitative research, prove the validity of the Disrupt Yourself process. It makes no difference if your goal is to make millions of dollars or solve global warming, start a restaurant, or a revolution.
For years I have mentored entrepreneurs and aspiring students on how to disrupt. What I have discovered is that these techniques can be applied to virtually any field or endeavor. I truly believe that everyone can achieve personal success. Disrupt Yourself provides readers with instructions for self-disruption as well as the tools for applying that knowledge to disrupting the business and non-commercial worlds. This book is for all those willing to annihilate their assumptions in order to create a re-imagined self. It is a guide for those wishing to get more out of their jobs, careers, and lives. It can also be a guide for our world, as disruptors are the only ones capable of dealing with the macro issues affecting society at large and our planet as a whole. Disrupt Yourself reveals a new paradigm for breaking the patterns that limit personal success and growth by sharing actual case studies from dozens of the world's most accomplished disruptors.
Renaissance Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli said that entrepreneurs are "simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage." It's this type of thinking that will lead to success in today's world.
You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams. The great disruptors constantly reinvent themselves and their careers. They never fear losing their jobs because they create jobs. They control their own destinies. This book is written to answer two very basic questions: How did they do it? How can I do it? The third question is entirely up to you: Will you do it?
[TWEET: You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.]
[i] I would later learn that California State Senator Alan Robbins accepted over $13,500 in bribes from GTECH in exchange for awarding them the lucrative lottery contract-a crime for which Robbins was later sentenced to five years in prison. For more information, see: Paul Jacobs and Mark Gladstone "Robbins Quits Senate, Admits to Corruption: Probe: The San Fernando Valley Democrat will be sentences to 5 years in Prison" Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1991.