Chapter One
In Defense of Disruption
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking.
It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
-Albert Einstein
In first-century Rome, an innovative glassmaker created vitrum flexile, flexible glass. Proud of his invention, he requested an audience with Emperor Tiberius. The emperor threw the drinking vessel down on the ground, but, much to his surprise, it did not shatter. At the time, all drinking vessels were made of gold and silver, which tainted wine with a metallic taste. Considering the glassmaker's creation, Tiberius realized it would completely disrupt the Roman economy. If goblets were no longer made of gold and silver, the value of the precious metals would diminish immeasurably. Tiberius asked the glassmaker if anyone else knew the secret formula. When the inventor took a solemn oath that he alone knew how to create vitrum flexile, the emperor had the man beheaded.
Today it is not so easy to thwart disruption.
The business headlines will tell you that the world has become a scary place. Advances in 3-D printing that create just-in-time inventory threaten the jobs of 320 million manufacturing workers around the globe.1 Self-driving cars, trucks, and drones will displace tens of millions more workers. Renewable energy, such as solar photovoltaic cells, which have decreased in cost by more than 85 percent since the year 2000, will shift the geopolitical future of nations whose economies are supported by fossil fuels.2 According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute study, the automation of knowledge work will have a $5 trillion to $7 trillion impact on white-collar jobs.3 Ecommerce and productivity gains in delivering retail goods are expected to further reduce the number of retail stores by as much as 15 percent.4 What is the real estate value of a mall, factory, or office building when its purpose is made obsolete? America's workforce is now dealing with the realization that even though the recession is over, it has been a jobless recovery. This era of endless innovation has resulted in large multinational corporations shedding more than 2.9 million domestic jobs since the recession, and the pace of change is only accelerating.5 It seems that whenever reporters, news anchors, pundits, and economists discuss this rapid pace of change, they throw around the word disruption-often employing the language of warfare-destruction and disorder. As generations-old companies and once valued brands and businesses are displaced by nimble, efficient new startups, we're led to believe that disruptive new technologies have given the dogs in our dog-eat-dog world a powerful and violent strain of rabies.
The disruption characterizing our current business landscape goes beyond innovation-and there is a difference between the two. Take the mighty sword, for example. Men have been fighting with swords for over five thousand years. Early bronze swords were lethally sharp, but, given the weak tensile strength of bronze, they had to be short in length. The innovation of steel and other alloys allowed the sword to grow in length, broadness, and societal importance. Skilled swordsmen became the defenders of kings and kingdoms, and the sword became the symbol of liberty and strength. Innovation therefore consisted of how each new culture and generation improved upon swords, changing how they were forged and how they were wielded in combat. But one of the great Hollywood adventure movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark, provides the perfect illustration of how disruption works. When Indiana Jones is challenged to a duel by an Arab swordsman flamboyantly waving his massive scimitar, Indy nonchalantly reaches into his holster, pulls out a revolver, and shoots the swordsman dead. With the presence of the pistol, the sword was made obsolete. Disruption is to existing businesses and business models what Indy's Smith & Wesson was to the sword: it instantly changes the way the world functions and the course of history.
Disruption is almost always led by a technological change. But disruption's impact extends far beyond the technology industries. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793 did more than just make cotton a profitable crop; it led to a quintupled growth in the number of slaves in the South and sparked the industrial revolution in the North. It catapulted a young nation's economy and hastened the onslaught of the Civil War. Every American's life was affected. History was altered by this one technological breakthrough. A technology or product is disruptive when it creates an entirely new market, consumer base, or user and destroys or displaces the market for the technology it replaced. Email disrupted postal mail, for example, and Wikipedia disrupted the traditional multivolume bound encyclopedia.
Early in my career, I saw firsthand the difference between something that is truly disruptive and something that is merely innovative. When I launched my first company, Jasmine Productions, we were a small twelve-person operation doing small-time graphic and special-effects production work for hire. I was eager for an entry into mainstream Hollywood. At the same time, the Japanese electronics manufacturer Pioneer was also looking for an inroad. Pioneer had acquired control of a new home video format-the laser videodisc-from Philips and MCA (Universal Studios). Branded LaserDisc, the twelve-inch vinyl-record-size platters had audio and video quality vastly superior to that of VHS and Betamax videocassettes, which were then popular with consumers for home video entertainment. The laserdisc player was marketed as a "record player that produces beautiful sound and pictures," which could be enjoyed on your television. Laserdiscs were read by lasers and had no moving parts, as fragile videocassettes did, so the picture and sound quality would not deteriorate over time, nor would the discs jam or tear the way videotape did. Additionally, whereas videotape had to spool linearly through the entire tape to get to a different point, the lasers could instantly go from any point in the video to any other point, thus creating the possibility of "interactive video." Stories could have different outcomes depending on which choice a viewer made. Unlike the linear narratives of movies and television, the laserdisc could combine the interactivity of video games with the production values of film. I was convinced this would revolutionize all forms of entertainment, and I wanted to lead this revolution.
Pioneer Electronics needed developers to create consumer titles for this emerging field. The technology was so superior to videotape that I couldn't see how it could fail. I joined up with other filmmakers to work on Time Frame,the first interactive laserdisc title produced for the home, which Pioneer was going to distribute under its newly minted DiscoVision label. I felt like a rock star signed to a music label. We had dozens of ideas for interactive laserdiscs for kids and adults to enjoy. We planned to produce hit after hit. IBM and the Japanese electronics manufacturers had spent hundreds of millions of dollars inventing this new medium, and I was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor. I was going to be the king of the laserdisc and forever change home entertainment. I was sure the laserdisc would replace videocassettes the way television replaced radio after World War II.
Unfortunately, after the first Christmas season, it became clear that because home consumers couldn't use laserdiscs to record their favorite television shows, the way they had been doing with videocassettes, consumers saw the value of laserdiscs as being very limited. Our first major sales season was a bust. We knew we were going nowhere fast. The laserdisc's only redeeming legacy was that its core technologies would become the basis for the more successful optical disc formats that followed over the coming decades: the CD and the DVD. As quickly as I had imagined how big the interactive video home market and my personal fortune were going to be, the sales never materialized, and Pioneer abandoned home entertainment. How could we have been so wrong?
I learned then that there is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up. I refused to be a failure. As Winston Churchill once said, "Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
I learned then that there is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work.
I realized that the laserdisc hadn't transformed home entertainment because the only new thing it offered customers was an improved experience. The laserdisc sought to compete on the playing field already established by the VCR. The VCR disrupted television viewing for an entire generation; laserdiscs were just an incremental improvement in visual quality. Laserdiscs were sold in the same sales channels, by the same salespeople, to the same consumer as videocassettes.
For a product or a process to be truly disruptive, it must create a new market and transform an existing business model. This realization launched my thirty-year study of disruption. True disruption alters a market or system forever. The DVR, for example, didn't just change how we watch television; it upended the entire advertising-supported television business model of the previous fifty years.
True disruption alters a market or system forever.
But just as early man progressed from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, each disruptive technology will itself eventually be disrupted. One hundred fifty years ago, the invention of the gramophone was disruptive. Because of the gramophone, mankind's love of music became a mass media industry (a market was created), and for the first time in history, artists and musicians were able to amass great wealth from their craft (a new business model was launched). The gramophone meant that experiencing the musical talent of Enrico Caruso, the greatest tenor of his generation, was no longer restricted to just a few affluent patrons of opera. Common citizens developed a passion for music and could suddenly afford a library of popular recordings. Records were so popular with the masses that blues singer Bessie Smith became a millionaire in the 1920s. Eventually, through incremental improvements in recording and playback, the compact disc was born. The CD became the crowning technological innovation of the music industry, but it did not force any significant changes to the multi-billion-dollar business model. Artists still signed with labels, labels still produced and released albums, and consumers purchased the entire thing on a CD, just as they had once purchased a record.
The $40 billion music industry was born of one invention-the gramophone-and comfortably relied on one business model for more than a century of profits. Then disruption came from another technology: the Internet. Disruptive digital services such as Napster, iTunes, and Spotify killed the mighty album, creating a market for single downloads; eviscerated the music labels' revenue model; and shot the industry dead. One can argue about the inherent value of each incremental innovation in business, but the impact of disruption is undeniable and unmistakable. In the wake of digital disruption, EMI-the hundred-year-old company that invented electric recording, the company that signed Caruso, the Beatles, and thousands of other artists-simply ceased to exist.
In the twenty-first century, billion-dollar industries can be disrupted and waylaid virtually overnight-no sector of commerce or government is immune to the threat.
For the record companies and recording artists disrupted by digital downloads and MP3s, for the postal workers and direct-mail businesses disrupted by email, for the newspaper and publishing executives disrupted by new advertising models like Craigslist and delivery platforms like ebooks and desktop self-publishing, disruption brings with it a sense of doom and gloom. We think of these businesses contracting and jobs being lost. But the truth is, wherever a business has been disrupted, volume is released. Massive opportunity is created and major shifts in economic wealth follow. Disruption creates opportunity. The railroads created railroad barons. The automobile created oil tycoons. Silicon Valley has created thousands of dot-com millionaires. Most people are surprised to learn that the richest man in Los Angeles is not a Hollywood celebrity, but a doctor who made over $7 billion by developing disruptive pharmaceuticals.6 Identify the right trend or create the right startup, and billions of dollars could be yours. Anyone has the power to disrupt, and everyone has the opportunity to benefit from disruption. There has never been a time in history when upward mobility has been so equitably disbursed.
There has never been a time in history when upward mobility has been so equitably disbursed.
Yes, the pace of disruption has increased exponentially, thanks to a confluence of disruptive technologies that change how we work, communicate, travel, learn, and age. A century ago, having a few thousand customers for your product made you nationally known to America's seventy-six million citizens. Now, over six billion potential consumers are just one click away from becoming customers. Cloud computing, wearable technology, 3-D printing, and the Internet of Things may just be abstract concepts to you today, but the impact they will have on your career and fortune is inevitable. There are fortunes to be made by identifying and exploiting the smallest aspects of these seismic shifts in technology and business organizations. Executives at Gulf Oil didn't have to know how to design or manufacture automobiles in order to recognize the growing demand for gasoline in 1913; they just had to satisfy the consumer's needs, so they created the first drive-in gas station. Today the world spends $2.5 trillion consuming petroleum,7 and oil companies account for five of the world's top ten revenue-producing companies.8 To financially benefit from technology changes, you don't need an engineering degree or an M.B.A. To survive and thrive in the era of endless innovation, you merely need to think like a disruptor.
FORGET THEORIES OF DISRUPTION
Since Clayton Christensen coined the phrase "disruptive innovation" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma,scores of academics and management consultants have studied a range of industries and companies in order to identify and classify various forms of disruption. Christensen asserts that there is a firm distinction between sustaining technologies and disruptive ones-think of the improving gas mileage of cars over the past thirty years as a series of sustaining technologies. But an electric car that doesn't require gasoline: that would be disruptive technology. At first, disruptive technologies pose no threat to the entrenched technology because of poor performance. In the case of the first generation of electric cars, the mileage may be great, but the battery can't get the vehicle from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. If Tesla, on the other hand, were to launch a $30,000 car with a thousand-mile range, then it would be game over for the combustion engine.
Following in Christensen's footsteps, an entire cottage industry of innovation experts have developed their own jargon for identifying and labeling disruptions. There are now more theories of disruption out there than we can count. Some focus on the most profitable high end of an existing market, while others examine how disruption works by encroaching on the low end.9 One theory holds that disruption starts at the fringe of existing markets by addressing unmet needs of new customers.10 Yet another focuses on price as its market force.11 My favorite piece of modern management jargon is the technology S curve, which shows on a graph that new inventions grow slowly in the market, then have an explosive growth period, before gradually tapering off as they mature over time.12 In other words, things start off small, get big, and then die off. My personal belief is that the technology S curve could be used to graph anything from the life cycle of the hard-drive industry to the life cycle of an oak tree. Every living thing grows and eventually dies. Everything. Knowing the S curve of the dinosaurs doesn't help us understand why they disappeared or how mankind can avoid extinction. Neither can plotting the S curve of your product or company better prepare you for the inevitable. The management science of disruption has now reached its own maturation stage, as evidenced by the fact that the University of Southern California, where I am an adjunct professor, even offers an undergraduate degree in disruption! But the problem with all the theoretical approaches is that they are like the blood-spatter science used by Showtime's Dexter Morgan: great for revealing what killed the victim, but worthless for predicting who will be slaughtered next.
I prefer to leave the past to historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. I believe most people want to know how they and their businesses are going to survive. And the truly motivated and bold want to know how they can thrive by becoming agents of change. The methodologies outlined in Disrupt You! are powerful because they are predictive and equip anyone to become a disruptor.
I've had the luck and privilege of being at the center of some of the most disruptive trends of the past thirty years. From the birth of the personal computer and the launching of the commercial Internet to the creation of ecommerce, digital media, and smartphones, I have had a front-row seat, working alongside some amazing Davids who have upended some multi-billion-dollar Goliaths. Several times my colleagues and I partnered with the very companies our disruptions would eventually destroy. Disruption causes vast sums of money to flow from existing businesses and business models to new entrants. Disrupt You! is about entering the fray.
Disruption causes vast sums of money to flow from existing businesses and business models to new entrants.
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When I was in my twenties and the personal computer industry was in its infancy, all the best and brightest minds I knew were imagining new uses for the home computer. PCs could balance checkbooks, word-process, make newsletters, play video games, format movie scripts, and be used for a host of other applications where typewriters couldn't compete. Everyone saw that the PC had limitless potential, but no one had yet made significant money from this hobbyist endeavor. Just as every engineer today has an idea for a new smartphone app, scores of software companies were forming to compete for the potential billions this new disruptive industry promised. These new companies created software, circuit chips, motherboards, and myriad hardware components. Each firm was staking its fortunes on pushing the technical limits of what the primitive PCs could accomplish. Every day, new innovations and companies sprouted up like dandelions in summer.
While technological developments create the opportunity for disruption, one doesn't have to be a master of the new technology to reap the benefits. The young entrepreneurs of the 1990s were so desperate to find a way to cash in by improving upon the new technology-or trying to invent new gadgets and gizmos for the new technology to utilize-that they were investing in computer systems that cost more than the cars they drove. But which fledgling startup of the era was the first to sell for over $100 million? It wasn't a software company. It wasn't a hardware firm, either. In fact, my friend Billy Myers didn't even know how to use a computer. But he was a born entrepreneur who recognized an opportunity created by disruption when he saw it. While other entrepreneurs were busy investing in complex computer systems, eager to create the newest, latest, greatest technological breakthroughs, Billy took a step back and analyzed what was happening around him. What he saw was people buying a $2,000 item for their home. His epiphany was dirt simple: something as expensive and valuable as a computer needed a dustcover. Who wouldn't spend $10 to protect a $2,000 investment? Billy began making plastic dustcovers for monitors and central processing units (CPUs). He made dustcovers for keyboards and external hard drives. When he noticed people storing their software on dozens of little floppy disks, he made plastic cases and plastic file drawers. Consumers are using a mouse? Then they must have a plastic mouse pad. Billy was the first to identify and create a personal-computer accessories market, and he eventually sold his company, MicroComputer Accessories, to Rubbermaid for a fortune.
Billy's success wasn't born of inventing anything new; it was the result of his seeing opportunity created by disruptive technology and then seizing that opportunity. While Kaypro, Eagle, Franklin, Magnuson, Osborne, and dozens of other computer companies spent millions in their fight to capture a piece of the exploding PC market, one outsider identified where the most value could be captured the fastest in this new industry. (Decades later, when Apple unveiled the iPhone and launched a second generation of app developers scurrying to cash in, I smiled and watched as each customer lined up at the Apple Store to purchase a new expensive phone and, with it, a $30 plastic case. Most app companies spend millions of dollars competing for downloads and App Store placement, only to lose money and fail. Meanwhile, the iPhone accessories market quickly grew to a $16 billion business.)
Billy's story of producing and selling dustcovers, disk cases, and mouse pads at the dawn of the era of the personal computer is a perfect illustration of a beloved phrase of both sailors and coders: K.I.S.S.-keep it simple, stupid. While Billy was selling computer accessories, I realized I didn't have the staff or funds to out-engineer the big guys. So I took a page from Billy's book and looked for an opportunity in a part of the market others had overlooked. My goal was to capture as much value in the shortest amount of time possible. I wanted to generate profits that could fuel expansion into more costly product sectors. In layman's terms, I wanted to get in the game, make some money with a simple product, and then reinvest my profits into better, more complex products. I also wanted to focus on a niche that had high margins with little existing competition. I was twenty-eight years old, and I had been running my work-for-hire technology production company for nearly seven years. I decided that the new technology of the CD-ROM offered me the opportunity I was looking for. I partnered with IBM-then the nation's leader in computer sales-and licensed my product for IBM to ship and sell globally. My very first product, the Jasmine 6-Pack, came bundled with all IBM ActionMedia II PCs, sold for $1,500, and had a manufacturing cost of only $12. So where did I find opportunity for a 12,500-percent-profit-margin product that no one else had seen? Stock photography.
Capture as much value as possible in the shortest time possible.
When computers went from having monochromatic screens with phosphorus-green text to featuring full-color, TV-like displays, I knew it wasn't going to be long before users were going to want to see and use real photos on those screens. I realized that corporate brochures, newsletters, training software, and educational software all would require thousands of photographs of people, places, and things that could be incorporated into their products. I had worked at an advertising agency during college, so I was able to identify a need that most engineers wouldn't have seen. As we will see in the next chapter, being successful as a disruptor is about applying your unique experience and viewpoint to find opportunity.
My company's new product focused not as much on how personal computers were disrupting technology as on how they were disrupting existing, non-technology-related business models. At the time, whenever anyone needed a photo for something they were publishing, they had only two choices: hire a photographer or contact a stock photography agency. So if you needed a photograph of an elephant, either you could fly a nature photographer overseas and wait several weeks to get your image or you could call a stock photography agency. As primitive as it sounds, you would call the agency on the telephone and tell them you needed a photograph of an elephant by a river. The agency would overnight you a few dozen slides to choose from. The single-use licensing fee to use the image could range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The process was slow, manual, inefficient, and very, very expensive. My solution was simple.
I contacted stock agencies that didn't understand or didn't care about the PC. I quickly made a deal with PhotoBank for the rights to digitize 750,000 images from all around the globe. In addition to fantastic nature and travel imagery, PhotoBank had a huge collection of photographs of people doing every conceivable job or social activity. I licensed the images and put three hundred at a time, organized by theme or topic, on CD-ROM discs, agreeing to pay PhotoBank a royalty for each CD-ROM I sold. There were two unique aspects to my business model. First, anyone purchasing my software could use any or all of the three hundred images on the disc royalty-free. Companies that bought my CD-ROMs could save tens of thousands of dollars a year and would have the legal right to use the images over and over again. Second, since I couldn't fit the three hundred images onto a single disc at the highest possible resolution (i.e., the quality needed for magazine printing), my product wouldn't cannibalize the stock agency's existing business. Magazines and other professional print organizations would still have to go through the stock agency to get the high-resolution images. My customers were individual users and small businesses that wanted to put pictures in brochures, in school papers, or on fliers they were creating on their new word processors.
By becoming an IBM business partner, my company enabled its product to appear in IBM's trade show booths and brochures, and we gained access to their thousands of customers. IBM opened doors for us, and my company experienced explosive growth for our products. With this steady revenue stream, we were later able to expand into other software products such as games and education. When the technology evolved and computers began playing sound and video, I started licensing music and video libraries to extend the wave without having to substantially change my initial business model. My startup became an established and recognized leader in the field. We had broad distribution and controlled valuable shelf space at retail. Building on our initial success and first-mover advantage, Jasmine Multimedia Publishing eventually produced over three hundred CD-ROMs, ranging from video games to office productivity tools. And as soon as I realized that the advent of the Web meant the death of packaged software, I sold my company before we were disrupted-and focused all my energies on how I could use the Internet to disrupt other industries.
THE DISRUPTOR'S PATH TO SUCCESS
This success was not the result of my having invented a new technology. Instead, I used an existing technology to disrupt a different business. This, in the turbulent times of ceaseless technological transformation, is the secret to thriving as a disruptor.
A business or product can be understood as the sum of its value-adding links. Traditionally, these links are thought of as research and development; design; production; marketing and sales; and distribution. Each of these disparate links contributes different value to the business as a whole. All products begin with research and development. R & D defines what need the product fulfills and what functions it must possess. The product must then be designed and produced within the financial and material constraints available to the company. Marketing and sales focus on how to create and fulfill demand for the product. And lastly, distribution deals with the logistical issues of getting the product to consumers. Each link must be solid and sustainable if a product is to succeed, and each link can be disrupted by new entrants that are able to fulfill the same functions in a more efficient manner. A business is at risk for disruption when one or more of these links can be replaced by a technology or product that delivers improved services or additional value to a new market in a more efficient way. Let's take the obvious example of mail. E-mail was able to disrupt the distribution link in the value chain of postal mail by enabling people to send messages to one another instantly and directly, rendering the postal service unnecessary in almost all matters of daily communication.
But to thrive in the era of disruption, you don't have to invent anything new. There's no need to discover something the world has never seen before. Rather, there are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others' disruptive breakthroughs. While email disrupted the distribution link in the value chain of postal mail, countless businesses have seen tremendous growth and profitability by using email to market, sell, design, and even produce other products. In other words, a disruption in one link in the value chain creates opportunity in other links.
There are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others' disruptive breakthroughs.
Anyone who takes advantage of the opportunities created by disruption, anyone who refuses to be intimidated by technological innovation, anyone who finds ways to continually reinvent themselves so that their unique assets will never become obsolete-these are the people I consider disruptors.
Success as a disruptor is about capturing the value that is released through disruption. Every business will be disrupted sooner or later by technology. From the family restaurant that doesn't know how to interact with OpenTable, Yelp, or Groupon to the mortgage broker made redundant by online loan originators such as Quicken, you can either embrace the disruptor's journey or become roadkill. In today's business world, if you are not moving forward, you're falling behind.
The pace of change continues to accelerate, and therefore new opportunities abound. New entrants will replace old corporations that have survived on the momentum of milking every last dime out of established products instead of accepting the realities of cannibalization and championing disruption. As Kodak executive Larry Matteson said before the century-old company filed for bankruptcy, "Wise businesspeople concluded that it was best not to hurry to switch from making seventy cents on the dollar on film to maybe five cents at most in digital."
My first business success was in publishing CD-ROMs. It would have been easy to define myself as a CD-ROM publisher, but if I had, then when that industry disappeared, my career would have gone with it. Instead I see myself as a serial disruptor. I'm constantly looking for ways to apply new technological advancements to revolutionize how we work, learn, and play. I've run businesses in ecommerce, digital media distribution, social advertising, mobile apps, and crowdfunding. I've made a career out of capitalizing on the opportunities made available through disruptive technologies. I pride myself on knowing how to adapt when the rules of the game are changed; I refuse to be merely a pawn moved around the board.
Though I spent the majority of my career as a startup entrepreneur, in each of my three "corporate" gigs (as senior management at Universal Studios, EMI, and Sony), I was brought in specifically as an intrapreneur. An intrapreneur disrupts from within the corporation, rather than waiting for the company to be attacked by external forces. At Universal Studios in the mid-1990s, I was tasked with finding ways to leverage the newly created World Wide Web to see if it could help market movies, sell music, book theme-park vacations, and generate new revenue streams. In the early aughts, I was president of EMI recorded music, where I had the dual challenge of combating the wave of Internet piracy launched by Napster and its descendants while migrating our revenue streams to digital downloads and streaming services. I was then hired by Sony-a company that for decades had been a leading innovator-to create a digital ecosystem for all the company's disparate divisions: music, film, video, books, personal electronics, PlayStation, television, and computers.
When one is fully empowered, being an intrapreneur is the best job in the world. You have all the speed and agility of a startup, turbocharged with the financial and marketing muscle of a global corporation. You also get to pick your own team (which is so critical for building a successful business) and can afford to hire the best in the world. In each of my corporate gigs, I built new divisions to go after emerging market opportunities. Sometimes we were able to influence the overall corporate culture; other times we were treated like an ugly stepchild with Ebola.
All three of my corporate stints allowed me to be a part of major industry during a time of great disruption. Unable to chart its own destiny as an independent entertainment company, Universal Studios has changed hands six times since the 1990s. EMI was acquired by a private equity firm for the record-setting price of $4.7 billion,13 only to be cut up and sold piecemeal four years later.14 Sony, unwilling or unable to adapt to a changing digital landscape, lost nearly 90 percent of its value when the company went from a market capitalization over $100 billion in 2000 to $18 billion in 2012.15 I have been both the victor and the vanquished. I have successfully disrupted markets dominated by IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, and I have been disrupted by two college students in a dorm room. The lessons I learned from my rung on the corporate ladder influence Disrupt You! as much as what I learned from running startups. The truth is that corporate employees can no longer be immune to the entrepreneurial spirit. Incremental innovation is like walking on quicksand: it will keep you very busy but won't get you very far. Building disruptive organizations must be infused into the DNA of every successful twenty-first-century corporation.
One of my favorite expressions is "Security robs ambition." The majority of people are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better. Many professionals (including most of the middle-aged lawyers I know) have grown tired of their career but feel ensnared by their safe salary and comfortable routine. It is no coincidence that we refer to our accumulation of material goods as "trappings." The longer you stay at a job you don't like, the more money you will earn and the less likely you'll be to leave to pursue your dreams. But the choice is always yours. Ask yourself, Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?
The majority of people are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better.
Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?
Most people were raised to believe in the so-called forty-forty life plan. Back in the era of stable corporations and fully funded pensions, employees worked forty hours a week for forty years and then retired. In the era of 401(k) plans and no pensions, working forty hours a week for forty years is not a formula for success. Twenty-three million Americans aged sixty or over are considered "financially insecure," and one-third of senior households have no money left over each month or are in debt after meeting essential expenses.16 Worst of all, if one sees oneself as having achieved only a narrow band of experience at one company or in one field, what happens if that field goes away? While you are lamenting your "safe" position in life, someone else may be disrupting your entire industry and putting the company you work for out of business. Think your big corporate job is safe from disruption? Only seventy-one companies from the original Fortune 500 list published in 1954 remain on the list.17Only 14 percent of the largest, most successful companies survived long enough for an employee to work his or her whole career at one company and retire.18 Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.
Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.
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Disrupt You! examines how anyone can adopt a disruptor's mind-set and set themselves on a disruptor's path to success-whether that means starting your own business, proving your value at the company where you're already employed, or rebranding yourself for career transformation. We will look at how successful disruptors identify opportunities created by disruptions in the value chains of other businesses, find big ideas, and know when to pivot their energies and adjust their business models. Finally, Disrupt You! explores the ways various businesses and social organizations have recently been disrupted and predicts which links in their value chains are ripe for future disruption.
According to USA Today, 50 percent of today's college students want to be entrepreneurs.19 In addition to students, countless other workers dream of being their own bosses, creating their own small businesses, or even just making more money. Dozens of business incubators are sprouting up all around America. In 1980, there were only twelve incubators in the entire nation; today there are over 1,250, and that number is estimated to grow by 10 percent per year.20 As I travel around the country speaking at incubators, I encounter first-time entrepreneurs thirsty for practical advice on how to transform their industries and make constructive change. Even in these tough economic times, many Americans quit their jobs last year because they wanted more from their lives than a paycheck.21 They want to make a difference. Disrupt You! isn't just for startup entrepreneurs or corporate employees; it is for everyone looking for a promotion, a raise, or a way to get more satisfaction out of their lives.
Copyright © 2015 by Jay Samit
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Reid Hoffman