These are my notes to this awesome book. If you haven't had a chance to read this book yet you need to read it.
This is one of the best business books I've ever read, I highly recommend it.
My Notes:
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, 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.
Like most people, I didn’t know how to channel my ideas and energies into positive actions.
Through self-disruption I have come to see that I can accomplish what I once thought impossible.
I’ve 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 that businesses—whether they make dog food
or software—don’t sell products; they sell solutions.
All disruption starts with introspection.
The steps for disruption are not taught in college or business school.
This book is for all those willing to annihilate their assumptions in order to create a reimagined self.
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?
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It
cannot be changed without changing our thinking. —Albert Einstein
Disruption is almost always led by a technological change.
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.
Winston Churchill once said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
For a product or a process to be truly disruptive, it must create a new market and transform an existing business model.
One can argue about the inherent value of each incremental
innovation in business, but the impact of disruption is undeniable and
unmistakable.
Disruption creates opportunity.
Anyone has the power to disrupt, and everyone has the opportunity to benefit from disruption.
To survive and thrive in the era of endless innovation, you merely need to think like a disruptor.
K.I.S.S.—keep it simple, stupid.
My goal was to capture as much value in the shortest amount of time possible.
Being successful as a disruptor is about applying your unique experience and viewpoint to find opportunity.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Intrapreneur.
An Intrapreneur disrupts from within the corporation, rather than waiting for the company to be attacked by external forces.
When one is fully empowered, being an Intrapreneur is the best job in the world.
You also get to pick your own team (which is so critical for building a successful business)
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.
“Security robs ambition.”
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.
Only seventy-one companies from the original Fortune 500 list
published in 1954 remain on the list. 17 Only 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.
Security doesn’t rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." —Leo Tolstoy
Being a disruptor is simply a state of mind. It is the ability to
look for opportunity in every obstacle, to respond to every setback as a
new beginning.
Disruption isn’t about what happens to you; it’s about how you respond to what happens to you.
Disruptors recognize that the problems they’re facing are probably happening to others as well.
Rather than observing a problem and sitting back and waiting for
others to solve it, they jumped in headfirst, seeing massive problems as
massive opportunities. To adopt the mind-set of a disruptor, you must
first disrupt yourself.
“The mind is everything. What you think, you become,”
Deconstructing a set of assumptions so as to disrupt a problem and thereby create new opportunity.
Working around the established system to survive was the ideal training ground for an autonomous disruptor.
“Identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.”
The unfortunate reality is that what holds most people back is actually their own beliefs that they are not good enough or deserving enough to be successful.
You get what you believe you deserve.
We become what we believe we are.
“We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.”
You have the power to alter the physical hard-wiring of the connections in your brain.
Train yourself to look outside the given variables and see the big picture.
Don’t try to see the steps to solving a problem; first visualize the
solution and then work backward to determine what you will have to do
or build to get to that solution.
By taking just five minutes each morning to visualize success, you
train your brain to accept that you are capable of handling success. By
visualizing each step of your journey, you are actually getting your
mind prepared to handle the opportunity.
The second benefit of starting your day with visualization is how
good it will make you feel. A negative mind will never find success. I
have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.
As you will discover in later chapters, success is merely turning
obstacles into opportunities: the bigger the obstacle, the greater your
potential for success.
A negative mind will never find success. I have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.
The way we market and sell ourselves should not be determined by
what others perceive of us. Our lives and careers are determined by our
acceptance or rejection of our perceived limitations.
“Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your
greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from
everyone else.”
A dream with a deadline is a goal.
Your energy is a valuable resource: distribute it wisely.
The research and development links are all the various ways you interpret the world around you.
The next links in the chain are production and design. What emotions
and actions are produced when you’re confronted by a challenge or
problem?
Disrupting the next link in your personal value chain involves
analyzing how you market and sell your potential. Not your skills or
accomplishments, but your limitless potential.
Finally, think about how you distribute your time and energy.
You can’t win a race without a winning mind-set.
The key to adopting a disruptor’s mind-set is to honestly assess
your internal value chain to overcome every obstacle in the way.
Annihilate all the assumptions that put limitations on your dreams and
your expectations for yourself.
Question what you’ve always been told are your strengths and weaknesses.
Train yourself to think differently. Market your potential. Distribute your energy wisely and efficiently.
Katharine Hepburn famously stated, “We are taught you must blame
your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers—but
never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault,
because if you wanted to change, you’re the one who has got to change.”
"Map out your future—but do it in pencil. The road ahead is as long as you make it. Make it worth the trip." —Jon Bon Jovi
Today’s most successful disruptors didn’t just sit around waiting
for opportunity to knock. No, they went out and created it.
“If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs.”
Starting each day with a positive mind-set is the most important step in your journey to discovering opportunity.
“I will have more money than I will ever need.”
As you spend more time consistently visualizing your future, a
pattern will develop. You will begin to focus on those things most
important to you. Let these aspirations inspire you, and write them
down. What are you passionate about? What is missing from your life?
Start writing down your dreams and begin turning them into goals. That
is the essence of a personal road map or life path.
You can truly have it all, just not all at the same time.
Plan for ways to get more enjoyment into your life and you will get more joy out of it.
In most cases, you will discover a world full of people waiting to help you achieve your goals.
When accepting a job, always ask yourself two questions: Will this
position move me closer to achieving my goal? How long will I stay at
this job before moving on?
When a job no longer offers you the opportunity for personal growth, then it is time to move on.
you will have more regrets about the things you didn’t try than the ones you tried and didn’t succeed at.
I didn’t travel the road alone, and I can assure you that you won’t, either.
Mentors are invaluable—and often crucial—to a disruptor’s success.
Send them an email. Reach out and ask for advice.
“The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who
are already the way you want to be,” billionaire Reid Hoffman suggests.
Every successful person would love to share his or her knowledge with the next generation.
To really achieve everything you set out to accomplish, you must set deadlines.
Every successful disruptor I know refused to sit back and wait. They
didn’t worry about the time being right or the conditions being
perfect; they just dived right in.
The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that
successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured
is an excuse.
To succeed in business, one must see oneself as a brand: a brand of one.
“Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there in an interesting way,”
Brownstein advises. “The people who you want to work for can’t hire you
any less than they already are. So shoot for the moon.”
Differentiation in the job market is just another variant on my axiom “Be the best at what you do or the only one doing it.”
What they did in their job, not just what company or product they did it for.
In the twenty-first century, lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.
Crafting the right language to describe your accomplishments is also crucial.
The most important tool you have on a résumé is language.
I was not always aware of the importance of personal branding. In
fact, I spent a good part of my career believing that my work should
speak for itself. It doesn’t.
How we market and sell ourselves comes into play long before we get the opportunity to prove ourselves through our work.
As superficial as it may sound, the clothes do make the man.
Disrupting your style and brand is about evolving.
You may work at many jobs in your life, but you have only one career.
The race against time defines the brand of one.
One of the best ways to leverage and promote your brand of one is through public speaking.
The more unique your topic, the less competition you will have.
What are you uniquely qualified to discuss?
One of the most interesting and unique speakers I have ever heard,
Michio Kaku, is a theoretical physicist who makes the most
incomprehensible science relevant and engaging.
Blogging, tweeting, and posting give you a controlled environment in which to “speak” with your audience.
The more you post, the more followers you develop,
The second benefit of generating all of this “branded” content is that your name appears more frequently in search results.
The more you post, the greater your chances of being discovered by someone searching for your expertise.
Your words allow you to define your reality and disrupt your
industry. Your words can have the same weight and authority as those
coming from giant media organizations. As author Seth Godin declares in
Linchpin, “Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone
else assumes is the truth.”
Posting and writing is also a great way to get noticed internally at a large company.
While posting or writing a blog is a great start, the key to
building a brand of one is having your name endorsed by more established
brands.
Major publications such as Forbes and The Huffington Post don’t have
the writing staffs needed to address all of the topics they cover.
To succeed, you must build your brand of one.
An Intrapreneur is someone who starts a new division within a
structure that is otherwise designed to maintain the status quo.
Successful Intrapreneurs make internal enemies a lot faster than they make progress.
The goal for the Intrapreneur is to show measurable results before those who are about to be dethroned destroy you.
The customer will always find a way to get what he wants, even if the traditional supplier won’t comply.
I learned as an Intrapreneur was to be fearless when you know survival is at stake.
Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.
The first is a resource trap, The second is management’s psychological trap, The last trap is a failure to plan for an evolving future.
“Business organizations are not built for innovation,” Govindarajan writes. “They are built for efficiency.”
In our Darwinian world, every corporate and governmental leader is focused primarily on survival.
Moore’s Law still holds true in the twenty-first century. The
exponential growth of computing power and the rise of technological
singularity threaten to disrupt every industry on an ever-increasing
rate of frequency.
Disruptors have the benefit of operating in senior management’s blind spot.
What I discovered was that the trick to disrupting from within an
organization is to get what you want by giving the company what it
thinks it wants.
For all disruptors, this is the most important lesson anyone can
learn. It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of
change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living
in the past and present can follow.
An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go further than a genius idea no one gets.
You can do whatever you want in life, as long as you can find someone else who is willing to pay for it.
There are two types of people in this world: those who look for opportunity and those who make it happen.
The experience emboldened me to never let a lack of funding stop me from following my dreams.
With OPM, every project is doable, and one’s return on investment (ROI) is more easily achieved.
CEOs will gladly overpay for your company if the acquisition enables them to keep their jobs.
Contrary to popular belief, most of the millionaires in Silicon
Valley did not get rich by building profitable businesses, but rather by
selling the potential of their new enterprises to established industry
giants.
"You can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea." —Medgar Evers
“Be the best at what you do,” he said, “or the only one doing it.”
Everyone will tell you that uniqueness and authenticity are two of the most important traits in business.
The key to finding a big idea is first finding a problem in need of a solution.
Every disruptive idea makes use of new technology to solve a big problem.
The next step is to kill your big idea. If you can find a problem
that will derail an idea, so will the marketplace. The quicker you can
eliminate the business roadkill, the more capital you will have left to
focus on the one idea that can’t be killed.
I learned later in my career that the faster you can kill the bad
ideas, the quicker you can pivot to the successful one. “Speed to fail”
should be every entrepreneur’s motto. When you finally find the one idea
that can’t be killed, go with it.
In reality, most discoveries come from the simple act of identifying life’s problems.
If you want to disrupt the world, take a good, hard look at it. Ask
yourself this question: Is my world perfect? Does everything function
smoothly at your job or company? Are all your friends enjoying the
stress-free lives they imagined for themselves when they were young? Are
all the goods and services you use properly priced and easy to find? If
the answer to any of these questions is no, then there is room for a
disruptive idea. As Mahatma Gandhi so prophetically stated, “You must be
the change you wish to see in the world.”
The trick to creating disruption at scale is to identify the biggest
opportunities where the existing value chain is most easily upended.
Look for the piece of the business that will shift the most dollars away from their present course.
Step two is then capturing as much of the newly unlocked value as you possibly can in the shortest time.
Find a problem, disrupt it, and solve it.
The bigger the problem, the more people your solution helps, and the
more money you make. Disruptors are simply problem solvers.
Trying to identify such opportunities is what venture capitalists do for a living.
Fewer than 1 percent of the startups that get a meeting are funded.
By carefully studying your environment and analyzing your daily
frustrations, you’ll find that opportunities for disruption start to
jump out at you.
Write down three things they notice could be improved every day.
carefully observe how things function in your world and focus on where the maximum worth is created in each value chain.
The worse your day is going, the better the opportunities to be
discovered from your frustration. A disruptor finds opportunity and
profit from his misfortunes.
According to research experts at Nielsen, women have generated
virtually all the income growth experienced in the United States during
the past twenty years, and they are responsible for 83 percent of all
consumer purchases. 3 That’s a huge market worth tapping into. What is
not working for the American woman? Could that be a global issue?
“All problems are opportunities in disguise,”
“Every problem is a prospective opportunity.”
Problems are just businesses waiting for the right entrepreneur to unlock the value.
We do, however, all bring skills and our unique creativity to how we solve problems in our lives.
Insight and drive are all the skills you need.
Everything else can be hired.
Every new experience or skill we learn has the potential to lead us to a big idea.
“Your job is to kill your dumb ass idea.”
The trouble with most entrepreneurs is that they would rather be
ruined by praise than saved by criticism. Your job is to try everything
you can to kill your big idea and discover every way that it can fail.
When you discover a crack in your plan, fix it, reshape it, and make it
stronger.
You don’t want a big idea; you want what I like to call a zombie
idea: no matter what is thrown at it, a zombie idea can’t be stopped or
killed.
If your idea is truly disruptive to a market, get used to hearing the word no.
They invest in people, not ideas.
Disruptors looking for a big idea need only examine their worlds and
their businesses: What problems do you confront every day? How do those
problems provide the opportunity for value to be captured? More often
than not, a big idea is just a simple solution to a small problem.
“Change before you have to,”
Learning when to pivot is a skill that is useful for any business.
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
True disruptors aren’t afraid to pivot.
For most businesses, pivoting is less about big changes in direction
and more about adjusting to ever-changing market conditions.
Test, verify, and adjust is the only way to stay on course.
Data has no ego and makes an excellent copilot.
Success doesn’t teach as many lessons as failure does.
“It’s fine to celebrate success,” Bill Gates famously said, “but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
All financial and personal success comes from change. To the disruptor, change is a natural requirement.
Smart entrepreneurs learn that they must fail often and fast. Try an approach, quickly measure the results, and move on.
For the startup entrepreneur, failing quickly is often the key to long-term success.
For today’s mobile and Web-based businesses, data is everything.
The single biggest reason most startups fail isn’t that the founders
had a bad idea. They fail because they run out of capital before they
discover how to bring their idea to market.
Data is the most rational and productive member of any startup team.
Invite data to as many planning meetings as you can. Data may
disappoint, but it never lies.
EFFECTUATION
Data is always right.
If no one signs up to buy the product, listen to your customers.
Real consumers actually value their time as much as their money.
Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.
Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.
Customers and data instantly let you know how your business is doing and where it is heading.
The only true mistake is not realizing the value of the mistakes you are making.
“Make mistakes small and fast,” - Miles Rose,
The faster you pivot, the more time, money, and energy you have to spend on a better idea.
Value is the commodity that a consumer actually purchases.
As I suggested earlier in this book, the key to self-transformation
is understanding what makes you, as an individual, uniquely valuable.
Differentiating value is the only competitive advantage any single business enterprise can maintain over another.
Research and development, design, production, marketing and sales, and distribution—are not equal.
The varied properties of each link in the chain are what, in the end, make the entire ecosystem so vulnerable to disruption.
It’s easiest to make money from disruption by focusing on the most
profitable links in the chain. So before one embarks on disrupting this
system, it is important to understand a value chain’s inherent
instability.
Once disrupted, a broken value chain is never repaired.
To the disruptor, every threat to the status quo is an opportunity
in disguise. Deconstruct the problem and solve for the new opportunity.
Being able to quickly identify disproportionate links is the key to
disrupting an existing value chain and capturing the greatest return for
your investment.
Most scientists don’t know what they are doing.
A scientist’s job is to discover new knowledge through experimentation and observation.
Disruptors don’t have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.
The R & D link has never been easier to disrupt than it is
today. To the disruptor, this link of the value chain offers the
distinct advantage that you can profit from a discovery that others
might have spent years refining before ultimately abandoning it.
The disruption is not in the category you create, but rather in the
act of leveraging an investment made by others into a profitable
business.
Disruption can come from learning to reuse, repurpose, and recycle
the R & D of others to achieve new products in new categories never
imagined by the original creators.
Design is where science and art break even. —Robin Mathew
Think you can improve upon something already in existence? You are ready to disrupt the design link in the value chain.
Design disruption focuses on the art of simply building something better.
Oftentimes, the real disruption comes not from changes to the product itself but from innovations in packaging design.
“The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.”
Second, it’s often the case that the solution to one industry’s problems already exists in another unrelated field.
The surest path to finding a way to disrupt an existing value chain
is to look beyond your industry and apply transformative insights from
other businesses.
Leverage an existing brand to build on the established relationship
consumers already have with the existing products that share the brand
identity. Often referred to as brand extensions, this is an easy way to
disrupt a category through design.
“The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
Outwardly, I treat bartenders and billionaires, postmen and popes, the same.
DESIGN DISRUPTION THROUGH CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Design is crucial to how products are perceived by consumers; it determines how users feel about a product.
Poor design presents a world of opportunity for disruptors looking
to make their mark without having to invent or introduce a new product
to the world.
Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.
To disrupt production, and capture value, one must look to on-demand manufacturing.
We had recognized that in order for innovation to be successful, it
has to be about not just value creation, but value capture. (Inventor Afate Gnikou, Africa’s version of MacGyver, has even built
a working 3-D printer from electronic waste and parts he found in
Nigerian scrapyards.
Everyone has the power to compete on a global scale without having to raise millions of dollars for equipment and tooling.
Being ahead of this curve is the best way to disrupt this link of the value chain.
Those who recognize the inevitability of such changes stand to benefit the most.
Everyone lives by selling something.
And that was how I learned what’s at the heart of all sales and marketing: creating demand even in the absence of logic.
Disrupting the sales link of the value chain is really about
deciding what business your company or your product is in. Recognizing
the value that can be both created and captured through creative pricing
models can disrupt any business sector.
Disrupting the sales link involves rethinking how an item is priced as much as how it is sold.
Customer service should be thought of as marketing, because it influences how customers feel about your company.
Great customer service creates brand loyalty and product differentiation.
The heart and soul of good customer service is building a great company culture.
“The customer is always right,” my father said. “Even when they’re wrong.”
With so much technology changing how we interact with customers, the
key is to not lose track of how our products make consumers feel.
To disrupt and capture value from the sales-and-marketing link, it
is imperative that you think about how your customers and employees feel
about every interaction they have with your brand, from the way they
purchase the products to how they hear about them, through advertising
and word of mouth.
In the digital era, distribution is no longer about supply chain
efficiencies, but rather about the ability to connect directly with the
end consumer.
“True disruption means threatening your existing product line and
your past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of
businesses.”
Distribution, it turns out, holds the most value in the digital age.
“There are two kinds of companies: those that work to try to charge
more and those that work to charge less,” Jeff Bezos declares. “We will
be in the second.”
American cable subscriber gets over 189 TV channels, yet watches
only 17 of them. 20 Further eroding those numbers is the fact that only
38 percent of viewers watch television live, which is causing
advertisers to question when and if their ads are being seen.
A new generation of entrepreneurs is creating opportunities for
connections around the content without ever being tied to the cost of
creating that content.
“Facts are the enemy of truth,”
With so much content available, however, the real challenge is no
longer access to that content but discovery of it. Curation,
collaborative filtering, and personalization are all paths for
entrepreneurs to cash in on digital distribution without having to
invest costly dollars on content creation.
Curation and discovery are hard work. Flipboard, N3twork, Maker
Studios, and dozens of other startups are taking different paths to
crack the challenge of curating video in a world where over a hundred
hours of video are uploaded to YouTube per minute.
Every new business or disruptive idea will, sooner or later, require
additional funding. Even the most successful of ventures require growth
capital to keep pace with consumer demand.
It is about solving for someone else’s problem in order to cost-effectively solve for your own.
The secret to OPM is to find someone else’s problem and make your product their solution.
You’ll never know how close you were to victory if you give up.
For the entrepreneur looking to utilize such OPM opportunities, the
process is very straightforward. First, identify and define your target
market. What is the specific audience that your product appeals to, and
what are the emotional attributes attached to your value proposition?
Once you are armed with that information, your next step is to make a
list of the other, noncompetitive products marketed to the same
audience.
If you are launching a new weight loss supplement, for example,
think of health clubs, exercise equipment manufacturers, sports apparel
companies, and so on. Study the slogans and ad campaigns of the biggest
players in each of those categories until you find a fit. Finally,
search the Internet to find that company’s ad agency and contact the
creative team for the account.
Another variant of OPM is cause marketing.
For the smallest of companies, I also recommend cause marketing as
an internal team-building exercise to increase job satisfaction and
reduce employee churn.
When I was building my first company, we had more time than money,
and more talent than paying work. So each year we gathered the whole
company together to work on a pro bono project that could best utilize
our talents.
OPM is the only nondilutive source available to all entrepreneurs.
For those looking to build a nonprofit, champion a cause, or change a public policy, crowdsourcing is the answer.
Crowdsourcing is changing the ways in which products are funded, data is collected, and excess human capital is deployed.
Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor of distribution, because, in
a most Zenlike fashion, the content is controlled by everyone and no
one at the same time.
A new business model: reduce competition by making services and products free.
The power of crowdsourcing is that it prevents any business or
organization from controlling access by democratizing the process.
Any business based solely on its access to proprietary data can easily be disrupted by crowdsourcing.
The possibilities of migrating from an economy based on owning to one based on sharing are limitless.
Whole industries will be disrupted as consumers shift from “consuming” to “sourcing.”
The power of crowdsourcing always remains with the crowd, not with the technological implementation.
By building a vertical market out of a single Craigslist category, a
disruptor can add more functionality to better serve the consumer.
Those looking to disrupt through crowdsourcing need to focus on three key elements.
First, analyze what data a startup is now able to gather.
The second requirement for successful crowd disruption is efficiency.
Finally, the net result has to be of consistent quality and transparency.
Feedback is the engine that improves the overall quality of
crowdsourced businesses and is the one aspect of the crowd economy that
big businesses are struggling to embrace. The more open the system is to
consumer interaction, the more robust the market will become.
A 2012 study by Ratemizer showed that while iPhone users increased
their data usage by 68 percent, voice minute usage dropped by 13 percent
over the same ten-month span.
I am not predicting the demise of Twitter, Facebook, or Craigslist,
but history shows that as any service grows to hundreds of millions of
users, the opportunity for disruption becomes inevitable.
There is no question that the power of the crowd will inspire change in all areas of our economy.
When you are searching for an industry to disrupt, the best
opportunities are those where inefficiency is your only competition.
In today’s knowledge-based economy, what you earn depends on what you learn. —President Bill Clinton
In the early 1900s, billionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie
recognized that access to information was the most important tool for
improving society.
“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to
benefit its people,” Carnegie wrote. “It is a never failing spring in
the desert.” In his lifetime, Carnegie gave away billions of dollars,
creating 2,509 public libraries and founding the Carnegie Institute of
Technology (now known as Carnegie Mellon University).
A big idea attracts big thinkers and big doers.
Leo Tolstoy said, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.”
The only thing in life as certain as death and taxes is the fact
that every business or social endeavor requires two things to grow:
people and money. The best big idea is going to be only as good as its
implementation.
The two most important, and thereby the most ripe for disruption, are capital and human capital.
Tolstoy famously pointed out, “Money is a new form of slavery, and
distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is
impersonal—that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
In fact, 51.3 percent of American households headed by someone under
twenty-four years of age are considered unbanked or underbanked.
Innovative disruptors can unlock value in the waste of other industries and create new sectors of employment.
Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing
that ever has.” - Alec Ross,
A people’s press that can’t be blocked or shut down is a truly free press.
"The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact."
Epilogue: The Self-Disruptor’s Manifesto
Your future—our world’s future—is far more malleable and controllable than most people realize.
No one writes books about those who failed to take risks. History doesn’t remember those who maintained the status quo.
Every man and woman would like to leave their mark—some evidence of
their existence—on this world. This is the self-disruptor’s manifesto:
to transform yourself, your business, and the world.
“My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently
unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them,” Sir Richard
Branson
Achieved their goals by deciding that nothing would stop them.
Innovation is merely problem solving, and problems are merely opportunities waiting to be seized.
No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can’t make a difference.
The latest technology is waiting for disruptors with big zombie ideas.
In 2016, IP traffic will grow to more than 1.3 zettabytes—ten times all the global IP traffic in 2008.
The joy of disruption comes from accepting that we all live in a temporal state.
Our purpose is to contribute to the time we live in by reinventing ourselves and our world.
Disruptors benefit society by bringing positive change to all aspects of life.
“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself,” Galileo wrote.
“There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves,” President Lyndon Johnson
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