Become a Master of Disruption

disruption-managementI have been fascinated by the phenomenon of disruption of large companies. It is horrifying to see large giants fall or get displaced. One of the first research papers I worked on was titled Survival where I examined disruption from the other end of the spectrum. It was published in the best paper proceedings of the Academy of Management. Since then I have been studying why large companies get disrupted.

Did you know that firms get disrupted for dozens of reasons? Did you know that disruptive technology is only one of those dozens of reasons why established firms get disrupted? Did you know that sustaining innovations often lead to disruption? Did you know that something as simple as cadence of innovation can simply disrupt an established firm who is otherwise quite innovative? Learn surprising facts about disruption and gain mastery over this very important aspect of innovation and transformation.

LATEST DISRUPTION INSIGHTS

A Free Audio Course on Disruption

Listen to over 4 hours of audio sessions covering different aspects of disruption

A Sixty-Minute Guide To Disruption

A Survival Guide in the Age of Disruption
The best 60 minute investment you can make in your career today
Understand Disruption

Researchers have studied disruption for over 80 years. But disruption as a phenomenon is different from disruptive innovations. Not all disruptions stem only from disruptive technologies.Not all disruptive technologies lead to disruption.

Learn How To Predict Disruptive Forces

Firms don’t get blindsided by disruptive events. They underestimate the power of disruptive ideas. So what can you do about this? The answer is superior prediction and analysis skills. Learn how to do that.

Debunk The Myths Behind Disruption

Kodak was not disrupted because it did not innovate. It fully committed to innovation and had the most valuable patents in digital technology. Firms rarely get disrupted due to lack of technology. Then why do they get disrupted? Find out why.

Why Do Some Business Models Become Disuprtive

Why did Netflix disrupt Blockbuster but Zipcar did not Disrupt Budget? Why do some business models become disruptive but others do not? There are structural reasons why this happens. Learn about these reasons.

How to Survive A Disruption?

Many firms facing disruptive events failed.  What makes great firms fail? More importantly, not all firms that face disruptive forces fail. What make them survive in the face of disruptive forces? What are the lessons you can learn from these stories?

How to Respond to Disruptive forces?

In the age of disruption, every firm needs to manage disruption. You need knowledge, tool and a process to do that. Here is a three pronged approach to managing a disruption in your industry.

The Dark Side of Innovation

How cognitive traps lead to disruption?

Innovation is the life-blood of organizations. It adds value, and contributes to growth of the business. But what if you encounter an innovation which instead promises to destroy value for your Company – destroy value if you pursue the innovation and destroy value if you ignore it. No different from getting stuck in quicksand – move you drown, stay still you drown.Everyone has heard of the demise of the once legendary Kodak in the face of digital photography. Did you know that they spent 5 billion dollars investing in digital technology and had the most valuable patents in this area? Did you know that Kodak had 20 years to respond to the threat of digital photography and was fully committed to the technology during those years? Why then did they fail? It was because they faced the dark side of innovation.

I found this type of innovation to be widely prevalent across industries in today’s business environment. They are here to stay and it is highly likely that one such innovation is lurking around the corner of your business right now.

The Dark Side of Innovation takes you deep into the heart of such innovations and helps you predict massive changes coming to your industry and provides you with a framework to design responses to such changes.

It will also provide you:-

dsoi

  • A recipe book to design innovations
  • Insights into 4 sustainers of value in your industry
  • Innovation methods to recreate value in your business
  • 5 Drivers of innovation success
  • Critical ways of protecting your business, and
  • Dozens of stories of success and failure of companies facing the dark side of innovation

Understanding Disruption

What is Disruption

Click here to find out what is disruption really.

Click here to find out how to survive the age of disruption.

Click here to find out what is step function disruption.

Causes of Disruption

Click here to find out the two causes of disruption.

Click here to find out the reasons for disruption by incremental and sustaining innovations.

Click here to find out what is driving the age of disruption.

Challenges of Disruption

Click here to read how a little guy will eat your lunch and run away with your business.

Click here to find out why did Kodak really fail.

Click here to read the challenges of a profit destroying innovation.

Stories of Disruption

Click here to read why digital camera became a profit destroying force in the camera industry.

Click here to read Quartz watch and disruption.

Click here to read how the Swiss face a second wave of disruption.

Click here to read the profit destroying innovation in music industry.

Click here to read the classified industry and disruption.

Response Strategies

Click here to read how important is organizational slack for innovation.

Click here to read why media industry is the hotbed for profit destroying innovations.

Click here to read how Swatch tamed a disruption.

Click here to read Kodak’s reaction to a disruptive event.

Click here to read Polaroid’s reaction to disruptive events.

Designing Innovation

Click here to read What not to do as an innovator

Click here to read where do innovations come from.

Click here to read disruption by the dark side of innovation.

You and Disruption

Discover how will The Dark Side of Innovation help you in your role

Essential guide to protect and grow your business in increasingly uncertain times.

We are living in a world where new threats emerge each day. New technologies, new competitors, new business models and industry convergence are just a handful of challenges facing you. As a successful business leader, you are adept at facing such challenges and you are confident that you can steer your business through these hurdles and skillfully avoid the pot holes that appear in your path.

But how about the challenges heading towards you that you are unaware of? What about those challenges which are akin to quicksand. Where whether you take action or avoid action, the result will be no different: where your traditional solutions will not help you but push you deeper into the quicksand.

Kodak and Polaroid faced such a quicksand. They took all the action great companies do – Invested heavily in the new technology, built new capabilities and made organizational changes to deal with the new era. In spite of spending billions of dollars in technology and building state of the art new products, both of them found themselves in a quicksand from which they could not re-emerge.

The dark side of innovation raises your awareness of the quicksand in your path that you can neither anticipate nor deal with using traditional methods. It includes several hair raising tales of companies who could not emerge from the quicksand of profit destroying innovations and inspiring tales of firms who succeeded against great odds. Using data from dozens of companies and industries, it lays out a method to design solutions to such a quicksand that is bound to appear in your path.

The powerful tools from the book are essential elements of your strategic arsenal, significantly enhancing your odds of growing and protecting your business.

This Book is about taking your business to great heights using powerful new strategies!

The world of small business is an exciting place where passionate entrepreneurs and business leaders are trying to make their mark. However, small businesses face a host of challenges. Most small business leaders wish they had more resources and a larger footprint to go that extra mile; that little extra edge that would allow them to compete with big players without betting the farm.

The conventional strategy for small businesses is to focus on narrow niches that are not important to big players. This allows small players to remain under the radar and co-exist with large players. This makes sense because when SMEs fight big players, muscle power decides who wins. Thus it is often suicidal for small players to take on their larger brethren.

But, there is good news. There are times when a certain type of innovation or change initiated by a small player can trap a large player into inactivity.

Just as David stunned Goliath by using a weakness in Goliath’s armor, small players can use a psychological vulnerability in the armor of dominant competitors to win against them.

The dark side of innovation is the first book to show how large players often behave as deer in the headlights when faced with such innovations. It shows the Achilles’ heel in every large company that can leave it paralyzed by even a small and peripheral player.

It describes how small and peripheral firms rose to prominence and dominant positions using this secret psychological ploy. Most importantly, it gives you the recipe used by many smaller firms to successfully create such innovations.

The Dark side of Innovation:-

  • Shares inspiring and moving stories of small firms defeating large incumbents
  • Describes the secret nature of innovations that often paralyze large incumbents
  • Provides a recipe of creating such innovations in any industry
  • Helps the reader see vulnerability of large firms in a new light
  • Provides a new strategic tool for SMEs willing to achieve greatness.

Be the innovator you aspire to be.

As an R&D professional, you are faced with significant innovation demands to give your business the cutting edge it so needs versus your competitors. You are adept at building an innovation pipeline and leveraging your organization to provide cutting edge innovations.

However you believe you are close to a breaking point. You secretly wish you had a magic wand to provide better and bigger innovations for your business and with fewer resources. You need a magic wind beneath your wings to propel you to deliver these demands.

The dark side of innovation provides you the recipe you are looking for. The four step process laid out in the book shows you how to leverage the various changes in your industry to be the propellant of your innovation pipeline. It helps you to ride the wave of emerging opportunities and threats in your industry along with the magic of your technology to create massive value by increasing the size of your innovation pipeline and increasing the size of prize of existing innovations.

Leverage ever changing consumer and competitive landscape to build value.

You are a proficient business builder who has the pulse of the market. You thrive in innovating to build your business. You are running at 200 miles per hour to keep your business thriving on a daily basis. At these high speeds, although you are acutely aware of many changes ahead of you, you simply do not have the time or leisure to step back and look ahead for the big opportunities and threats on a regular basis. Every minute spent away from your customer, your brands, and your markets is a wasted minute.

Deep down, you fear that something big may be lurking around the corner which you have not anticipated. You know major companies and large businesses have gone from great heights to abysmal depths due to such changes that were not anticipated.

The dark side of innovation allows you to conquer this fear efficiently and effectively. This must read book allows you to see the ever changing consumer and competitive landscape in a new light. It helps you recognize the major changes taking place in your industry and the big hidden threats that face your business. A few hours with this book will not only help you avoid the pit falls of the dark side of innovation but will allow you to formulate marketing strategies which leverage these slow and hidden changes taking place in your markets to build business value.

You owe it to yourself.

Stay ahead of the curve and deliver business innovation

You are the lifeblood of information flow in your organization. You leverage systems and technologies to deliver the maximum impact for your business. Your organization is integral to not only the day to day running of the businesses but is also linked with the future strategies of your company.

You are increasingly being called upon to step into the role of a business innovator. While a lot of your attention and investment is focused on ensuring the current systems infrastructure continues to function flawlessly, there are two critical issues that you would like to resolve.
First, while the business needs continue to change on a daily basis, your systems do not change daily. This creates a perpetual gap between business needs and your systems solutions. You want to close or eliminate this gap.
Second, as new technologies emerge regularly, you want to use them to deliver higher business value. How do you use new technologies to maximize your business results?

To solve both these issues, you need to understand the link between your business decisions and the changing context of your business. This will allow you to anticipate the upcoming changes in your industry and help you prepare your systems for the changes that will be inevitable. The same knowledge will help you understand which technologies and emerging trends can be brought together for a higher business impact.

The dark side of innovation provides you with a methodology to anticipate the changes in your industry and get ahead of the curve. This will not only allow you to step into the role of a business innovator but will also help you keep your systems solutions ready for the inevitable changes ahead of you.

As a strategy professional, whether in a consulting firm or within a corporation, you are adept at solving critical problems for your clients. Beyond designing solutions, you also play an important role in identifying and framing problems for management teams. With your training and experience, you are well aware of the various tools and techniques for identifying, framing and solving problems. However, you are in constant search for new and better tools and techniques to be more effective.

The dark side of Innovation provides a breakthrough methodology to enable you to identify and frame emerging threats to your client’s business. Based on years of research across industries, the book is a must read for those who seek to disrupt or survive disruption and for the strategists who advice them.

Provides you advanced holistic understanding of innovation and business transformation with cutting edge tools. Enables you to analyze industries and companies you are exploring for employment.

As an MBA student, you are undergoing a massive change in your mindset through your education. You are getting a tremendous exposure to the world of business in ways that you were unaware of. You are rapidly accumulating the tools and techniques across different functional areas and becoming adept at management. Your objective is to use these tools and your education to make a mark in the world of business. You not only want to get a great education but also want to get a great job after your MBA.

The Dark Side of Innovation will enable you in your pursuits in three important ways. First, it will provide you with a holistic understanding of innovation and business transformation that pulls together from many functional areas. This will help you consolidate many lessons you learnt through your business courses. Second, it will provide you with a framework to analyze an industry and any company from a powerful perspective. After this analysis, you will be able to discuss an industry and a business with senior managers in insightful terms. This will be helpful in your job interviews when you sit down and talk with senior management of any company. Third, it will help you become a better business manager as you start your first job. Irrespective of the functional domain you choose to follow in your career, the dark side of innovation promises to be a good companion.

Assessment Tool

The assessment tool asks you to fill out a short questionnaire and based on your answers provides you an assessment of your needs. It will help you understand what kind of benefit you will get from the Strategic Anticipation and Response Model. It will assess how urgently you needs the model. Most importantly, it will help you diagnose whether there is a missing arrow in your strategic arsenal.

Click here to download Assessment Tool

FAQ

The Frequently Asked Questions document provides you the answers to common questions that you may be asking after reading the book. If you have a question that has not been answered pleased contact me and I will add the answer to this document.

Click here to download the FAQ

Download first 50 pages of my book: The Dark Side of Innovation

 

Turbocharge your career with the power of disruption