Ideas vs. Execution

July 29, 2012 By 4 Comments

Get up and start executing because this is what it takes to disrupt.

Think of your physical self in two ways:

  • At your physical peak
  • At 200 pounds overweight

Between these two points is a spectrum that you are actually on. The proximity to your peak has to do with two factors: 1) knowing how to get there and 2) doing it. It takes both ideas and execution.

But only one of the two factors separates those in great shape from those in bad shape: execution. Almost everyone has the idea part down, i.e. they know what to do: what to eat, what exercises to do, that stress needs to be managed and that sleep is essential. Many even have advanced workout routines developed and belong to fitness clubs with super-fit people who provide excellent coaching.

Too bad most are not actually doing any of this.

It’s the human condition – ideas are easy and execution is hard. To be disruptive, your focus must be on execution. Ideation is essential, but you don’t have to work on that because it comes naturally. That’s the fun part. Everyone has their own ideas and values them, but most people are the 100+ pound overweight guy on the couch who knows he should be outside running, but just isn’t.

If you find yourself complaining that your company doesn’t listen to you or give you credit for your ideas, it’s time for you to start executing better. You are in bad shape and doing nothing but sitting on the couch.

Figure out how to execute your ideas and push them in your organization. Lead others, even if you must do so via extracurricular activities. Create business cases for change to compel your management to move forward, never losing your rock star status so that you will be listened to.

It takes guts to get this done because it is difficult. It takes extra work to fill in the gaps where your peers are not performing, it takes courage to believe in your ideas when they are questioned by executives and customers, and it takes perseverance to keep going when you continuously encounter obstacles on your way to success.

This is what execution is all about. It’s the hard part of disruptive innovation, and it’s what will give you the edge over all the others – regardless of how good their ideas are.

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship Tagged With: , , , ,

The Enemy of Innovation is Quality

July 21, 2012 By 2 Comments

Reblogged from megadisrupter:

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Layoffs and customer losses are two events that typically garner the same response from the recently departed. Laid off workers think, “I was doing such a good job. They love me. They just told me that in my last review.” Fired suppliers say, “But we’re doing such a good job. You love us. You just said so at lunch three weeks ago.”

Read more… 475 more words

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship

Disrupter Tools: The Hard Skills

July 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Reblogged from megadisrupter:

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It is absolutely true that the most important skills in becoming a disruptive force cannot be gained in a traditional classroom. There is no college major in disruptive studies, no certificate from AMA for killer vision and no HR departments hold training classes on having guts. These semi-soft skills contain nuances that are unique to each person and only so much of their composition can be taught.

Read more… 360 more words

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship

The Principle of Monetization in Your Career

July 7, 2012 By 9 Comments

Don’t try to count your money before you have created value.

Think of the coolest, most impactful-to-your-life companies that have started up over the past 20 years. You surely thought of Google. Apple had to be in there and so did Amazon.com. If you manage B2B customer relationships, Salesforce.com comes to mind. For B2C businesses, Yelp rolls off the tongue pretty easily. For connecting, you probably think of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Now think about older companies that have launched new products or services that have been disruptive. Think of your favorite local businesses that are crushing it. Think of the new stuff you’re hearing about that isn’t yet mainstream in transportation, energy and biotech.

None of these companies or products were or will be profitable on day one. Some of them didn’t make any revenue at all in the beginning. But the people behind them knew they were creating value for their market and that was their priority. Monetizing it was an afterthought because these people know one important thing:

If you create value, there will be a payoff.

This principle is never untrue. However, there are plenty of examples of companies that will not launch a product until they have a profitable revenue stream lined up. This is where truly great potential is squandered, because sometimes value that could be created never comes to fruition – all because monetization was the priority instead of value creation.

This principle scales all the way down to you. If you create value for your company, there will be a payoff: fulfillment in your career and plenty of money down the road. The problem out there is that there are way too many people asking “how much more will I get paid if I {value creation topic here}?” Will I get paid more if I take this training? If I go outside my job description to improve something? Solve a problem without being asked to?

Some people ask these questions out loud to their managers, e.g. “If I take this extra training you are offering me, will I get a raise?” But most of us simply rationalize it in our head when we decide to pass on opportunities to create value because:

  • It’s not our job
  • We already work too hard
  • Our peers aren’t doing it, so it’s not fair to us to have to do it
  • It would be giving away our labor for free

This thinking is just as flawed as it is rampant. To be a disruptive force, you have to be the person who is creating value where no one else is. Those opportunities where your peers are slacking off are not unfair to you, they are your ticket to a huge payoff down the road. Likewise, extra training or assignments are themselves compensation to you. They give you the tools and vehicles to create value; expecting guaranteed payment upon completion of training or in advance of taking on an assignment makes no sense.

If you want to be a disrupter at your company remember one mantra: value now, money later.

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship Tagged With: , , ,

Disruption in Your DNA

June 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Reblogged from megadisrupter:

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  • Click to visit the original post

Disrupters make impactful change in their organizations as a course of habit. It is not a special effort and it is not daunting or stressful. It is organic because it’s in their DNA.

Disrupters are different because of how they view their outputs. They became rock stars and now their vision has expanded.

While normal people view their outputs like this:

Read more… 102 more words

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship

Rocket Scientists in Your Mailroom

May 26, 2012 By 1 Comment

The fight is coming for overqualified people to fill lower-end jobs where innovation is part of the expectation.

The bigger a company gets, the more mundane hiring becomes. Recruiting departments and hiring managers make a mold, assign a price tag and run a parade of candidates through a multi-layered interview process that answers one question: who is the best fit at the best price?

In the higher ranks of management and for roles with complex skill sets, part of being a great fit is to not fit in, i.e. being an independent thinker who creates value and is willing to risk reputation and job security to do so. Corporate VPs are not going to receive instructions on how to do their jobs, and they wouldn’t want to. It’s the same with medical researchers, nuclear physicists, software developers and rocket scientists – they are there to be the best in their field and change the world.

Aggressive growth companies know this all too well because they are currently fighting brutal talent wars. In the face of 8-9% U.S. unemployment rates, there is a dearth of talent available with robust skills and game-changing leadership ability. But there is an abundance of talent available now that very few companies are tapping into: the middles. They aren’t those top-tier people you focus on so much – they’re the ones who want too much money to fill jobs that you don’t view as strategic.

But ask yourself this: what if you staffed your mailroom with rocket scientists? Hired successful executives to be order processors? Put accomplished business process gurus on the customer service hotlines?

If you’re thinking “that would be stupid because our budget for those positions is $10 an hour”, [Read more...]

Filed Under: Hiring & Managing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Role of Art in Your Disruptive Professional Life

May 19, 2012 By 1 Comment

Mix in some brush strokes with your keystrokes.

The most common term business professionals use to describe their relationship with art is “well-rounded”. It’s the same with our kids. We seem to think that poems, paintings and songs are there to add a little something extra around the edges of our existence, rounding us out. We think art is nice, not critical. When looking to improve ourselves or estimate the value of others, artistic taste and ability is not a core criteria, it’s a tie-breaker.

The truth is that art doesn’t round us out, it sharpens us. Great artists are among the most effective communicators on the planet, and we can all sharpen our business skill set by consuming and creating art. Here’s how: [Read more...]

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Rebooting Your Career

May 12, 2012 By 1 Comment

Time to install your updates and hit the restart button.

The most frequently asked questions by unemployed readers of megadisrupter come from those who were laid off after holding a single job for many years. They held the job for so many years that looking for a new one feels awkward, foreign and terrible. They liked their old job and never even looked for a different one when they had it.

And while it is tough to get started looking for a new job, the hardest part comes during the search itself. People aren’t finding anything similar to what they were doing, and the few who do are finding the compensation to be drastically lower than what they were making. These folks are feeling too old to be taken seriously, too outdated and irrelevant to the professional world. Some have sent out over 1,000 resumes and gotten fewer than five responses.

Of course, on a long enough timeline the survival rate for all jobs drops to zero. At this point in our history, it is normal for people who have had the same job for 20 or more years to be laid off. If you haven’t evolved what you do and who you are, you cannot view yourself as a victim if you get the boot in favor of a cheaper person who does the same thing or a solution that replaces what you do entirely.

If you are in this situation, the good news is that you are still valuable. If you’ve been striking out in your job search, it’s not because you have nothing left to offer but because you are searching incorrectly. Here are a few problems to keep in mind about your situation and how to reboot your career to overcome them: [Read more...]

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Eliminate Your Own Job

May 5, 2012 By 5 Comments

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for all jobs drops to zero.

“I need to keep my job relevant or I’ll be out of work.” You’ve heard it, seen other people’s faces when they are thinking it and maybe you have had this exact thought yourself. This instinctual thought process is the biggest reason organizations innovate slowly (or sometimes not at all). When they do innovate, it is painful and involves layoffs. The cycle feeds on itself: employees continuously find ways to avoid participating in change in the name of self-preservation. It works for a little while but then ends with self-annihilation.

If you’re thinking “that’s not me”, think again. Even rock stars fear the type of change that is truly self-preserving: eliminating their own job.

We can all claim that we embrace change because we all do to some degree. But self-preserving change is not change around the edges of what we personally do. Making changes that only make you yourself more productive helps you win the short-term race. You can persevere through cost-cutting driven layoffs, get modest raises and receive incremental promotions. You will still be devoured by the disruptive change that will eventually hit your space, though. This is the change that doesn’t do what you do better, it replaces what you do entirely.

Think Fight Club: on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every job drops to zero. There are people and companies out there designing substitutes for what you do, and they are going to succeed at some point. The situation is ever more urgent because innovation cycles are getting shorter.

You have the advantage, though. [Read more...]

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What Process Teaches Us About People

May 1, 2012 By 8 Comments

Your people are even more important than your processes; use lessons from process improvement to accelerate success.

Process improvement projects fail more often than they succeed. Even though there are many documented lessons from these failures, organizations continue to repeat the same mistakes. The result is millions in wasted project spend and a process that is as bad (or worse) than when the project started. For would-be disrupters this is detrimental. Launching a disruptive idea and failing in execution makes your company trust you less and your customers are not going to risk their continuity with you anymore.

People improvement is a big deal for organizations as well. In fact, the stakes with improving talent are much higher than with processes. But because the cost / benefit analysis is harder to quantify with talent management decisions, mistakes are less often recognized as “failures”. Interestingly, the top causes of failure in process improvement initiatives are the same for people improvement initiatives. Here are the top three issues and the lessons you can apply to people improvement:

[Read more...]

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Be Effective, Not Nice

April 30, 2012 By 6 Comments

This is not how business meetings are supposed to run.

Nice people and incompetent people have at least one thing in common: they equivocate when speaking their ideas.

For incompetent folks, the strategy is logical – they nuance their concepts and answers so much that they say nothing. This is safe for them because their goal is to not be wrong. The best way to do this is to avoid strong statements or committing to a point of view. Sure, their audience leaves the room having received no value and will never engage them again, but an incompetent person doesn’t realize this. All they know is that they escaped face-to-face embarrassment.

For nice people, equivocation is sadly keeping them from achieving their goals. They are competent, but their priority is to be polite. They work to ensure that no one looks dumb and in the process make themselves sound incompetent. Their crystal clear concepts and answers to criticism are muddled with extra words, deference and unspoken truths. Not only does an audience gain very little from a nice person’s communications, they sometimes come away with misperceptions because they are forced to draw their own conclusions.

Of course, being mean isn’t the answer (mean people suck). [Read more...]

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Tell Your Customer What They Want

April 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For many years, there has been an ongoing demolition of the ‘telling’ approach to service, whereby listening to the customer is the most important part of anyone’s job and telling customers what you offer is evil. This applies to both internal and external customers, and is largely a reaction to the early part of the 20th century where telling the customer about what you do (loudly) without listening was the norm. The result has been good – instead of customers  shoe-horning a solution or employee into their organization and achieving a mediocre result, the supplier or employee listens to customer needs and puts together a solution that achieves a great result.

There is a negative side to this, though: [Read more...]

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Disrupter Tools: The Hard Skills

April 24, 2012 By 2 Comments

There are a few hard skills you will need to create disruptive innovation and catapult your career.

It is absolutely true that the most important skills in becoming a disruptive force cannot be gained in a traditional classroom. There is no college major in disruptive studies, no certificate from AMA for killer vision and no HR departments hold training classes on having guts. These semi-soft skills contain nuances that are unique to each person and only so much of their composition can be taught. They are what separates a disrupter from all the rest.

There are hard skills that are critical to success, however. And while normal people use their hard skills to be box-checkers, you can use them to create mega-value. Below are the most important hard skills for disrupters, starting with the basic building blocks to the more complex. If you lack proficiency in any of these areas, find training as soon as possible even if it is on your own dime. The investment will pay you back many times over. One last note: the best certification you can get that covers all of these is Lean Six Sigma. If your company has an LSS program, become a Green Belt candidate (or even a Black Belt candidate) as soon as possible.

  1. SIPOC – SIPOC stands for Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Customer. It is used to focus on a single process so its value can be determined. It is the first step in understanding the meaning of what you do for your customer (the recipient of your output).
  2. Process Mapping – Boxes and arrows that quickly and effectively communicate a process to the reader. Sometimes other shapes are involved as well. It is impossible to design a substitute without maps and SIPOCs.
  3. Measurement & Data Collection – This is not as easy as it sounds. Crucial data points are placed, and sometimes hidden, throughout every process. It’s important to learn what data is important and how to collect it effectively.
  4. Data Analysis – Making meaning out of data. Huge.
  5. Productivity – Generating outputs at a given speed. This is incredibly important to all organizations.
  6. Risk Analysis – This can get very deep, but you need to at least understand how to identify risks and quantify their likelihoods and impacts. Tons of good tools for this are available free on the web.
  7. Cost / Benefit Analysis – Determining the net benefit of making a change. This is your ticket to executive & customer sponsorship of your disruptive idea.

Check out the “disrupter tools” section to the left for cheap (or free) ways to get better in these areas.

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Staying Out of the Ivory Tower

April 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You can't rock from an ivory tower.

Have you ever noticed that your favorite band or writer was a lot better when they first broke out? Those first couple of albums or books really resonated with you. They inspired and shaped you. Since then, though…meh.

What happens to our favorite artists when they get popular? A lot of things do, but the reason they resonate less is that they’re in an ivory tower. The pains and struggles they sang about when they made their first few albums are gone. The unique perspective they drew upon to write in an original way no longer exists. They are different people. They still have problems and struggles, it’s just that now those are ivory tower problems; problems that are meaningless to you.

This is the same thing that happens when you are promoted up through the ranks. You were a rock star and led your peers in overcoming problems. You led disruptive change – that’s why you are an executive now. The bigger you get and the longer you are away from an individual contributor role, the less you participate in the small picture and flex your critical thinking muscle. Since your role now involves spending more time on big picture communications to executives and external stakeholders, that’s what you focus on. When you talk to your team, you may notice they become quieter over time. They have less to say because they don’t relate to you anymore.

The cool thing about those now-famous artists is that sometimes they hit bottom. They realize they have lost touch with themselves and aren’t relevant to the real world anymore. It hurts them. Bouts of depression, followed by time off and self-discovery, lead to a new album or book that is totally excellent. You love it because they are relevant to you again, only this time they are more evolved and inspire you in new ways.

When it comes to your own corporate ivory tower, you don’t have to hit bottom or go through depression to come out of it. Here are some ways to proactively be more relevant to your direct reports and individual contributors: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Hiring & Managing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Job Hunting: Move Past the Fundamentals

April 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You are expected to wear pants, so it isn't impressive to the hiring manager when you show up in them.

The result of any candidate search is that one or two dominant candidates crush the field. The candidates who are grouped together in the back of the pack are not bad candidates, though. In fact, these candidates are quite good – they fit the background requirements, have the right credentials and do ‘all the right things’ in their interview. The problem is that when you’re a good candidate, you are a lot like everyone else in the back of the pack. Meanwhile, the dominant candidates break out, uniquely connecting themselves to the position through their personal narrative with success stories to back it up. They leave the good candidates in the dust.

The mistake that good candidates are making is they are too focused on the fundamentals of the job hunt. The fundamentals are all the things recruiters and job search sites are telling you to do: how to maximize your odds of getting your resume noticed, getting selected for an interview and making the hiring manager take a liking to you. Since everyone is getting the same advice on focusing on the fundamentals, very few are focusing on their strategy to achieve dominance.

The fundamentals should sound quite familiar:

[Read more...]

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Disruptive Selling: Get Away From the Edges

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Stop edging out and start blowing away.

There are two reasons customers form new relationships with vendors:

  1. Their current vendor or self-serve process is broken
  2. Their current vendor or self-serve process works fine but can be eliminated in favor of a substitute

The first reason is quality-driven. The customer is looking for a process or product to work the way it is supposed to work. They want a vendor focused on executing an old vision.

The second reason has nothing to do with quality, it has to do with value. The quality is good, but there are alternatives that are more valuable to their organization. They are working with vendors focused on a new vision.

When selling to customers with broken processes, you are in competition with vendors who are very similar to you. You are in a dogfight because you win by biting and clawing around the edges to create differentiation; things like price point, grade and cultural fit define your win strategy.

When selling substitutes to customers, you are using unique strengths to design disruptive replacements that provide many times more value than their current process. In this endeavor you are alone. You aren’t biting and clawing in a dogfight because no one else has a design like yours.

Being disruptive is more valuable to both organizations because both profit much more with substitutes than with improvements around the edges. Instead of looking to best your competitors head-to-head with the same offering, find ways to make them unnecessary by designing a great substitute for their service.

Filed Under: Selling Tagged With: , ,

Recognizing Mediocrity and Rising Above It

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Work can still be like this even when your ideas are ignored.

Being an innovative employee is made up of two components:

  1. Having innovative ideas
  2. Participating in their execution

Most people have great ideas, but only a very small percentage of these ever sniff execution at all, much less allow the idea generator to participate meaningfully. This is because most management structures enable mediocrity by providing employees with boxes to check, grading them on that box-checking and then believing things are going great.

If you are part of a structure like this, you have most likely had ideas that were either shot down entirely or merely acknowledged in some meaningless way (Good job, buddy! We value you! Here’s a key chain!). This is the tell-tale sign of a mediocre environment: no meaningful action. For innovative ideas to be meaningful they have to be acted on in some way, whether that is the idea actually being implemented or even just a viability analysis that determines it won’t work.

When your ideas are not acted on, it harms your company because they lose to more innovative competitors; there is immediate opportunity loss, but also an ever-devolving workforce. With no action, there is less likelihood you will continue to provide value above and beyond your box-checking duties because you weren’t rewarded for doing them.

You must rise above this mediocrity for your own sake. The burgeoning trend in organizations is to dump layered management structures in favor of smarter, more empowered employees who don’t need heavy management. When that happens to your organization, you want to be retained as one of the folks who can thrive in the new environment, not laid off because you’re just a box-checker. You also need to build your legacy for a successful job hunt if that is an option you are pursuing. You need success stories and a meaningful reason for wanting a new position to win a great job where you are a great fit.

Here is how to rise above mediocrity: [Read more...]

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Cultivate Disruption

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is going to happen sometimes - let it.

What happens when you anti-manage great people who are addicted to overcoming obstacles? They push you, and sometimes they push you hard.

Human reflexes tell you to be rigid when you are pushed. They tell you to seize control and to settle things down. It is a reflex because it’s overwhelming if you are already busy with something (or several things). You are at capacity, can’t work another 60-hour week and besides, there is enough cool stuff in the pipeline already.

The problem is that your personal capacity doesn’t matter in this situation. If you are being pushed to support an initiative it means your people aren’t yet at their capacity. Unused potential in your people leads to dissatisfaction, lack of fulfillment and declining performance.

It leads to attrition.

You hired and developed these people to critically think their way through problems independently, to cultivate killer big picture vision and to always pursue mega-value. You used to be one of these people. Why would you want to shut them down? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Hiring & Managing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Confidence: Get It

April 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

Confidence engenders support for your disruptive ideas.

There are a handful of sublimely confident people out there who get approval from their executives or customers to proceed with a solution that is deeply flawed. There are absolutely zero people who receive support from executives and customers for anything if they lack sublime confidence, even when their solutions are brilliantly designed.

For ideas to become real, support from others is imperative. Disruptive innovations directly affect a number of stakeholders, in some cases across multiple companies. These stakeholders include not only executives and customers, but peers in other departments and frontline employees. All of these people care greatly for the continuity of their processes and outputs, and they are not going to support an idea that threatens to harm them. They need to see confidence to take on the change risk. Likewise, when an idea is launched as a project, frontline employees are not going to put their all into executing change if they do not have confidence in the change leader.

How do you develop the level of confidence needed to be a disruptive leader? Here are the key components: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship, Selling Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Job Hunting: You are the Prize

April 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Forget the rejections, you didn't belong there anyway. Find the place where you are prized.

There are many job hunters today and many of them are feeling desperate. Desperation can hit anyone, regardless of pedigree or past success. It hits us when we aren’t connected to something meaningful. The more we try to connect and then fail, the more hopeless and desperate we become. It is no mystery why people with a strong support structure and diverse interests are less impacted by negative events like job loss: they are connected in other ways.

Regardless of how connected you are to other people and things, though, failing repeatedly at job hunting delivers a desperation punch on some level and it will feed on itself and lead to more failure. When you’re desperate, you will take anything and this comes through loud and clear to recruiters and people you try to network with. Hiring managers? You probably aren’t even getting to talk to any of them anymore.

What you need to remember is you have no reason to be desperate, even if you have been failing. There are a handful of roles out there at great companies where you are prized. You’re the candidate they are rejecting all the others for. All you have to do is stop applying for every job you see and find these. Know who you are, target only a very few opportunities and dominate your competition; then it will be the hiring managers who are desperate, not you.

Filed Under: Job Hunting Tagged With: , , , ,
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