Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business

Dave Brown, The Surge Group's new Innovation Consultant, suggested I read this book. Dave had worked at frog design and the buzz in the industry is that this is the book everyone is reading and using.

How can you not be intrigued by the title this little book is sporting?  Yet, with a title such as this, you would think the contents might be a bit lofty or woo-woo.  The good news is that this is a very practical guide to a five-step process for imagining a powerful market disruption and transforming it into reality.  How do you come up with creative ideas?  How do you do so from new thinking patterns?  How do you start off with these ideas and then bring in business constraints to shape them into marketplace successes?

Luke Williams comes to us from frog design, one of the world's leading innovative firms.  At frog, he developed a process they called frogTHINK which was touted as a "fast, agile approach to collaborative innovation" that held a balance of tension "between fluid intuition and logical rigor".  He then tested this process outside the design world by developing a graduate level course at the Stern School of Business at NYU.  He draws on the work of Edward de Bono (lateral thinking) and combines powerful creativity techniques with business implementation discipline.

Williams states the the goal of this book is to provide you with a framework and motivation you need to discover and execute bold new recipes (ideas) to rearrange things to create more value and wealth.  He wants you to think about your business and your industry in entirely new ways.  The reason?  Williams argues that to stay afloat in today's disruptive environment, to stay competitive, you have to "think what no one else is thinking and do what no one else is doing".  You have to be disruptive, not just claim to be different while offering something very similar to the competition.  The argument, here, is do you want to spend a lot of money trying to achieve incremental change that doesn't really differentiate you or your product, or do you make bold moves now, before you are backed into a corner?

So what is disruptive thinking?  It is a way of thinking that "turns consumer expectations upside down and takes an industry to its next generation".  It leaves the competition scrambling to catch up.  How do you be the disruptor?  Williams outlines his five-step process and elaborates on each providing case studies.  His five steps to disruption are:

1. Craft a disruptive hypothesis.
2. Define a disruptive market opportunity.
3. Generate several disruptive ideas.
4. Shape them into a single, disruptive solution.
5. Make a disruptive pitch that will persuade internal or external stakeholders to invest or adopt what you've created.

Sounds easy! Or does it?

While Williams gives some very practical exercises for each of these steps, the one thing missing from this book is the discussion on whether the company is geared for innovation in the first place.  The diversity of the team, the strengths of the leadership, and the resulting culture will either enable or disable an organization's ability to walk through this process and come out the other side successfully.  I have observed that even when leadership says they are all for innovation, they engage in disabling tactics that stymie the process.  A simple yet profoundly disabling example is not allowing time for unencumbered thinking.  This will limit most of these steps.   Another disabler is the hierarchy of decision-making.  If all decisions rest on the CEO, the possibilities in step four become narrowed and as a result, creative thinking is squashed like a bug.  The culture and the leadership will make or break a company's ability to sustain continuous innovation. However, if the factors enabling innovation performance are all well greased, this five-step process could work like a charm.

The bottom line:  Williams presents clear, concise and actionable advice and tools in a short book. I highly recommend it.