Issue No. 558 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a likely bestseller from the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy—with a new word of the decade! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 550 book reviews, and click here for my recent review of Built to Beat Chaos.
The authors of the new book, Beyond Disruption, urge leaders not to be thwarted or stymied by the boundaries of a chessboard. Go beyond!
Beyond the Chessboard!
The bestselling authors of Blue Ocean Strategy urge nonprofits and for-profits to think beyond disruption. And to achieve innovation and growth without doing damage to industries, companies, or jobs—think “could,” not “should.” Think kinder and gentler, perhaps?
The old way: “This is the chessboard, and these are the pieces. In light of this, how are you going to play best?”
How wise leaders execute the Beyond Disruption way: “Rather than start with the chessboard, they start with their minds and imaginations, the magic between their ears, to envision what could be and what should be irrespective of what is.”
Here’s another must-read—just published this week by Harvard Business Review Press:
Innovate and Achieve Growth
without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs
by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
I usually look for the meat of a book on page 25. The authors delivered on page 28 with two objectives for this important book:
• “First, we aim to show why broadening the existing view of innovation and growth by including nondisruptive creation is of paramount importance today and will be even more so in the future.”
• “Second, we aim to show how you can generate nondisruptive creation, by laying out the building blocks for identifying, acting on, and capturing nondisruptive opportunities and by outlining areas ripe for nondisruptive creation that you can seize.”
In case you missed it, “nondisruptive creation” is the word-of-the-week, and likely, the word of the decade. But first—a trip down memory lane:
• Slide rulers
• BlackBerry
• Blockbuster
• Ocean liners
• Taxis
• Cameras with film
• Road atlases
“For the past 20 years,” write these bestselling authors and professors of strategy, “’disruption’ has been the battle cry of business: Disrupt this. Disrupt that. Disrupt or die. Calls for disruption have rung across Silicon Valley, major corporate boardrooms, the media, and business conferences around the globe.”
Examples: Uber replacing taxis, Amazon replacing local bookstores, GPS replacing road atlases, and iPhones replacing…well, almost everything!
Now…after reading this book, I’m evaluating every new idea (including Shark Tank episodes) with a question: Disruption or Nondisruptive Creation?
The authors add, “Corporate leaders have continually been warned that the only way to survive, succeed, and grow is to disrupt their industries or even their own companies. Not surprisingly, many have come to see disruption as a near-synonym for innovation.”
Kim and Mauborgne argue that there’s a better way. “It is a distinct new concept,” they write. “Nondisruptive creation creates new industries without leaving failed companies, lost jobs, and destroyed markets in its wake. It offers the immense potential to innovate new markets where none existed before.” Trust me—this is a very compelling argument—and my mind immediately imagined how my nonprofit colleagues will read this book and run with it. (Example: Read my review of Rooting for Rivals.)
Dozens and dozens of unique and memorable examples of nondisruptive creation are spotlighted. (I’m offering a Starbucks card to anyone who can read this book and NOT share a story with a friend or family member!)
• When Cunard ocean liners lost business to the airline industry they tried and failed with an airline—but then created something new: luxury vacationing at sea.
• When a 3M inventor wanted a better bookmark for his choir hymnal, he collaborated with a colleague and invented the post-it note—an innovation that didn’t disrupt any other product.
• When rural South Koreans moved to the city—they could not replicate the clay pot (buried in earth) fermenting method used for kimchi, a staple of the Korean diet. A nondisruptive market solution was launched in 1996—and today, more than 90% of Korean households have purchased an in-home kitchen appliance called Dimchae. (No disruption!)
• Ditto Bette Nesmith Graham who created Liquid Paper—no one lost their job and no product was sidelined. (By the way, she was also the mother of the future guitarist for The Monkees, Michael Nesmith. Now I'm a believer!)
The authors/professors already had plenty of street cred—they’re codirectors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute in Fontainebleau, France. They are honored as two of the four leading thinkers in the 100 years of Harvard Business Review’s publications. And in 2022, Thinkers50, the global ranking of management thinkers, named Blue Ocean Strategy as one of the top 10 classic books on management.
What? You haven’t yet read what the Financial Times called “one of the bestselling business books of the century”? Here you go:
• Article: “Blue Ocean Strategy” (Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2004)
• Book: Blue Ocean Strategy: Expanded Edition (2015)
• Video: “The Explainer: Blue Ocean Strategy” (2½ min.)
In Chapter 4, “The Rising Importance of Nondisruptive Creation,” Kim and Mauborgne weigh in on the tension between corporate economic gain and social good. They balance the mandate that, of course, corporations must make money—or they will do zero good. I appreciated this discussion—because it is so relevant today with perhaps more woke voices than wise voices. (Read Andy Kessler’s WSJ opinion column, “A Wrench Thrown Into Capitalism.”)
The authors are realists—there is not just one approach for achieving growth without displacing industries, companies, and jobs. They write, “…when it comes to the innovation of new markets, nondisruptive creation presents one workable path toward addressing this challenge. Here social good is not a sideshow but is locked into economic good by its very nature of creating without destroying, thus generating nondisruptive growth."
The authors add, “In other words, with nondisruptive creation, social good is not achieved in how companies spend money but begins to be achieved in the very way they make money to thrive and prosper. Instead of compromising economic good, nondisruptive creation brings economic good and social good closer to moving in lockstep.”
Beyond Disruption is richly illustrated with fascinating stories, such as the 3D-printed mechanical arms for a young war victim in South Sudan, to Bangladesh (microfinance for the poor) to the French postal service, La Poste’s “Watch Over My Parents” program (weekly home visits to the elderly!).
You’ll love the helpful and numerous tables—comparing current practices to potential best practices. Will this new approach be easy? No! But there are reasons to try this path and there are advantages: “Nondisruptive creation is emotionally and politically easier for incumbents’ internal stakeholders to get behind.” And what about external stakeholders? “While disruptive creation tends to increase conflicts with social interest groups and governments, nondisruptive creation largely sidesteps these challenges.”
My favorite chart: The Confidence-Competent Map with four quadrants:
• High Confidence, High Competence: PURSUE
• High Confidence, Low Competence: RETHINK
• High Competence, Low Confidence: RETHINK
• Low Competence, Low Confidence: DISCARD
There's more! I still need to inspire you with “cricketainment” and how the Board of Control for Cricket in India satisfied the cricket purists, yet introduced a shorter version of cricket to millions more. (Hmmm. I wonder if Major League Baseball in the U.S. borrowed some ideas?)
Or…the role that assumptions (one of my favorite topics) play across industries, especially how one finance firm peeled back banking’s assumptions. (See Table 8-1: The Assumption-Implication Analysis for overseas education loans—a helpful comparison chart for any innovation.)
Or…how one UK charity, Comic Relief, moved from “pity pleas” to their Red Nose Day. And get this: “Because Red Nose Day is held only once every two years, donor fatigue doesn’t set in, and people look forward to the next one.”
BEYOND THE NONPROFIT CHESSBOARD! We’re still years away from solving deep societal issues (homelessness, crime, racism, religious persecution, and more). Could this book move your favorite nonprofit closer to breakthrough solutions? Any risk in listening to the audio book (just six hours) or reading this important book? No risk at all—compared to the potential opportunity. It's time! Unhook yourself from the boundaries of your chessboard!
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Beyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs, by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne. Listen on Libro (6 hours, 6 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) After GPS devices arrived in our cars (a “high end” solution), the innovative app, Waze, is mentioned in Beyond Disruption as one of the many “breakthrough solutions from the low end.” Uri Levine, Waze co-founder, wrote the 2023 gem, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs (read my review). His interesting matrix includes four quadrants: “Winners” (high usage/value and many users), “Niche” (high usage/value, but few users), “Losers” (low usage/value and few users), “Dreams and Nightmares.” Are we focusing on problems or solutions? What’s the right answer?
2) OK, here’s a Starbucks card and our thanks to [insert team member name] for giving us a quick overview of Beyond Disruption. Now, around-the-room, give us one example of a disruption (here or somewhere on the globe) that negatively affected other jobs, companies, or industries. And then for our second around-the-room question, share a nondisruptive creation that combined economic gains with social good.
Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 4: The Mount Rushmore of Leadership Legends
Book #29 of 100: Turning the Flywheel
For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #29 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.
Turning the Flywheel:
A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
(Why Some Companies Build Momentum and Others Don’t)
by Jim Collins
Books #22 through #40 spotlight 19 books I named to “The Mount Rushmore of Leadership Legends” group—featuring Patrick Lencioni, Jim Collins, Ken Blanchard, and Peter Drucker. Part 4 features five books by Collins, including Turning the Flywheel.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Turning the Flywheel
• Listen on Libro (1 hours, 47 minutes)
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson)
You’ve sold over 10 million books worldwide. The assignment in 2019: boil it all down and deliver the key thought—the Big Idea—of what leaders and managers are missing. What one concept would you pick—that rises above everything else—and is your critical message for organizations today? Jim Collins picked the flywheel.
Using the flywheel concept at Ware Elementary School, the principal and her team saw satisfactory reading levels of just 35% mushroom to 99% in just seven years. True or False? (Read my review.)
I just read the delightful new book, An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!, by Florence Hazrat. The author (from the UK where "!" is known as the exclamation mark) quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald who frowned on exclamation marks—because using them is “like laughing at your own joke.” (LOL!!!) Read my review here and for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.
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Trend-Spotting Exercise
Tool #15, “Board Retreat Trend-Spotting Exercise,” details how to leverage a simple trend-spotting template to generate insights and interaction on a key hot topic at your next retreat. That’s just one of 22 tools in ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board, by Dan Busby and John Pearson (2019). Order from Amazon. And click here for 22 blogs on the 22 tools.
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PEARPOD | TELLING YOUR STORY. Note that the authors of Beyond Disruption believe that nondisruptive creation plays better with both internal and external stakeholders—than “disrupt or die!” That’s huge when telling your story. For more ideas, contact Jason Pearson at Pearpod (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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