About 20 years ago, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen made famous the idea of implementing disruption and how innovation is imperative for success.
His work, ” The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail,” became the seminal book on innovation and disruption. The concept is that companies need to innovate and disrupt themselves before the competition does it.
Today, it is important that individuals follow the same principles in order to stay ahead. If you wait for the competition to catch up with you, it could be too late.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Whitney Johnson, who has worked with Christensen for a number of years. She has recently written a book, ” Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work.” In this book, she makes the case that individuals can’t remain in what is imagined to be a safe place, but need to embrace stumbling blocks and constraints to learn from those difficulties and become even better.
I remember reading Christensen’s work and being impressed with his concepts, research and admonition to disrupt your own products and industry before competitors or the industry itself do it to you. Since he wrote this classic work, we have seen his concepts implemented as they have changed many industries leading to success.
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