Buy Now The book is intelligent, insightful, and extremely well crafted. Chapters and stories flow smoothly; diagrams are immediately understandable; the writing itself is simple, clear and engaging. Even the Appendices (E.g., children opening your mind) and Bibliography (E.g. how…
Read More The Innovator’s DNA by Clayton M. Christensen, Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen
The title of the book alone deserves mentioning; it is that smart. The subheading: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, could have been used, but it doesn’t quite have the edge that captures—that seems to imply: “DNA can be changed!... gotta buy this right now! ....could change it during my summer vacation!” (Yes, you could—if your vacation time was 1,459,999,999,979 trillion days longer—which is how long it’s taken DNA to evolve.)
Before we dive into this month’s juicy one, here’s the short and sweet on May’s cliffhanger: HONOURING BUSINESS. We proposed that ‘Business’ doesn’t actually exist ... it is merely a word for you and me and others who like getting together and trading our stuff or skills. Similarly, the tag ‘NHL’ is us – you and me and others who rally and support, and play a fast hard game.
Ken Dryden, politician, lawyer, businessman, author, and former NHL goaltender, has been thinking and talking lately about the worrisome ramp-up of dirty hits in Hockey. In correlation, and well-aware of the growing conviction many of us have that Business is also ramping-up its dirty hits a.k.a. bad behaviours, Chris MacDonald, philosophy professor and esteemed business ethics advisor, analogized the two situations by saying: “Hockey, like commerce, is a fundamentally adversarial context that also happens to be socially beneficial (editor’s note: sometimes). That is; the rest of society benefits from the fact that both hockey players and business executives regard the other team as the enemy and try their best to outdo them. Try, that is, within certain limits.”
While it’s true the Profit from Conflict can be evaluated by little black numbers on sheets of white paper, it can also be measured in how we Profit Others. And while money is pretty sweet stuff, helping others by: ∞creating Conflict for ourselves in the vein of the Famous 5; ∞prodding and provoking our nice comfy beliefs and stagnant patterns of thinking in the way philosopher Chris MacDonald does; ∞exemplifying and emulating former UN Envoy, Stephen Lewis, who walked—arms wide open—into the Aids fray in Africa…is an evolutionary, and in the case of the ‘Famous 5’, a sometimes revolutionary step forward.
Forget about the big-name—Hewlett Packard; DuPont; GE; Otis Elevator; IBM—industry leaders touted as innovative and tough. Instead, walk over to the window; look down the street to Trend Hunter, and Toronto Central CCA (Community Care Access) Centre; then look up …way up to the friendly giant of Ontario skiing – Blue Mountain Resorts to see just three of the thousands of ‘local’ concerns swimming with innovation. In spite of their divergences, each of the three share one over-riding value: they are run by observant ‘customer-product/experience’ thinkers: people who actually welcome conflicts between: 1) excellent ideas; 2) differences in values; 3) products or services not meeting the marketplace.
In the past five years, business leaders the world over, have been trashing has-been mission statements and un-buttoning company cultures to produce innovative thinking radically different from the heads-down; ‘yes sir; even if you’re wrong, sir’ choke-holds that grasped corporations and strangled employees throughout the 20th century. Instead, leaders today need creative ideas to ignite agile responses to this turn-on-a-dime marketplace. And they’re doing it by…’gulp’…fostering conflict. (
There are no rules; no laws concerning Gratitude. If you haven’t developed it or don’t use it enough, you won’t get a ticket; be judged guilty; get sent to jail. You won’t lose your job or the respect of your colleagues either…for you’ve made it a rule to say: ‘thank-you’ and everyone seems quite satisfied with that. But let’s not fool ourselves: saying ‘thank-you’ is not the same as being grateful. Not at all.
There is good conflict and then there’s bad conflict. The first one gets resolved; the second one doesn’t. For years, bad conflict ensured good conflict couldn’t earn a dime, never mind a profit. But things are turning around. Figuratively and in real dollars, good conflict is generating hefty returns both in business and at home. And it’s achieving those results with very little initial outlay.
Picture the scene: it’s late in your fiscal year and you’re in the final stages of negotiating a big sale. If you land this one, you will exceed your annual sales target by 25% and your bonus will double. No doubt about it – you want this one. Then comes the bad news: to do the deal, the client wants a major concession that will erode the profitability of the transaction and set a bad precedent. You thought you had handled this objection earlier and put it aside, but you were wrong. What now? In this article, I will share some advice that I hope will help address challenges like this.
