Your weekly disruption

The 7 variables is about surfing the S- Curves of your own personal disruption. Yes, disruption can feel a bit scary, but the payoff of career growth and personal achievement makes overcoming the fear factor well worth it. We all start at the low end of the learning curve. The key is to shift into hypergrowth and, when your learning crests, to do what great disruptors do: catch a new wave.

If you can surf the S-Curve way of learning and mastering you will have an accelerated competitive advantage in this era of disruption.

Lets look at each in turn

Another key element of ensuring you take the right risks is to make sure you’re exploiting your particular skills, or “distinctive strengths.” If you try something you’re only moderately good at, you’re increasing the risk of failure. A distinctive strength is something that you do, that others within your sphere do not. Pairing this strength with a need to be met or a problem to be solved gives you the momentum necessary to move into hypergrowth, the sweet spot of the S-curve.

For personal disruption this could entail public speaking, networking or even bean counting!

Nick Nairn the CEO of Stuart Alexander is one who has encouraged the virtues of playing to distinctive strengths.

Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 3

Disruption breaks our existing paradigms and takes us out of our status quo. To improve our journey we need to seek constant feedback. One of the best ways to obtain this feedback is to impose constraints. Think of skateboarders. They are some of the quickest learners in the world because they receive some incredibly fast and useful feedback. Every action. Every movement has an immediate consequence.

For personal disruption this means embracing working within limits, space, time, resources, stumbling blocks and budget.

One person who has definitely embraced constraints has been David Freeman the founder of H2CoCo. Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 5

The idea that you deserve or are owed something or are in some way privileged or superior – can be a disruption killer. It manifests itself in several ways. With cultural entitlement, we have such a strong sense of belonging with our peer group or clique, and such a powerful sense of its capabilities that we may tend to think poorly of those outside the group and ignore or even be unaware of their ideas. And if our plans seem to be working out well, we don’t feel the need to look beyond our own social and geographical borders for other people’s ideas. We believe that success comes naturally from within and always will.

For personal disruption we should make a sustained effort to experience other cultures by networking outside our usual realm either professionally or even geographically.

Esme Borgelt the Managing Director of Kelloggs has forged her career breaking down the silos within a big corporate. By doing so, the entitlement often felt has been replaced by collaboration. Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 9

Despite what its name and description might suggest, the S-curve of disruption isn’t actually a smooth, continuous, onwards-and-upwards growth process. Disruption by definition involves moving sideways, back, or down, with all the negative connotations that conjures, in order to move forward. Furthermore, you might need to make course corrections, so reversing or moving in a new direction are key parts of the disruption process.

You can do this in a planned way by deciding in advance what you hope to gain from the process – “a sort of business plan for your backward move.”

For personal disruption, as a manager, you might decide to allow employees to rotate into each other’s roles, knowing that in the short term, there may be an impact on revenue. But in the long term, the ideas and experience that flow from this could deliver big rewards.

James Lane has been an Executive who has travelled and taken step backs to catapult forward. Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 2

Sometimes too there is failure. Whenever we start something new there is this fantasy of a perfectly linear world. Sometimes dreams come true. And sometimes they don’t.

Paraphrasing John Milton: “the mind is its own place, it can make up heaven or hell, a hell or heaven”. “The mind is its own place”.

Personal disruptors can see success in every failure and a failure in every success. As you climb up your learning curve what will you make of your success?

Bernie Brookes outlined the learnings one can take from failures and more importantly how these can be the foundations for success. Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 13