Disrupt Yourself

In this week’s episode of The Critical Path, Horace Dediu interviewed Whitney Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book ‘Disrupt Yourself’. She has taken the tenets of disruption innovation theory and attempted to map them to career progression strategies. Which is an interesting exercise.

Her thesis is that in today’s world of work we can no longer rest on our laurels and presume that our current skills and competencies will carry us to the end of our careers. We are all going to have to disrupt ourselves many times throughout the arc of our careers. She outlined seven strategies you can implement to disrupt successfully.

1. Take the right kind of risks 

She identifies two categories of risk. The first is Market Risk, where you innovate within your sector. “Play where no one else is playing.” The second is Competitive Risk, where you innovate against your peers. She observes that while our brains are wired to see Competitive Risk as being less risky than Market Risk, the reverse is actually true.

2. Play to your distinctive strengths 

Transpose your skills into a new environment and propel yourself up the curve.

3. Embrace constraints

Understand that you are going to be constrained along some axis: be it experience, or buy-in, or time, or money. Those people who are most successful moving up the curve often impose constraints on themselves.

4. Battle entitlement 

Do not fall into the trap of intellectual entitlement. If you are set in your ways of thinking about the world, then that makes it far easier for others to disrupt you. It is better to engage with people who disagree with you. Sharpen your arguments and learn more. “Stress yourself with an open mind to make yourself smarter.”

5. Step back

To practice self-disruption, you often need to step back in your career to catapult yourself further up the curve. Having support is critical at this step, so bring those closest to you along on your journey. Consider how you can give those people the confidence they need.

6. Put failure in its place

You can choose whether you view an experience as a failure or a success. Learn to see the process of failure as a process of learning. Humility humble in the face of that is key.

7. Be driven by discovery

Many successful businesses end up in a very different place than where they started from. “We like to think we can see the top of the curve from the bottom of the curve.” You need to be open to discovering our path by course-correcting along the way.

Worth a listen.
The Critical Path 158, ‘Disrupt Yourself with Whitney Johnson’ 

My Book ‘Thinking Out Loud’

So I decided to make a book version of this blog. I made it for myself. It is called Thinking Out Loud and it looks like this. 

Given that so much of my writing on this blog is essentially Digital-First Advocacy, it is worth addressing the question of why I have invested time and effort into reconfiguring my blog writing into a paper-based artifact? There are a set of related answers to that question.

The first reason is the sense of agency achieved by creating an alternative second home for my writing that exists apart from the Blogger platform. My current belief is that Google’s Blogger product is unlikely to be depreciated within the next few years, as was the case with Google Reader which they closed down in July of this year. That said, since I do not host my own blog on my own server, I have to be very respectful of the fact that every single word I have published on this platform since 2004 is always only ever available at the whims of Google. So there is a lot be said for being able to read this material in a separate context not beholden to Google or to anyone else. While a printed edition hardly counts as a viable back-up, there is something (non-logically) reassuring about having my complete blog in one discrete container in my shelf.

While doing some work-related research into ebook publishing at the end of last year I became intrigued with the idea of this blog existing as an ebook. After that initial idea took hold, a cloud of unanswered questions occurred to me. What different characteristics might my blog exhibit when reconfigured within a book format? (Even as the person most familiar with this blog, I still find it challenging to comprehensively conceive of its remit, scope, and what I can only think of as its overall shape.) Would a hard copy make that shape more comprehensible and apparent to me? Would my writing read any differently when presented on paper as opposed to on screen? Was there any overarching narrative themes to my writing over the years? And would those themes become more apparent when presented in a traditional oldest-to-newest chronology? (Blogger presents posts in a reversed chronology, with the latest posts first and older material progressively further downstream.)

What started out as a seemingly uncomplicated idea – producing a hard copy archive of what I had written on this blog – took on a life of its own and my little side-project hobby gradually expanded its scope.

The ‘minimal viable product’ approach would have been just to re-purpose this blog as an electronic book for my Kindle. After considering the amount of work involved in producing an ebook, it seemed to be only a short distance from doing that to creating a physical on-demand printed version. In retrospect, I was very very wrong about that.

To make the book, I had to take on the roles of sub-editor, designer, typesetter, and proof-reader. As a result of taking that one-man-band approach, completing this book needed precisely zero meetings, emails, phone calls , or other mechanisms of coordination. Obviously then, any and all errors of comprehension, argument, logic, reasoning, referencing, attribution, spelling and typography are solely my own responsibility.

Firstly, I needed to correct the assorted typos and grammatical errors that I uncovered. As I originally intended the print-on-demand edition to be an accurate archive of the online version, I made all of those corrections within the Blogger CMS. I did not want to fork the content and end up with an alternative improved version on my own bookshelf and the less polished version representing me online.

For various reasons, above and beyond the fact of an unreasonable page count, I ultimately decided that I needed to edit out all of the posts which did not logically or usefully translate across to a printed edition. However, I left in as much material as possible. So this is definitely not an edited-highlights version of my blog. It still includes plenty of examples of my early writing that personally I find somewhat challenging to re-read.

Admittedly, most of the free time I would normally have spent writing new blog posts this year has been absorbed with all those inter-related tasks involved in putting together a book. That is my explanation for the paucity of all-new posts that I have published so far this year. So there was a definite opportunity cost in pursuing this project. Arguably, producing this book may not have been the optimal use of my spare cycles. But, in counterpoint to that, I wanted to create a tangible realisation of my existing writing. I thought that having the book would being me some joy and a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

My initial reaction to having the physical object since yesterday is that – even though I might be tending towards being ‘Mr. Digital’ these days – I have to admit that holding a printed copy of your own book in your hands is very satisfying.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I made this book for myself. Now having my own hard copy sitting on my bookshelf realises my original intention. That said, I have published this book using Lulu.com which means it is also available to order print-on-demand for anyone else who is interested in having their own copy. Print and delivery took just under two weeks for my copy.

You can purchase copies of Thinking Out Loud here.

Everything included in the print on-demand version will always remain available online here. This blog will still be the canonical version, due to it being both pointable-at and deep-linkable-to. The print on-demand version is a snapshot in time.

Give And You Shall Receive

Cory Doctorow authored a concise article in Forbes last week explaining how he has achieved considerable success with his practice of simultaneously releasing free electronic editions of his novels alongside the traditional printed editions for purchase. Two sentences are key to his arguement; “I haven’t lost any sales, I have just won an audience” and “My fans’ tireless evangelism for my work doesn't just sells books — it sells me”.
The emergent reputation economics of this sort of internet-enabled success interests me — it is a topic I have been following since 2003. I believe that there are models to implement and lessons to be learned here for all classes of knowledge workers, whether you are a branding consultant, an MS Word template guru, an expert on typography, a CSS maven, or whatever. In my mind, the type of practices that both Doctorow and Charles Stross are pioneering within their literary field has strong parallels with the concept of the Global Microbrand being championed by Hugh MacLeod. (Coincidentally, it was reading MacLeod’s ‘The Hughtrain’ free e-book distributed via ChangeThis that first exposed me to his ideas.) For all of us, getting our ideas out into the wild and establishing an audience for our ideas is going to be a prerequisite for success in tomorrow’s economy.

Delicious Tags: Reputation Economics | Global Microbrand | Marketing
Technorati Tags: Reputation Economics | Global Microbrand | Marketing

Why Blog? (Manifesto Zero-Six)

Over the last year I set out to teach myself how to blog in a more considered manner than I had attempted previously. I believe that I have made some progress, but I believe I have to pursue this more actively in Zero-Six. This implies that I am somehow going to have to give a greater time commitment than my current hour or two a week. Perhaps once I get my new work laptop and stop handwriting all of my blog posts in PDA Graffiti script on the 07:15 train every morning then the frequency of my publication schedule will increase. Given that the New Year is a time for reflection (I am stretching that one a bit at this stage I know), I have compiled my personal checklist of reasons to put in the effort required.

Blogging helps me to think
Even if I choose to think about relatively unimportant things like typefaces and web services, rather than philosophy, ethics or solving world hunger, the act of writing helps me to clarify my thoughts on many given topics.

Blogging makes me a better writer
The fact that my words can be read by anyone, coupled with the fact that my online writings are now far more permanent, compels me to focus more on the words that I use and the clarity with which I use them. As your blog becomes your Public Permanent Record, it has the upside of giving you sovereignty* and an enhanced reputation. But it can equally create a negative impression if you fail to take sufficient care over what you publish. As with anything else, practice makes perfect. The discipline of writing semi-regularly has already improved the quality of the standard non-blogging material that I write every day in work.

Career Survival
I do believe that blogging, or some iteration if it, is going to be an increasingly important and critical career skill, perhaps even a life skill. Particularly, but not exclusively, if you work in the area of communications – as I do. Reaistically, I am going to have to master this skill eventually, so why not do it now.

Producer versus Consumer
I want to spend more of my time making New Things, as opposed to consuming other people’s content. Today’s online tools and web services facilitate an increasingly active participatory role for all of us as producers of personalised media. Whether it be posting photos onto your Flickr page, your thoughts onto your blog, or whatever more advanced level you decide to take it to. In contrast to the traditional role of passive consumer of media, this seems a more interesting and productive use of my available time and attention.

*To paraphrase Hugh Macleod and his inspiring idea of becoming your own Global Micro-Brand.

Tools 2.0

Seth Godin has written an interesting post where he discusses the availability of tools and the low barriers to entry facilitated by today’s technology. It resonated with me as last week I had a discussion with a taxi driver who enjoyed using Photoshop even though, in his own words “I am not all that good with it”. It does not seem all that long ago since no-one outside of the design sector even knew what Photoshop was.

While I am able to see the point of the “You have a guitar, but that does not make you Jimi Hendrix” argument in Seth’s post, the fact is that the metaphorical playing fields are being levelled as we speak. The key implication to me seems that I have to concentrate on selling what is in my head. That has to be my unique differentiator. As someone else somewhere else will always be catching up with me on whatever craft design skills I have developed, or else leapfrogging those skills with better, smarter tools. I think we all have to run just to stand still and engage in constant learning to compete.

Seth can make us all feel guilty, as we really do not have that any reasons left not to get down to it and write our books now. (Actually my phrasing does him a disservice. Rather than fostering guilt, he is encouraging self-sufficiency and personal excellence.)