Simone Bhan Ahuja - Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business---Before the Competition Does

Praise for Disrupt-It-Yourself

Disruption may be inevitable, but it doesnt need to be destructive. This practical, masterful approach guides large organizations to be agile by building a safe place for innovative ideas, staying close to customers and supporting the intrapreneurs who create breakthrough solutions.

Asheesh Saksena, chief strategic growth officer, Best Buy

Based on new research and practical experience, this highly readable guide shows leaders how to identify and engage the undercover innovators inside organizations to create real value for customers. This is a significant contribution to innovation ideation and executionone you can put into practice immediately.

Julie Guggemos, senior vice president, product design and development, Target

Disrupt-It-Yourself engages leaders to create and unleash communities of innovation as a powerful antidote to the business as usual ways of working that hold organizations back from sustainable growth. An essential read for forward-looking leaders and organizations.

Tom Beauregard, executive vice president and chief innovation officer, UnitedHealth Group

Ahuja shows managers and leaders how to nurture and support innovators on the inside, giving them a safe space for bold innovation, even in highly regulated industries. Disrupt-It-Yourself is sure to become the new mantra for innovative organizations everywhere!

Stephanie Hammes-Betti, senior vice president, Innovation Design, US Bank

Maintaining a startup culture in large organizations is as paramount to success as nurturing the core business. Disrupt-It-Yourself presents a playbook to guide large firms to create a balance of bothfreedom and agility along with guidance and guardrailsso innovation can flourish with the discipline it needs to become sustainable. Dont miss out on this urgent and timely guide.

Yazdi Bagli, senior vice president, Global Business Services, Walmart

Disrupt-It-Yourself gives an eye-opening overview and insightful guidance on how to enable intrapreneurship, leveraging new ways for collaboration and enabling creativity that lead to meaningful and sustainable innovation.

Eric Quint, vice president and chief design officer, 3M Company

Meaningful solutions to societys most pressing problems come from unprecedented sourcesboth technological and human. Disrupt-It-Yourself will guide you to leverage the undercover intrapreneurs within your organizationand the right partners on the outsideto create new markets that build a better future for us all.

Salim Ismail, ExO Works founder and chairman and XPrize board member

Democratized technology and connected communities are bringing forward a new crop of Disrupt-It-Yourself innovators. The principles outlined by Ahuja in this prescient guide remind us that simple but powerful tools, along with human ingenuity, make massive growth and scalable transformation possible for organizations of any size.

Shashank Samant, president and CEO, GlobalLogic

Change is happening at such a pace that many organizations will simply not survive in the long run. That is, unless they follow this essential guide for leading fast and focused innovation. A must-read.

Greg McKeown, author of the New York Times bestseller Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Ahuja gets it right. Disrupt-It-Yourself proves that shifting to an asset-based mindset and using fewer resources can spur creativity, autonomy, and growth. The principles outlined in this book offer a compelling way for companies founded in the twentieth century to remain relevant in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Srinivas Prasad, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus, Bangalore

Simone provides readers with the tools to move from being idea killers to creators of killer ideas. This is a must-read for those looking to become global intrapreneurs and those who want to foster more intrapreneur-driven innovation in their organizations.

Hans Balmaekers, chief at Innov8rs.co

2019 by Simone Ahuja

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Unless otherwise noted, all quotes come from the authors personal interviews and are used with permission.

Epub Edition December 2018 9781595540720

ISBN 978-1-5955-4072-0 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-5955-4049-2 (HC)

ISBN 978-1-4002-1098-5 (IE)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957776

Printed in the United States of America

19 20 21 22 23 LSC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parentsthe original disrupters

For our son, Niko, a next-generation disrupter

And for my partner, Hari, who helps all of us

keep a foot on the ground, and without whom

this book would not have been possible.

Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

Contents

Disrupt yourself has become as routine in business parlance as maximize shareholder value. They are phrases that roll off the tongue so readily and so often that one might be lulled into a false belief that their fulfillment is both easy to achieve and pervasive in companies today. In reality, they are some of the most challenging and important tasks at hand. And accomplishing them is becoming more difficult every day as the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, upending the status quo and paving the way for new, disruptive challenger products, services, and business models, which often appear with lightning speed.

The average life span of an S&P 500 company has decreased to about fifteen years, down from sixty-seven years in the 1920s, and the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies from the class of 1955 are no longer on the list. Companies and brands that were once part of our daily vernacularCircuit City, Blockbuster, and Oldsmobilehave been replaced by companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Tesla. Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb have created entire new industries seemingly overnight, and for the successful companies, the gestation period from startup to multibillion market capitalization continues to shrink dramatically.

The year 2018 marked Stanley Black & Deckers 175th anniversary. We are a manufacturer that was formed in the wake of the first Industrial Revolution and has continued to innovate in order to stay relevant during the second and third. We are now in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, which is creating exciting and daunting challenges and opportunities for us and all legacy industrial companies. This time around it is different, in the sense that the speed of change has accelerated to a point at which it is impossibleor will soon become sofor any one institution to be able to absorb the change. Achieving longevity and sustainable success in this era requires new collaborative leadership models, new skills, and new cultural attributes. The degree of difficulty has never been so steep and the stakes are sky-high. I envision a near future where the difference between business leaders who understand and actualize this and those who dont will be the defining factor in the sustainability of legacy companies.