Whitney L. Johnson - Disrupt yourself : putting the power of disruptive innovation to work

Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thoughts.

Henry David Thoreau

Y oure trying something new: youve made a lateral move, been promoted, or started a new job. You are confident that you can be successful, but so much is unfamiliar. Its easy to become frustrated. Take a deep breath, and remember that at the beginning of this S-shaped growth curve, progress will be slow.

Very little is habitual at the low end of a learning curve. Considerable effort may seem to yield few results. Mapping new mental territory and creating new neuronal and electrochemical connections take time.

But if a task is not both meaningful and relevant, your brain will have little motivation to learn itand thus to move up the S-curve. Therefore, the first thing you need to ask is, What is it that I am trying to accomplish? Or, in other words: What job needs to be done?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of to hire is to give work to a person in exchange for wages or payment. But hiring can have a much broader definition, extending to every product and service we use. Whenever we buy something, we are hiring that product or service to take care of an unmet need, to do a job. This is an essential part of the outcome-driven innovation process introduced by Anthony UlwickChristensen, who calls it the jobs-to-be-done theory. To develop a new service or bring a new product to market, an innovator applying this theory doesnt focus on a customers age or gender. Instead, she focuses on what problem the customer needs solved, and who or what can be hired to do that job.

Every job that people want done, with few exceptions, has both functional and emotional elements. Take, for example, buying a home. There is an obvious unmet needputting a roof over your head. However, if you buy a larger house than you require for shelter or spend hours planting a garden in the backyard, theres also an emotional job afoot.

Consider your use of social media. Perhaps you, like me, hire Twitter to help you expand your network. JP Rangaswami, chief data officer for Deutsche Bank, described tweets as the knowledge workers pheromones, a means of sending signals to others. I also hire Twitter to prototype my ideas in real time and to learn to think more concisely. Now that LinkedIn has added a publishing platform, I can hire it to help me hone my personal voice via blog posts, in addition to consulting its repository of rsums when I am on the hunt for talent. Because the list of jobs that Linked-In can do for me has expanded, like an all-purpose cleaner, I seem to hire LinkedIn at least once a day.

As a professional investor, I hire an investment to do the functional job of making money. But whether I realize it or not, I am also hiring the investment to do an emotional job for me. To illustrate my point, lets

When you are beginning a new project, you need to figure out what jobsboth functional and emotionalthis new endeavor will do for you. Its best to clarify this either before you switch to a new role or as soon as possible thereafter. As executive coach Pam Fox Rollin shares in her book 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role, Many flameouts can be traced to missteps during [the] first quarter...[F]or the 6075% of leaders that survive into a second year (one third fail within the first year), their effectiveness and trajectory are powerfully affected by choices made in the first year. To make better choices early on, take the time to figure out why youre really making a move.

For a concrete way of thinking about this, I always come back to a lecture given by Steve Kaufman, former CEO of Arrow Electronics, at Harvard Business School in 2010. Like job role changes, corporate mergers are a time of transitionand hence anxiety. Kaufman recounted advice from the former head of Arrows acquisition integration team, Betty Jane Hess: When we make an acquisition, every employee has just three questions: (1) Do I have a job? (2) Who do I report to? And (3) How will I get paid? Until they get answers, nothing else matters. Lets take each in turn: