Mark McDonald

Disruption is an essential part of your global economy and in fact a theme for this year’s CIO Leadership Forums in Phoenix and London.  So the topic is on the mind of many executives and managers.

There are many books that say you need to ‘disrupt’ your business to remain competitive.  There are almost no books that describe how you create disruption in a clear, concise and step-by-step manner.  Luke Williams’s book Disrupt – think the unthinkable to spark transformation is exactly this type of book.

It’s rare that a book discusses a complex issue, one with such potential for consulting jargon and confusion, and produces a clear, concise and actionable set of advice.  Rather than try to cloud the issue, Williams tackles it head on by giving you the tools and discussion how you think differently and turn that thought into action.  In a way this approach is disruptive in itself and that is a good thing.

Highly recommended as a useful and valuable book that takes the idea of disruption and gives you a way to think through it and put it into practice.  In less than 200 tightly written pages, Williams provides clear and compelling tools that you can use to help identify, classify, and find the opportunities for disruption in your products, services and organization.

Recommended for:

Business managers should read this book to understand how to ask new questions and seek the new answers to drive growth.

Product and Marketing managers should read this book in order to simplify the tools and techniques they use which have become cumbersome and reflective in order to support the burden of market information.

Innovators or those seeking to be more innovative should read this book to pick up a clear set of questions, tools and ideas.  Many may seem similar to what they know, but consider them in this context.

Technology professionals should read this book and apply its advice to their own solutions as well as to IT itself which is undergoing massive disruption.  These tools will help you chart a future course based on future opportunities rather than reinforcing past practice.

Strengths

The book provides a clear and concise focus on the tools and techniques for recognizing disruptive opportunities.  This is a manual that I will carry around and refer to often as actionable things we can do.

The book has solid examples ranging from consumer products through to services and innovative solutions.  Williams describes how leading companies found disruption including P&G, Apple, Disney and others.  The examples are clean, clear and support the storyline in the book.

It’s short and small.  The book itself is more like a large pamphlet than and book. Which is a plus as it easily fits inside your briefcase, can be taken and read on the plane and can be carried around for us in other meetings. This form factor increases the books accessibility via increased portability.

Challenges

The book is written from a marketing and design perspective, which may make it a bit foreign to the traditional business reader.  That is good, because the traditional business manager or reader needs to disrupt his or her own thinking and ideas.

This book is a perfect compliment to “Change by Design” Tim Brown’s discussion of design theory and innovation as the CEO at IDEO.  It is not a consequence and Williams and Brown work in the same industry, and these two books define much of what business leaders should know about design and disruption.

Overall, this book is one of the best I have read in 2011.  It is one that I plan to recommend to executives as a quick and focused way to think differently about their products, services, operations and opportunities.  Rather than being a dry treatise on the need for disruption, or a consultant ease discussion, Williams has created a gem – something that is clear, focused and tight around a topic that is the subject of much debate and discussion.

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Category: Book Review Re-imagine IT Strategic planning Strategy     Tags: 2011 Planning, Book Review, Business Strategy, RE-imagine IT, Strategy, Strategy and Planning

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