Play to Your Distinctive Strengths
Each bird must sing with its own throat.
—Henrik Ibsen
Disruptors not only look for unmet needs, they match those needs with their distinctive strengths. A distinctive strength is something that you do well that others within your sphere don’t. Pairing this strength with a need to be met or problem to be solved gives you the momentum necessary to move into hypergrowth, the sweet spot of the S-curve. In this chapter, we’ll review what a distinctive strength is, talk about how to identify yours, match them with unmet needs, and then explore how this pairing allows you to accelerate up the curve.
In nature, it is abundantly clear that playing to distinctive strengths is what provides sustenance and allows an organism to thrive. I am stunned by the incredible diversity that exists within the animal kingdom, for example. Each organism has evolved to exploit a specific niche or adapt to a different climate.
Sometimes the strength is specific and obvious. Think about the cuddly little koala, sleeping up to twenty hours a day. One might have serious doubts about its ability to survive. However, the koala can do something that almost no other animal can: it uses eucalyptus leaves, which have minimal nutritional and caloric value, as a food source.
Sometimes the strength will be less obvious. Consider Charles Darwin’s finches, a subject you may vaguely remember from high school biology class. When Darwin first encountered these birds on the Galapagos Islands, he gathered numerous specimens, not quite realizing what he had discovered. Upon his return, he presented these specimens to the famous English ornithologist John Gould for identification. Gould’s analysis revealed that the specimens Darwin had submitted were in fact highly variable. What at first glance were all just “finches” turned out to be twelve different species. There were similarities, but evolution had allowed each to develop a distinctive strength. Each species had a novel beak structure that allowed it to exploit a specific food resource. Some evolved to eat seeds, others fruit, others insects, and others grubs. In business terms, they all had similar core competencies (feathers, wings, feet, beak), but it was a distinctive, seemingly subtle strength—the type of beak—that allowed the finches to effectively compete for a specific type of food.
Identify What You Do Well
What are you good at? Do you have an obvious advantage like the koala, or will you need to do a little hunting like Darwin’s finches? The following list of questions is not exhaustive, but it will get you started:
1. What skills have helped you survive? Like the finches whose beaks are adapted for the birds’ survival, you have skills you’ve developed out of necessity.
Scott Edinger is a highly successful consultant and CEO advisor—a role he could not have conceived of in his youth. He never knew his father, grew up broke and living in a trailer park, and at age nine, his mother left and he was adopted into less than ideal circumstances. Scott learned to survive his challenging childhood by becoming an expert in communication, conflict resolution, attunement to others, and raw persuasion. In college he put the paint and polish on his communication skills, placing in the top five in over a hundred debate tournaments, and earning bronze medals at the national championships, while completing a bachelor of science in communication and rhetoric.
Fast forward: prior to starting his own consulting firm, Edinger was an Executive Vice President of Sales, and has been globally ranked #2 in sales in a division of a Fortune 500 company. He is the author of two books and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, for which he wrote a popular and often-quoted magazine article, “How to Make Yourself Indispensable.” As a consultant, he has repeatedly helped Fortune 500 companies turn around underperforming divisions by focusing on a critical survival skill in business—how to sell.
What unique skills have you developed to survive and then applied within your career to thrive?
2. What makes you feel strong? Marcus Buckingham, the author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, explains: “Our strengths . . . clamor for attention in the most basic way: using them makes you feel strong. Take note of the times when you feel invigorated, inquisitive, successful . . . these moments are clues to what your strengths are.”1 If you identify and focus on what makes you feel strong, you can also expect to be happier, which, according to researchers, “leads to more flexible and adaptive thinking and to enhanced innovative ability and problem solving in a wide range of circumstances.”2
Do you feel strong when you’re teaching or learning, when you’re buying or selling, when you’re leading a team or creating on your own?
3. What exasperates you about others? When I wrote about this topic for Harvard Business Review, reader Alana Cates pointed out another way of identifying our hidden strengths: “When are you exasperated? The frustration of genius is in believing that if it is easy for you, it must be easy for everyone else.”3 Whether you are an engineer, musician, scientist, or professor struggling to manage the work of subordinates or peers, it may not be that they’re deficient, just that you’re unusually skilled.
Where does your “genius” emerge?
4. What made you different, even an oddball, as a child? As children we do what we love to do—even if that makes us an oddity. When you look back to childhood passions, you are likely to discover an innate talent.
In elementary school, Candice Brown Elliott’s classmates teasingly called her “Encyclopedia Brown” after the character in the children’s books. She recounts, “All the kids thought I was the smartest kid in school, but most of my teachers were deeply frustrated with me, because I got only average grades. I was labeled an underachiever.” She found schoolwork boring, so she didn’t pay attention. Instead, she says, “I daydreamed of having animated conversations with famous people like Madame Curie or Benjamin Franklin. I daydreamed about building the first true Artificial Intelligence (AI) that would reside in my bedroom closet. I daydreamed about how to build floating cities, great inventions, and new forms of art.”
High school was a similar experience; Elliott was reading two or three novels a week, but she flunked English class because she didn’t want to participate in dissecting literature that was “trashy and juvenile.” The second semester she was placed in “Survival English,” the school mistakenly taking her failing grade as evidence that she couldn’t read.
Despite not doing her schoolwork, Elliott continued to ace her exams and was muddling through with a C average. “Senior year, one instructor cornered me in the hallway angrily demanding to know why I never did the work. I replied, ‘It interferes with my studies.’ Thinking that I was being a smart-aleck kid, he angrily asked what I was studying . . . so I told him. He was dumbfounded that I was self-studying at an advanced university level, using my father’s university textbooks, among others. He then challenged me and said, ‘I want you to take my third semester Chem AP class.’ To which I objected, ‘But I haven’t taken the first two semesters.’ He overcame my objection by informing me that the third semester was by invitation only, would have only five students, and we each had to do only one semester project, of our own choosing. That final semester I had the same teacher for both Chem AP and English.” Elliott was on the honor roll that final semester, earning straight As.
Four decades later, Candice Brown Elliott holds ninety U.S.-issued patents. Her most famous invention, PenTile, color flat-panel display architecture, is shipping in hundreds of millions of smartphones, tablets, notebook PCs, and high-resolution televisions. She founded a venture-backed company to develop this technology, and later sold it to Samsung. She says, “If you see me at my desk, you’ll likely catch me daydreaming still.”
As a child, Elliott’s daydreaming was considered odd by her classmates and tremendously frustrating by her teachers. As an adult, her daydreaming, autodidactic approach is her superpower.
Is there something that made you peculiar when you were young? Could it be your superpower?
5. What compliments do you shrug off? All too frequently, we are oblivious to our own strengths. The trouble with certain strengths is that you do them so reflexively well they can be easy to overlook.
Perhaps you’ve had an experience similar to that of Neil Reay, managing director at Cancer Treatment Centers of America. When he asked for recommendations on his LinkedIn profile, he discovered, “Several things that others said about my strengths were not the things I was using as ‘Core Skills’ in my own profile, but were valuable to those around me.”4
Keep an eye out for those compliments you habitually dismiss not because you are being coy, but because this “thing” feels as natural as breathing. It may even be you’ve heard a compliment so many times, you are sick of it! Why can’t people praise you for the thing that you’ve worked really, really hard to do well?
A great example is Viniece Jennings, a senior fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program. After taking Gallup’s StrengthsFinder survey, she discovered that she was socially outgoing, reliable, genuine, and authentic. She was happy to learn that she was considered emotionally intelligent, but her type A alter ego was disappointed that qualities such as strategic, analytical, or focused weren’t in her lineup. Wondering if the survey was somehow incomplete, she asked friends and colleagues about the results. They responded, “Yep, that’s you” or, “That quality really sets you apart.” Because she has a PhD in environmental science and works as a research scientist, Jennings shares, “I expected to be mechanically analytical, inquisitive about everything environmental, and perhaps walking around with a statistics book.”
Given the seeming disconnect between her perceived strengths and the test results, Jennings looked to her past for proof of her supposed emotional intelligence. She’d grown up in Athens, Georgia, where there are a lot of landfills. After starting college in Delaware, she discovered that trash from Delaware was frequently routed to Georgia. She says, “On campus, every time I saw someone waste something I was sick inside because I knew it might be shipped to my hometown.” That’s when she wrote a mini-grant and managed a campus-wide recycling program in her spare time. A college friend recently sent her a picture of the new recycling bins at her alma mater, with the text “all because of you.” Remembering the impact of this experience, Jennings could see just how powerful and important her empathic strengths are, and that these strengths are a distinctive advantage within her chosen field of environmental science.
The tendency to deflect compliments around what we do reflexively well is understandable, perhaps even justifiable, but over the course of a career (or the life of a company), it will leave us trading at a discount to what we are really worth. Nineteenth-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Don’t assume that just because something comes easily or seems obvious to you, it’s not rare and valuable to someone else.
What compliments do you repeatedly dismiss?
6. What are your hard-won skills? These proficiencies aren’t necessarily your best skills, but typically they carry a price tag of sweat and possibly tears, and they speak volumes about you. These are the skills you point to when someone asks, “What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” While I was at Merrill Lynch, a résumé came across my desk for a fellow straight out of undergrad named Rob Larson. I liked that he’d majored in math, but what made him an especially attractive candidate for investment banking was that he’d earned money for college as a cowhand. We interviewed him; Goldman Sachs hired him. In a competitive field of candidates, his résumé stood out, not because herding cattle was a requisite skill for the job, but because he was no stranger to hard work.
Hard-won skills not only signal an ability to stick with a difficult task, they are often “pay-to-play” skills, a hurdle you have to jump to be able to do the job, and are thus vital at the outset of a career or upon reentry to the workforce after an extended leave of absence. Early in my professional life, it was apparent that if I wanted to play in the Wall Street sandbox, I had to pay by learning financial analysis, coursework not covered in my liberal arts curriculum. In almost every industry there are pay-to-play skills. When you muscle your way to acquiring these, they’ll give you the heft you need to scale existing curves and jump to new ones.
What skills have you worked really hard to obtain?
Identify Your Distinctive Strengths
Once you’ve identified your underlying assets or your core strengths, you also need to spot your distinctive strengths, defined as what you do well that others in your sphere don’t, in order to set your hand- and footholds along the curve.
Here’s an example: in the film The Hundred-Foot Journey, the Kadam family has sought asylum in Europe due to election disputes in Mumbai, India. After an initial stay in England, they make their way to a small village in France on the border of Switzerland. The father purchases an abandoned restaurant across the street—a hundred feet away—from an upscale French restaurant. Much of the humor in the film is about the rivalry between the two restaurateurs.
What is interesting from the perspective of disruption is following the learning curve of Hassan, the second-oldest son. He is a talented chef whose specialty is, not surprisingly, Indian cooking. But to gain stature as a chef, Hassan must master the French tradition. Only once he’s mastered the pay-to-play skill of French cuisine can he infuse it with Indian spices and flavors. This French–Indian fusion is his distinctive strength (what he does well that others within his sphere don’t) and wins him the industry’s coveted Michelin star.
For a real-life example, consider the story of industrial designer Adam Richardson. At age six, he was sketching designs for cars; by age nine, he was surveying neighbors about their driving habits and measuring their car interiors. Thirty years ago, this was a unique strength—no one was approaching design through the lens of research. When Richardson graduated from college, because he hadn’t yet keyed in on this strength, he took a fairly traditional industrial designer job at Sun Microsystems. He quickly realized that most of his design industry colleagues were brilliantly creative but not particularly attuned to customers’ needs. He, by contrast, wasn’t the strongest stylist but was enthralled with market research and good at capturing it.
“I’m a good listener, and I like finding patterns in chaotic qualitative data,” he explains. He looked for a graduate program to help him hone those skills, but because popular ones like that at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Stanford Design Program didn’t exist then, he ended up cobbling together a course for himself via the University of Chicago’s self-directed Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. Once Richardson was willing to veer from the traditional industrial design path to study anthropology, ethnography, sociology, cultural theory, and art history, he was able to make the leap to a dream job at design consultancy Frog. He is now a financial services disruptor at Financial Engines.5
Lieutenant Joseph “DuckDuck” Geeseman planned on teaching neuroscience at the college level, but when he graduated the job market was abysmal. So he started looking for an unmet need outside of academia. He applied to Facebook and Google (to possibly work with their data algorithms), to Hershey’s and Kraft (to be a food scientist), and to casino game companies (to make algorithms and stimuli that would keep people playing longer). Because his mother was an army officer he also applied to the military.
It turns out the military was interested in his PhD in neuroscience; the United States Navy has more than thirty active duty aerospace psychologists. Now that he has obtained the pay-to-play skill of basic flight training, Lt. Geeseman’s expertise in neuroscience and psychology is a distinctive strength as he designs aircraft and pilot interfaces. And he gets to do more science and research than he could have imagined.
Match Your Strengths with Unmet Needs
Once you have a clear picture of your one-of-a-kind skills, you can match those skills to unmet needs. Consider jobs where you’d be the wild-card candidate. Or look for ways to combine your passions. Look at problems that the organization needs solved, and ask yourself: Can I fix that?
When Jayne Juvan, a partner at the law firm Roetzel & Andress in Cleveland, Ohio, started using social media, very, very few lawyers used these tools. Because her profession is so conservative, many of the attorneys she interacted with didn’t see the opportunity. After only a few months of blogging, Crain’s Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media by lawyers. In her first year of practice, she landed a client via social media. That was a game changer, because her colleagues began to see her as an owner, not just an employee.
When she started to land wins, it became harder to navigate her profession because the legal industry was quite competitive. But, as she shares, “I didn’t back off, because I now knew how powerful social media was.” Good thing. When she was a third- and fourth-year associate, in 2007 to 2008, the economy collapsed. Her class experienced deep layoffs across the industry, which she sidestepped, in part because of her social media efforts. Most of the accolades she has received can be traced to social media. When she was considered for promotion to partner, the fact that she was being followed by prominent professionals on Twitter bolstered her case in a major way, as the CEO saw the potential of these relationships.
According to Catalyst, only 20 percent of partners in law firms are women, and only 16 percent of them have $500,000 worth of business or more.6 Jayne Juvan made partner at age thirty-two, and at thirty-four, her billing reports placed her in the small percentage of women with $500,000-plus of business. Once Juvan had acquired the basic competencies involved in practicing law, social media became her distinctive strength, propelling her into the partnership ranks at her law firm.
Greg Sorensen, CEO of Siemens Healthcare North America, was able to solve a problem for both Siemens and himself. As a former professor of radiology and health sciences IT at Harvard Medical School, Sorensen is highly credentialed. If Sorensen had raised his hand for a CEO role, however, it is unlikely he would have been a serious contender. But after Siemens Healthcare North America spent a year trying to fill the CEO position with a traditional sales candidate, one of the division CEOs, Tom Miller, and the CEO of the Managing Board, Hermann Requardt, came up with the crazy idea to hire Sorensen: someone who could comfortably converse with CEOs of hospitals and department chairs at major medical schools, speak knowledgeably to the Wall Street Journal, and influence the conversation in health-care reform. Because his unique portfolio of skills met the company’s need, Siemens was finally able to fill a critical position, and Sorensen had the opportunity to embark on a new endeavor.
Say Hello to the Low End of the Curve
Now that you’ve got a handle on your distinctive strengths and have found an unmet need, it’s time to disrupt, right? Unfortunately, at the low end of the curve, you’re so overwhelmed by new tasks, new people, and new information that finding the right unmet need to fit your unique confluence of skills can be very difficult. It’s tough to discern between something that is difficult to accomplish and something that is just the wrong fit.
Tereza Nemessanyi (pronounced Nem u SHAWN e) came to Microsoft from a background of strategy consulting and start-ups with the mandate to rethink how the tech giant engages with start-ups in New York City. She dove into the role with guns blazing, ready to shake things up and confident that her past experience and expertise would be taken at face value. What she found was an organizational structure that was difficult to understand and navigate successfully at the low end of her learning curve—she says it was “like I was speaking French and they were speaking Uzbek.” She couldn’t seem to get anything done.
Finally Nemessanyi’s boss assigned her to some projects where she could quickly generate revenue and rack up points internally. She leveraged those projects superbly, and gained the necessary credibility and buy-in to circle back to her original mandate of working with start-ups.
In 2014, Nemessanyi was able to partner with Suzanne Lee, founder and CEO of Biocouture, a cutting-edge biofabrication company and consultancy, to help sponsor Biofabricate, the first-ever conference organized around the concept of growing live biological materials as an input to manufacture. It was hugely successful; the O’Reilly Radar blog wrote that it “changed their view of the future.”7 Nemessanyi could have thrown in the towel and left Microsoft when she felt stalled at the low end of her new learning curve, but because she worked through the initial phase of learning and achieving pay-to-play milestones, she was able to build credibility, gaining access to the resources she needed to fulfill Microsoft’s unmet needs.
Sometimes moving up the curve just takes patience. In 2004, Lauren Zalaznick had arrived at the cable network Bravo as a result of the NBC acquisition of Universal. The network was looking for a show that would appeal to “affluencers”—well-educated, influential, and affluent viewers. Project Runway, a show about aspiring fashion designers, was that show. Bravo chose the airdate carefully. December 1 at 10 p.m. It had a strong lead-in and would air the week after Thanksgiving, when main networks were airing reruns. The network promoted the show heavily. It did everything right. But the ratings were bad. Only two out of a thousand people were watching, when the projection was twenty. The ratings were so bad, the team thought Nielsen had made a mistake. Both the show and Zalaznick’s job were on the line. Second-week ratings weren’t any better. The third week, ratings were actually lower.
So Zalaznick asked, what can we learn? Bravo had never had original programming in the 10 p.m. time slot, so maybe viewers weren’t used to looking for content there. Maybe the massive ad campaign of a few million dollars was paltry compared with those of the major networks. Maybe competitive reality shows weren’t a thing, and neither was fashion.
But instead of pulling back, Bravo doubled down. Instead of airing shows that it knew could get ratings, the network kept airing Project Runway. The idea of binge watching hadn’t yet taken hold, but marathoning on cable had, so Bravo aired the first three episodes as often as possible. By January, the ratings had quadrupled. We know the rest. It was the first competitive reality show on cable to win an Emmy, beating the major networks. It was in the vanguard of reality television, and legitimized creative competition on TV. The show wasn’t a bomb; Zalaznick and her team were simply at the low end of the curve.8
Sometimes you are on the wrong curve. You may see a huge opportunity, or hope to be hired to do a job, but before taking the job or starting that business, make sure that you have the strengths that meet those needs. If there isn’t a match, it will be tough to drive toward competence. Best-selling author Augusten Burroughs wanted to be an actor as a child, and was confident he would be “one of the greatest actors of the day, possibly the greatest.” When he finally saw himself on videotape, “it was a stunning revelation. My knowledge that I was giving an incredible performance in no way aligned with what I saw. I sucked worse than anything has ever sucked in the history of suckage.”9 Faced with the truth that he was not an actor, he wondered, what now? Burroughs eventually made his way toward writing. Because he writes well, he was able to do the job that he had hoped to do as an actor: connect with people. He then explains, “When I chose writing over acting, I didn’t give up on a dream, I gave up on my choice of vehicle used to deliver the dream. Dreams are not like spleens, there’s not just one per person.” Like Burroughs, you may find that your distinctive strengths do not align with the learning curve you are hoping to scale. In which case, you’ll want to jump to a curve that is a better fit.
There is no shortage of jobs-to-be-done and problems to be solved. But there’s only one of you. The right problems are those that you somehow feel called to solve, and are capable of solving, because of your expertise and accumulated life experience. As you consider making the leap to a new learning curve, examine the assets you’ve acquired, and focus on what you can do that others cannot. Then look for a job that no one else is doing. Just as Darwin’s finches developed unique beaks to effectively get access to food, when you recognize and apply your distinctive strengths, you’ll quickly move up the pecking order of your personal curve of learning.