This book is written for business leaders by an innovation leader who understands the pressures of delivering on new growth. These pressures have intensified in the face of massive shifts in digital technologies, platforms, products, services, and business models. Like most of you, I did not have the time to “deep-dive” into the innovation literature to find all of the answers I needed. Nevertheless, digital transformation does not care. The changes it brings are disruptive. It has Newton’s first law of physics on its side. The law of gross tonnage: The heavier vessel always has the right-of-way.
For a business leader looking to apply knowledge from the literature on digital transformation and disruptive innovation, it takes a tremendous amount of time to dedicate to finding, sorting, sifting, reading, and analyzing. This is not helped by the “[m]any researchers, writers, and consultants who use ‘disruptive innovation’ to describe any situation in which an industry is shaken up and previously successful incumbents stumble. But that’s much too broad a usage” (Christensen et al. 2015). So, I did the work of synthesizing past research to demonstrate a pattern of six disrupters, I coined “Pattern of Disruptions”. These disrupters are a part of a larger theory and model, which I detail in Chapter One.
I reread many of the latest leading innovation books, articles, research studies, business cases, and industry reports on disruptive innovation, digital transformation, and digital disruption. I found the literature was insightful, but incomplete and vastly disjointed. You will find that I quote industry experts from these fields: disruptive innovation, digital transformation, business, strategy, and technology because I want readers to understand my perspectives do not exist in a vacuum. They are reinforced and shared across a community of leaders. There are entire books written on the chapters in this book. I did not attempt to capture all of the works that have been published on disruptive innovation and digital transformation. I extracted only the contextual meanings or significance from leading works. I took everything and viewed it through the lens of my 20-year career in business, innovation leadership, new product development, strategy, and product line (with P&L) management.
My passions for business, innovation, and strategy compelled me to write this book. I hope you find value in my methodologies, my new theory and model on disruptive innovation, and my synthesis of decades of research to equip business leaders with answers for the 21st-century. I hope they ignite the new growth engines of disruptive innovation and digital transformation in your organizations. Thomas M. Siebel, groundbreaking technology and business leader, has this advice in his book, Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction: “In management, I find one of the most important skills is pattern recognition: the ability to sort through complexity to find basic truths you recognize from other situations” (2019). This book is the results of my work to identify patterns, sort through complexities, and reveal new insights into disruptive innovation and digital transformation. As the saying jokingly goes: I took one for the team.