Chapter 11
Career View: Disrupt Yourself
Chance favors the prepared mind. —Louis Pasteur, inventor You have now completed the hard work of building the disruptor’s playbook, which will position your company for Goliath’s Revenge. Enough about the company. Let’s talk about you and your career: specifically, how you can prioritize the roles you should pursue, the skills you should develop, and the plan you should execute to maximize your professional impact in this confusing time of digital disruption. Roles change, people adjust. A century ago, farmers felt great about their chosen career, with one out of every three people working in agriculture. Today it is just one in a hundred. However, entirely new roles, such as automation engineer, agronomist, and biotech researcher, have been created that make that 1% still farming more and more productive. Farming today looks nothing like it did a century ago. We feed many more people with a comparatively tiny workforce. Genetically modified seeds, robotic farming equipment, and AI-based crop planning have become the norm. Farmers sit in front of sophisticated computer interfaces to remotely control tractors based on sensor data and drone video. Algorithms decide where to plant what seed, and when to harvest the bounty in a way that maximizes yield and keeps the soil fertile. This same story is playing out in every industry, with existing career paths being reshaped and new roles emerging. As philosopher Eric Hoffer said, “In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” If you are reading this book, our bet is that you are a learner, so it is time to learn how to put Goliath’s Revenge to work for your career. This means understanding your professional readiness as measured against the six rules, balancing your triple bottom line, writing your statement of purpose, and defining your personal action plan to deliver on your long-term goals. Pull out the career self-assessment grids that you completed at the end of Chapters 4 through 9 and fill in your overall assessment by rule on your copy of Figure 11.1. Again, if you completed the self-assessments online at www.goliathsrevenge.com, your career readiness summary will be produced automatically. Figure 11.1 Career Readiness Summary. Don’t be discouraged if your version of Figure 11.1 has more white space and smaller bars than the example shown here. You may be at an earlier stage in your career than that of the fictional employee in the example or have deep experience in a few rules but none in others. That is okay. Go back and look at your source grids again. Reacquaint yourself with the specific aspects of the rules for which your capabilities are highly developed versus those for which you are just getting started. Interpreting those gaps correctly depends on your current level in your company. If you are a CEO or senior executive, these grids are unforgiving. Recognize that your white space is going to be amplified throughout your company. The implications of your capability gaps vary dramatically by rule. The “what” and “why” rules are nonnegotiable. Those are Rule 1 (Deliver step-change customer outcomes) and Rule 6 (Reframe your purpose), respectively. As a senior leader, it is your job to define the big, hairy, audacious goals that your company is in service to and help every one of your employees understand why those goals matter. So, if you are anywhere below advanced capability on those rules, building your expertise there is job one. Of the remaining “how” rules, make Rule 5 (Value talent over technology) the next highest priority in your professional development plan. As we covered in Chapter 9, the more tightly aligned your personal statement of purpose is with your company’s, the more powerful a talent magnet you will be. In particular, focusing your professional life around a clear triple bottom line—more on that in a moment—will resonate with the millennial and Gen Z employees that you will be working to recruit, develop, and motivate. If you have capability gaps for Rules 2 through 4, consider surrounding yourself with peers and next-level managers that already have spikes in those capabilities. For Rule 2 (Pursue Big I and Little I innovation), your primary role is instilling a culture of innovation and providing the air cover that gives your team the confidence to take risk, fail fast, and iterate toward success over time. For Rule 3 (Use your data as currency), you are most likely to have a technical team and outside partners that deliver the data integration, analytic, and machine learning expertise required. Your role will be ensuring that investments levels are sufficient and new capabilities are built rapidly enough to establish your company’s algorithmic advantage. In parallel, get educated on the state of the art in machine and deep learning so that you can recognize great when you see it. Finally, for Rule 4 (Accelerate through innovation networks), be sure to set the tone that NIH and WKE attitudes are career limiting going forward. Beyond that, you have almost certainly developed a sizable peer network on your path to becoming a senior executive. Continue to extend that network into the VC and startup realms to keep your finger on the pulse of over-the-horizon disruptive innovations that your team may not see coming. Middle management is where the battle for greatness is won or lost. Leaders with strong T-shaped capability profiles and deep institutional knowledge tend to reside at this layer of the organizational chart. This is also where legacy mindsets, cultures, and metrics can sometimes stifle even the most exciting innovation opportunities. As a middle manager, focus your professional development on the “how” aspects of the new rules: that is, Rules 2 through 5. You are the last line of defense against your company failing to execute fast enough to achieve Goliath’s Revenge. While you have influence on how your company prioritizes its step-change customer outcomes in Rule 1 and input to your company’s reframed purpose in Rule 6, the final decisions likely come from your boss or your boss’s boss. For Rule 2, play to your strength. As you saw in Chapter 5, Big I and Little I innovations are equally valuable to your company’s long-term success. So if you are gifted at driving the sustaining innovation that makes existing offers, experiences, and operations better, focus on leading Little I teams. On the other hand, if you wake up every day looking for the next high-risk/big-payoff breakthrough, then seek out opportunities to sponsor Big I initiatives, to mentor those teams, or to step out of your current role to act as a venture general manager for a disruptive innovation. At a minimum, get educated on innovation tools (such as design thinking) and new business-building methods (such as lean startup). Rule 3 may well represent a mindset shift if you do not come from a data background. Build up your statistics and analytics skills through online and classroom-based executive education programs. While you may not be the one crunching data or building models, you need to appreciate how data and algorithms can automate routine processes for near-term profit improvement while acting as springboards for future disruptive innovations. For Rule 4, build up your experience with external innovation networks by committing your organization to running small experiments on open innovation platforms (such as Topcoder or Kaggle). Consider becoming an expert yourself on those platforms by participating in challenges that fall within your specific expertise. As with senior executives, continue to broaden your professional network to include venture capitalists, startups, business incubators, and research universities that you think might impact your business over time. If you are a technologist, consider becoming more of a solution finder than an inventor, as the former role will be in ascendency once your company fully embraces open innovation. For Rule 5, if you have a capability gap, then time is of the essence. You will be teaching the frontline managers how to source, recruit, develop, motivate, and retain talent over time. Investing personal time in preemptive skill development is always a good bet. It is like buying an option on your own stock. Finally, think through how to continually evolve the human-machine balance across your teams. Translating the “what” into the “how” is a moving target given the rapid progress in what AI and robotics are capable of. Stay nimble here. Both authors of this book have kids that are recent college grads and working in their first or second jobs. So we have a good appreciation of the level of apprehension and uncertainty involved in planning a career that is sure to span multiple waves of digital disruption. If you are just starting your career and have gotten this far in a business book, congratulations on thinking beyond your current role. As with the power of compounding in personal investing, any extra effort you apply now in expanding your skill set has the potential for big payoffs later. Each of the six rules provides an opportunity for this extra credit learning and accelerated professional development. For Rule 1, take the time to internalize the stairway to value and buyer persona–based outcomes in Chapter 4. Regardless of your current role, if the opportunity presents itself to be part of customer- or partner-facing market-validation initiatives, jump at the chance. Those present the opportunity for you to build your own view around unmet customer needs and the disruptive innovation initiatives that could deliver on them. Overnight, you will be thinking about growth strategy in a way that employees with double your tenure are not yet able to. For Rule 2, get involved with hackathons or innovation challenges, even if you do not have a technical background. The tools of data analytics and coding are getting so good that anyone can contribute to these teams. Seek out experiences in both Little I incremental improvement efforts and Big I disruptive innovation ventures. You might think that Big I is sexier and represents a better way to move your career ahead. Don’t be that naïve. Established companies place massive value on delivering on their current-year financial goals, and most cannot get there without a steady stream of Little I successes. If you have entrepreneurial experience from your college days, make sure that your boss, mentor, and human resources representative knows about it to increase your odds of being selected for a Big I initiative. For Rule 3, if you already have a strong statistics or data science background, you are ahead of the game and should pursue roles that leverage analytics and machine learning. If you have not developed these skills, invest your personal time now to gain at least a foundational understanding through online learning platforms (such as Coursera and Udacity). For Rule 4, your recent academic pursuits actually give you a leg up. Keep in touch with professors doing interesting research and classmates headed to other innovative companies. By definition, you have a fresh network, so don’t let it go stale. Continue to seek out opportunities to interact with people outside your company who are working on Big I and Little I initiatives. You never know when there will be an intersection between what they are working on and a new project you are asked to contribute to. Building partner networks and ecosystems is as much a mindset as it is a process. The more you can build this capability, the more valuable you will become to both current and prospective employers. For Rule 5, you carry no baggage from a nondigital world. Use this perspective to look ahead and anticipate the roles that will be needed and that will excite you. In Chapter 8, we prioritized some for you to consider: product incubation managers, behavioral scientists, journey mappers, business modelers, solution finders, and emerging-technology specialists. If one or more of those strike a chord with you, then seek out people already in those jobs at your company, buy them lunch, and understand what those roles really entail. Also, balance your T capability profile. If you are on a business track, think about accumulating more technology, data, and design skills. If you are on a technology track, build your competencies in product management and business modeling. This does not mean you should be a jack of all trades, master of none. By all means, develop deep expertise in an area that you could be famous for someday, but be well rounded too so that you can react quickly to the inevitable shifts that are coming your way. For Rule 6, it is never too early to draft your personal statement of purpose (which we will cover later in this chapter). Chances are, you are still forming your views on the world and the kind of challenges that excite you. However, the old saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, then all roads will lead you there” definitely applies. In a company context, the triple bottom line means balancing social, environmental, and financial measures of success. Here is the career version. See Figure 11.2 for a graphical representation of how you might think about balancing lifetime earnings, lifetime fulfillment, and social impact in each decade of your life. Figure 11.2 Growing Your Triple Bottom Line. This is about living a three-dimensional life. When you talk to people at a later stage of life who have enjoyed remarkable achievements in just one of those dimensions, they tend to have less satisfaction than people who have succeeded on at least two, and possibly all three. Conversely, people who try to make great leaps on all three dimensions in any given decade of their lives suffer from the high-stress situation of spreading themselves too thin. Let’s take an example—we will call her Joan. As depicted in the triangles of Figure 11.2, Joan chose to live her life as a series of majors and minors across the three dimensions of the triple bottom line. During the college and early career years of her twenties, Joan majored in social impact and ate a lot of microwaved ramen noodles with an egg added for cheap protein. Joan’s thirties delivered a big jump in earnings as she joined a prestigious consulting firm; took on the tough tasks of an associate, then engagement manager; and generally hit her professional stride. Now a partner, Joan’s forties and fifties delivered big leaps in both earnings and fulfillment. Joan became increasingly motivated by how her consulting practice helped accelerate the careers of the executives she advised. She lived vicariously through their successes, as the best outside advisors tend to do. In her personal life, Joan prioritized her time to leave a lasting, positive impact on those she touched. As she looks out toward her sixties and seventies, Joan is planning an explicit rebalancing away from incremental earnings and toward big leaps in both fulfillment and social impact. Now, your life will take a different path than the one shown here. Figure 11.2 is just an example of how to think about staging your lifetime achievements across these three dimensions. To help you plot your own triangles back to your twenties and create a plan out to your seventies, let’s go deeper into what each of these triple bottom line axes mean. Now, you might be thinking, “Why put money first of the three dimensions?” The simple reality is that it drives human behavior more than anything else. Like it or not, money is the most universal measuring stick of professional accomplishments. It is also a means to the end of buying the goods and services needed to improve our lives and grow our families. Four reasons that money matters follow. Let’s face it—most advances in society have come about through capitalism. Individuals undertake education, entrepreneurs launch businesses, and investors take risks hoping to grow their wealth over time. Without this economic incentive system, few people would work as hard as they do. Today’s kids will mostly end up in jobs that haven’t been invented yet. This makes it hard to differentiate attractive careers from those that will become commoditized. Markets can be brutally honest in rewarding scarce capabilities (such as AI today) and devaluing others. This makes earnings the default proxy for identifying which skills are in demand versus which are dying off. True entrepreneurs love asymmetric payoffs. They want to go big or go home. They are in the minority, in that they will accept a major reduction in salary if they can own a significant piece of the action. The promise of life-changing wealth, even if the odds are low, continues to draw new entrepreneurs to venture-backed companies. It is why Silicon Valley remains such a vibrant place. Now, clearly you can make an impact by committing time to social impact projects. However, improving the prospects of thousands or millions of people requires significant resources. Building up your financial war chest by means of a successful career positions you to play that bigger game if you choose to. People such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are literally changing the world by funding projects that provide access to clean water, healthcare, and remote education. Fulfillment is the achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted. It brings a sense of purpose to our lives. Fulfillment exists in both the professional and personal realms. Getting recognized for your incredible work on an important project and seeing your daughter lead her team to success in a playoff volleyball game could each move you along that horizontal axis of Figure 11.2. So, how can you advance your life in this dimension? We describe four ways to do just that next. Like molecules bouncing around in a closed vessel, your life is full of seemingly random collisions with the people and experiences that shape who you will become. Yet these collisions are not nearly as random as you might think. Taking just four steps can increase your odds of having the right collisions: pursuing a diverse career path, having an independent point of view, building strong personal and professional relationships, and living by a statement of purpose that resonates with others. As the famous Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.” Learning is like oxygen—once it stops, you’re dead. In a world where the pace of change is accelerating and we are all racing to stay ahead of AI and automation, continuous learning is essential. However, you might have shut down your learning mode after college graduation. Sure, you might read books and engage in on-the-job training, but what was the last entirely new topic you immersed yourself in? Now, we are not saying that you should teach yourself rocket science, as Elon Musk did in his spare time. Just keep the flame of your intellectual curiosity burning to maximize your lifetime fulfillment. Mahatma Gandhi said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Go back and look at the progression of your triangles on your copy of Figure 11.2. Can you pinpoint the key decisions that drove advancement in one dimension at the expense of the other two? Maybe the decision was taking a year off from college to travel in Europe. Maybe it was leaving a job too early because you felt undervalued. Maybe it was taking on a big fund-raising role at your kids’ school that led to a new professional relationship. Be explicit in identifying decisions to pivot toward the road less traveled. Just keep in mind the end goal of leading a fulfilling life and progressing toward your desired impact on the world around you. If you’ve ever played poker, the surest way to go broke is to muck every hand because you do not think your cards are good enough to put any chips in the pot. Eventually, the blinds will kill you. Life is like that too. Realize that most successes in life are built on the back of prior failures, so some of your pivots may very well take you down a dirt road. Think like a poker player. When presented with a potentially risky opportunity, think, “Is this the pot that I want to put all my chips into?” How big a return from accepting that risky opportunity might you get in terms of a jump in personal or professional fulfillment if your bet pays off? Be the person who can see beyond the risk all the way to the potential return. Muhammad Ali once said, “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” We all want to do things that matter. Some digital natives jump right into social entrepreneurship at a point in life that the previous generation was taking any job that could pay the bills. There is no right or wrong sequencing for this dimension of your triple bottom line triangle. That said, think about the following four actions that can lead you to accelerated social impact. This one is simple. Invest your talents and resources to solve problems that can elevate the human condition. If you need some inspiration around what those problems might be, here are seven priorities from the United Nations: access to clean water, women’s rights and education, climate change, access to healthcare, food scarcity, human rights, and personal safety and security. Drive progress in any of those areas and you are certain to accelerate your social impact. Wear your passion on your sleeve instead of hiding it. Making progress on any problem worth solving almost certainly takes a team. Apply all those leadership lessons you’ve learned in your professional life to this new domain of social impact. Inspire and mobilize others to pursue your idea for how to make a real impact on the world. The dimensions of your triple bottom line triangle are mutually reinforcing. Seek out intersections between the social-impact axis and the other two. For example, take those new inspirational leadership skills that you developed solving your community’s social challenges back to your day job. Use those new capabilities to become even more adept at inspiring people who don’t work for you to get behind initiatives you are driving. Have a prepared mind to anticipate risks and opportunities. Be a dot connector that surfaces insights and sees the connections across industries needed to solve big problems in the world. Great people naturally gravitate to other great people. In driving social impact, be clear about how your personal value system aligns with the problem you’ve chosen to tackle. Seek out others who share your passion for solving that problem and have a value system and underlying motivation similar to your own. Your values are how you are going to translate your personal statement of purpose into a living, breathing compass for your life and not just an exercise in a book. Now that you understand what each axis of the triple bottom line means, take a moment to think through how well you are progressing against your lifetime earnings, lifetime fulfillment, and social impact goals. See Figure 11.3 for a template. Figure 11.3 Tracking Your Triple Bottom Line. Give yourself a 3 on any aspect of your triple bottom line that is progressing at the rate you expect. A 4 or 5 means that you are ahead of your goals, while a 1 or 2 means you are behind. Put a date in the corner of the tracker and come back to this a year from now to see if you’ve caught up in the areas where you felt you were not making the progress you wanted to. Now, we understand that this is not a comfortable exercise and that the average person does not like discomfort. However, we are pretty sure that you are not reading this book in search of “average.” Progress on each dimension of your triple bottom line replenishes your energy and pushes you forward. It validates the effort you’ve put in and the risks you’ve taken. When developing the phonograph, Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” If you’ve given yourself a few 1 or 2 scores in tracking your progress against your triple bottom line goals, that is okay. Chalk it up to experience and devote some time next month or next year toward that dimension of your life. Picture yourself whitewater rafting with nine strangers and a guide. You are heading toward the churning gyrations of class five rapids. Your guide tells you to look down the river to see threats far enough in advance to maneuver around them. She says you need to use the current to your advantage so that you don’t have to paddle so hard. Before you left the shore, you made some important decisions that will have you end up either on the raft or under it. Did you spend the extra time needed to get in shape and develop the skills needed to be on this particular river? Who did you team up with, and how does their fitness level and skill set ready them for such a turbulent journey? If this feels like the most-recent special project in your professional life, then you are not alone. Managing your career is a bit like that rafting trip. A few important decisions are within your control, but many are beyond it. Scenario planning has been used for decades to make good decisions in the face of uncertainty. The goal is to make decisions that are roughly right instead of ones that are precisely wrong. Scenario planning stretches your thinking, challenges your assumptions, and keeps you moving forward when times are uncertain. Shaping your life to progress against your triple bottom line goals requires that you anticipate the future currents that will push your career one way or the other. To bring us full-circle to the GM story that began this book, let’s assume that your particular passion is the future of transportation. To make good decisions about your career, consider the alternative scenarios for how the industry you want to work in is going to evolve. See Figure 11.4 for three plausible scenarios of how the car industry might look by 2023. Figure 11.4 Car Industry 2023 Scenarios. Now think through what types of roles, skills, and experiences will be most valued in each scenario. Some capabilities will be valuable no matter which industry-evolution scenario unfolds. Others will be valued only under one or two of those scenarios. See Figure 11.5 for examples of both for each of Figure 11.4’s car industry scenarios. Figure 11.5 Skills by Future Scenario. So, if your career goal is shaping the future of the car industry, skills in areas such as remote telemetry, electric powertrains, or online marketing are going to be highly valued regardless of how the industry evolves. If you focus your skill development solely on areas such as fleet network design or machine vision for autonomous driving, then you are making a riskier bet on scenarios B or C, respectively. When we get to your personal action plan below, make sure you consider this future view of the skills and capabilities likely to be most in demand in your industry. That is the only way to put the preemptive skill development we covered in Chapter 9 to work for you. Your purpose is what gets you out of bed every morning. It transcends any specific role you take on, skill you build, or company you work for. Now, hopefully there is significant alignment between your purpose and your company’s (Chapter 9). That makes life easy. However, if your personal purpose is fundamentally incompatible with your company’s purpose, then it is likely time to look for another job that is a better fit. Here are some examples of powerful statements of purpose at the individual level. They each answer the cosmic question, “Why was I put on this planet?” Pause here and write a draft of your statement of purpose. Keep it to a single sentence. Reflect on the impact you aspire to have over the course of your career. Your statement of purpose will serve as the destination point on your career GPS. Now let’s define a waypoint along your career journey. Assume it is five years from now and the editor of your industry’s most important publication has called and wants to write a profile on the impact you’ve had. What do you want the headline to say? Going back to the car industry scenarios, if you had committed your career to car-industry scenario B and worked in the public sector, your future headline might be: “Mayor Joanne Smith made community car-sharing possible. Her tireless work on cutting red tape, rezoning parking lots, and promoting public investment in charging infrastructure cut Denver’s traffic by 50% and its air pollution by 80%.” If you were a finance manager working to help shape the same scenario, your future headline might be: “Innovator James Frederick developed a groundbreaking fractional ownership model that took car sharing mainstream. Individuals can get a return on their partial car ownership and credits to drive any car in the fleet.” Your future headline takes one or more scenarios for how your industry is likely to evolve and overlays your professional aspirations. It is a pithy way to answer the question, “What are you going to do about it?” Come back to your statement of purpose and future headline at least annually to take stock of whether that long-term destination and midterm waypoint still make sense. If not, then adjust them to reflect that future version of you. This may all seem like a lot to think about: understanding your professional gaps against the six rules, setting your triple bottom line goals, thinking through which skills will be valued under multiple industry evolution scenarios, and finally writing your statement of purpose and future headline. Stepping back, this all comes down to navigating your professional life through what are going to be very rough waters. Digital disruption can be disorienting. Simplify things by building an action plan that defines what you are actually going to do over the coming month, six months, and year. Don’t go further out in time than that. In each time frame, be specific in laying out the concrete steps you are going to take to advance your lifetime earnings, lifetime fulfillment, and social impact goals. This is not the time to be aspirational. Write your action plan in such a way that a friend could easily tell you whether you completed each action or not. What does this look like in practice? Here is an example of how Jaclyn, a midlevel product manager within an established publishing company, might map out her personal action plan. Jaclyn aspires to be an internal venture leader on innovative new digital and AI product offerings but is currently managing a legacy publication. One-Month Actions Six-Month Actions One-Year Actions Note that all of these are make or miss. That is, Jaclyn is holding herself accountable through actions that are crisply defined and on the path toward her long-term goals. You can’t wait forever. If you are in your twenties, you have boundless energy and the physical capacity to take on almost anything. You can work a 12-hour day, party all night, sleep on the floor, drink a Red Bull, and be ready to go tomorrow. You might lack the experience, personal network, and financial resources to have the full impact you aspire for, but your enthusiasm is high. If you are in your fifties, you have lived through enough experiences to develop the pattern recognition that leads to wisdom. If you’ve been successful, you also have a broad network of personal and professional relationships to draw on. Finally, you may have substantial capital to deploy to the projects you care most about. However, you may no longer have the energy to pull all-nighters and work seven days a week. While the slope of the curves or the point of their intersection might be different from what is depicted in Figure 11.6, some version of the longevity paradox holds true for most talented people. Figure 11.6 The Longevity Paradox. You can have a major impact at 18 (like Mark Zuckerberg or Malala) or after 80 (like Warren Buffett and the Dalai Lama). The longevity paradox just means that you need to partner with someone at the other end of the age spectrum that can complement what you bring. Just start somewhere and you’ll have the chance to leave a legacy of impact. Now it’s time to stop reading and get to work making your future headline a reality. Go be a disruptor inside your Goliath and beat David at his own game. Good luck!
Professional Readiness for the Six Rules
Senior Executive
Midlevel Manager
Entry-Level Employee
Balancing Your Triple Bottom Line
Lifetime Earnings
A Necessary Evil
The Market Price of Skills
The Fuel for Innovation
Capital for a Bigger Game
Lifetime Fulfillment
Create the Right Collisions
Stay Obsessed with Learning
Know When to Pivot
View Risk as an Opportunity
Social Impact
Do Stuff That Matters
Have Contagious Passion
Look for Intersections
Live Your Values
Navigating Choppy Waters
Your Purpose and Headline
Your Statement of Purpose
Your Future Headline
Your Personal Action Plan
The Time Is Now
