Accelerated Disruption by Eric Lefkofsky – Book Review
If you aspire to be an entrepreneur or transform your company, this book is for you. If you feel passion alone will succeed or risk a torrential downpour, save your money, although all proceeds go to Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Accelerated disruption is a plan to create a business that offers unique value and generates profits in large and deeply fragmented markets. The author presents 18 key laws, how to manage and implement them, steeped in his experiences of successful startups, as well as companies that went awry. The opening chapter sets the tone with the Law of Accelerated Disruption, a roadmap of how to disrupt a market by leveraging cost savings, transparent technology, and a hybrid of automation and human processes that deliver the value customers crave.
AD presents why you need to anticipate customer needs, rather than react to customer pain with current processes / vendors. Driven by sophisticated extraction of customer data, the creation of customized technology solutions offers value for optimal decision making, eliminating the pain of previous processes. Illustrating lessons learned from startups Innerworkings, Echo, and MediaBank, AD shows how to uncover customer pain by asking naive questions. Innovators are a dedicated breed, embracing willful ignorance to figure out where the pain lies and then creating technological applications to tackle solutions that industry experts generally overlook.
The author’s experience is that buyers are pain-free while bosses are in significant pain. Buyers make their world easier to manage by limiting suppliers, valuing loyalty over results, and predictability over risk of purchase criteria. Embracing changing market landscapes, appreciating the limited options of asset providers, and leveraging spend are benchmarks that senior leadership should seek. In other words, if your business has been shopping the same way for years, there is a great opportunity to outsource this feature to companies that use technology that leverages purchasing power and custom technology for measurable value.
Large corporations are often paralyzed by the weight of their own infrastructure, hierarchies, policies, lack of respect for customers / employees, resisting change or have stopped listening to honest feedback. Of the many illustrated success stories, the newest company, ThePoint (rewriting the high content of the web but the lack of discipline in a new space for activism) is very different from the previous companies and yet incorporates the same Open mindedness, guts and passion that could dwarf the + $ 1 billion in equity capital generated by the author to date.
AD details why soliciting honest feedback, both internally and externally, will respect your organization’s logic. Learning from criticism rather than discouraging it will involve the intellectual capital necessary to continually improve. Management must build the path to correct information with a culture that is sensitive to the business environment. Arrogance, a key indicator of being out of touch with employees, markets, and your future must be watched. The author takes a hard line on the end result of a business venture that must make the market better than it was before, fueling the addiction of customers to its service, with true technological innovations. Indifference leads to commodified markets, while engaged passions generate lifetime value from the client’s capital.
The author believes in developing technology rapidly, sacrificing perfection for speed … a new paradigm of innovation. Insightful warnings like “If you’re not interrupting, you’re being interrupted” abound. He shows what organized chaos looks like, maintaining key business drivers, and appreciates that leadership that brings learning into action quickly is the ultimate competitive advantage.
The case for embracing risk, which goes hand in hand with innovation, is made to overcome fear. Ingrained companies embrace conventional wisdom and therefore risk a deluge. The author appreciates that human beings are great rationalizers, who often lack the courage to face personal weaknesses, fragile egos, criticism, fear the wrong answers, instead of embracing the search for the right questions.
Although entrepreneurship is a very broad concept, the author presents it in a very tight message, simplified with graphical representations, easy to read, understand and act.
“Accelerated Disruption” offers more than any current best seller in the business category. Unlike others, this book demonstrates what you must do to be successful in your own business.