Disruptive Leadership

I guarantee that everybody reading this blog takes for granted the wealth of information at their fingertips. Looking for something? Google it.

But for the billions of people in the developing world that don’t even have a mobile phone, what do they do?

Last year at SoCAP ‘08 I met a young woman with an intriguing social venture called Open Mind. She had attended the panel I was hosting on ICT for Development and approached me after the session about a project called Question Box. Her name was Rose Shuman and she had an idea for a free telephone hotline service to bring information to those in the developing world with no access to a phone or computer. [Read the rest of this entry...]

As I mentioned in my last post: A Measure of Success,  I had asked Thomas Thurston to write an article for Disruptive Leadership giving further insights into his research on disruptive innovation.  He delivered faster than I expected. Enjoy.

One of the most shocking things I keep finding in disruption research (at least it’s shocking to me) is how little a new venture’s team, financials, geography, or industry seem to matter in predicting whether it will succeed or fail.  Disruption Theory doesn’t answer every question, and it continues to be refined.  Still, it seems to operate at a level of abstraction that supersedes a lot of details that most of us consider critical.

For the sake of argument, businesses can be categorized as having three primary components:  (1) strategy, (2) team, and (3) execution.  While all three are vital, the data has consistently demonstrated how, time and time again, if you get strategy wrong (in disruptive terms), you’re doomed (even with a great team and stellar execution).  That runs somewhat counter to the chestnet “bet on the jockey, not the horse.”  It also defies my old-school sales upbringing where the conventional wisdom was to always “prefer a bad strategy with good execution, over a good strategy with bad execution.”  Even today it can be hard for me to emotionally digest how good strategies with bad execution do, in fact, tend to fare  better than bad strategies with good execution.  Yet the data doesn’t care how I feel, and that’s a good thing.  This also shouldn’t stop any of us from trying to excel in all three categories. [Read the rest of this entry...]

One of the things that I love about blogging is meeting fascinating people that have a common interest in disruptive leadership topics. Last week Thomas Thurston got in touch with me after he read A Lesson Learned.  Thomas had also previously worked for Intel and was involved with some of the same emerging market projects.

The highlight of meeting Thomas was his story.  He created a model from Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation that could predict, with 85% accuracy, whether a business venture would succeed or fail.  His model caught the attention of Christensen himself at Harvard Business School (HBS), who asked Thomas to join him for a year at HBS, fully paid for by Intel.  Thomas then took that same model and used it to create a stock portfolio that is wildly successful (more on that later).

[Read the rest of this entry...]

A societal imbalance

438 million people in China will be 60 or older by 2050, leaving just 1.6 working-age adults for each elder. (Couples in Shanghai can now have a second child. )

America’s education paradox

Americans rank 15th to 25th in math, reading, science and problem solving,  but are #4 in % of higher-education degrees earned.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Countries with lower “social dysfunction” (e.g. based on lower rates of homicide, teen pregnancy, unemployment, poverty, etc.) tend to be more secular.   Those that have higher rates of “dysfunction,” such as Portugal and the United States, are more religious (as measured by self-professed belief, church attendance, etc.)

Democracy isn’t always good for your health.

Paul Collier, author of “The Bottom Billion,” ran studies on post-conflict societies to learn what factors lead to peace.  While the risk of violence decreases during an election year, it doubles the following year from 5 to 10%.

Source: A set of “interesting” tidbits from the August 24th, 2009 airline lounge copy of Newsweek I read while waiting for my return flight from Shanghai to San Francisco.

Wired recently hosted a conference called “Disruptive by Design,” the first conference that I know of focused mostly on disruptive business models.  In talking about Disruptive Leadership, I have often emphasize that a disruptive business model must accompany the disruptive innovation, especially when addressing the bottom of the pyramid.  CK Pralahad talks in detail about this in the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

One of the featured speakers was Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.  Given the success of Amazon’s Kindle and its impact to the “business model” of the publishing industry, that was the primary topic of discussion.  You can watch Jeff’s entire talk on Wire’d conference site (as well all the other speakers).

So what does this have to do with “next billion?” The device is expensive at ~$400 — far out of reach of most.  Amazon’s online store is primarily a mature market phenomenon.

[Read the rest of this entry...]