Accelerated Disruption By Eric Lefkofsky – Book Review

If you aspire be an entrepreneur, or transform your company, this book is for you. If you feel passion alone will succeed or are risk averse, save your money, though all proceeds go to Chicago’s Children’s Hospital.

Accelerated Disruption is a blueprint on creating a business that delivers unique value and carves profits from large, deeply fragmented markets. The author presents 18 key Laws, how to manage and implement them, steeped with his experiences of successful start ups, as well as ventures gone awry. The opening chapter sets the tone with the Law of Accelerated Disruption, a map on how to disrupt a market by leveraging spend savings, transparent technology and a hybrid of automation and human processes that deliver value customers crave.

AD presents why you must anticipate customer needs, rather than react to customer pain with current processes/providers. Driven by sophisticated mining of customer data, the creation of customized technology solutions delivers value for optimal decision making, eliminating the pain of previous processes. Illustrating lessons learned from start-ups Innerworkings, Echo and MediaBank, AD shows how to discover client pain by asking naive questions. Innovators are a dedicated breed, embracing intentional ignorance to ferret out where pain resides, then create technology applications to address solutions that industry insiders usually miss.

The author’s experience is buyers feel no pain while bosses have significant pain. Buyers make their world easier to manage by limiting suppliers, value loyalty over results and predictability over risk for buying criteria. Embracing changing market landscapes, an appreciation of limited asset provider options, leveraging spend are benchmarks senior leadership must seek. In other words if your company has been buying the same way for years, there is great opportunity to outsource this function to companies who utilize technology that leverage buying power, and customized technology for measurable value.

Large corporations are often paralyzed by the weight of their own infrastructure, hierarchies, politics, lack of respect for clients/employees, resisting change or have stopped listening for honest feedback. Of the many success stories illustrated, the newest venture, ThePoint (rewriting the webs high content but lack of discipline into a new space for activism) is very different than previous ventures and yet incorporates the same open mindset, guts, and passion that could dwarf the author’s +$1 billion dollars in profit equity generated to date.

AD details why soliciting candid feedback, internally as well as externally, will honor logic in your organization. Learning from criticism rather than discouraging will engage the intellectual capital needed to continuously improve. The pathway for the right information must be build by management 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 for. The author takes a hard line on the end result of a business venture must make the market better than it was before, fueling customer addiction to your service, with true technology innovations. Indifference leads to commoditized markets whereas engaged passions deliver value for a lifetime of customer equity.

The author believes in developing technology rapidly, sacrificing perfection for speed…a new innovation paradigm. Insightful warnings abound like “If you are not disrupting you are being disrupted.” He shows what organized chaos looks like, maintaining key business drivers and appreciates that leadership taking learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.

The case for embracing risk, going hand in hand with innovation, is made to overcome fear. Entrenched businesses embrace conventional wisdom and therefore are risk averse. The author appreciates that humans are great rationalizers, often lacking the courage to face personal weaknesses, fragile egos, criticism, fearing wrong answers, instead of embracing the quest for the right questions.

Though entrepreneurialism a very broad concept, the author presents in a very tight message, simplified with graphic representations, easy to read, understand and act upon.

“Accelerated Disruption” delivers more than any current best seller in the business category. Unlike others, this book demonstrates what you must do to be a success in your own business.



Source by Harry Gorden

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