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Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation Kindle Edition
The barriers to entry in your market just vanished. Unexpected competitors are swarming in. Are you ready?
You always knew digital was going to change things, but you didn’t realize how close to home it would hit. In every industry, digital competitors are taking advantage of new platforms, tools, and relationships to undercut competitors, get closer to customers, and disrupt the usual ways of doing business. The only way to compete is to evolve.
James McQuivey of Forrester Research has been teaching people how to do this for over a decade. He’s gone into the biggest companies, even in traditional industries like insurance and consumer packaged goods, and changed the way they think about innovation. Now he’s sharing his approach with you.
McQuivey will show you how Dr. Hugh Reinhoff of Ferrokin BioSciences disrupted the pharmaceutical industry, streamlining connections with doctors and regulators to bring molecules to market far faster—and then sold out for $100 million. How Charles Teague and his team of four people created Lose It!, a weight loss application that millions have adopted, achieving rapid success and undermining titans like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig in the process.
Regardless of your background and industry, you can learn how to be a digital disruptor too. First, adopt the right mindset: Take risks, invest as cheaply as possible, and build on existing platforms to find the fastest path to solving a customer’s problem.
Second, seek the “adjacent possible”—the space just next to yours where new technology creates opportunity. That’s how Benjamin Rubin and Paolo DePetrillo of Zeo created a $100 sleep monitor that does much of what you’d get from a $3,000 sleep lab visit.
Finally, disrupt yourself. Use these tools to make parts of your business obsolete before your competitors do. That’s what Tim FitzRandolph did at Disney, creating a game that shot to the top of the app store charts.
With the tools in this book you can assess your readiness, learn the disruptive mindset, and innovate rapidly, starting right within your own business.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAmazon Publishing
- Publication dateFebruary 26, 2013
- File size15.4 MB

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Editorial Reviews
Review
“In Digital Disruption, James McQuivey persuasively demonstrates how to shift your mind-set by thinking and acting ‘disruptively’ in order to drive radical change to best meet the future needs of your consumers.” ―Markus Dohle, chairman and CEO, Random House
“Technology disruption used to affect other people, not you. No longer. This is a frightening and useful manifesto about how the rapid changes in technology are going to overturn every corner of the world as we know it―and how you can take advantage of that.” ―Seth Godin, author of The Icarus Deception
“There is a powerful change happening in the way we consume and process information. It’s a democratizing force that is drowning out the oligarchy of media who have told us what’s important and what to think. It is incumbent upon all of us to master this new method―and to take the power into our own hands. James’s book is an important step in that direction.” ―Cory Booker, mayor, Newark, New Jersey, and co-founder, Waywire
“Disrupting healthcare as an industry has become a national imperative. Forrester’s book, brilliantly analyzing the anatomy of disruption, is just what the doctor should have ordered.” ―Roy Shoenberg, MD MPH, CEO/Founder, American Well
“In his new book, James makes a compelling argument to think beyond change for change’s sake and instead focus on giving customers what they truly want. This book is a must-read for anybody who wants to succeed in the next era of consumer technology.” ―Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive
“As McQuivey vividly shows, advances in hardware and software have totally changed the way we do business and the way we live. This valuable book helps business leaders join this accelerating revolution and transform their relationship with customers.” ―Kevin Rollins, former CEO, Dell, Inc.
“I have studied disruptive innovation for more than two decades. Here, McQuivey offers insights about disruption―and about the accelerating pace of disruption―that I truly hadn’t understood before. This is a very important book about what tomorrow holds in store; it shows us both what will happen and how to address it. I recommend it enthusiastically.” ―Clayton Christensen, professor, Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
“Many Fortune 500 companies that existed three decades ago are now gone. If your company is to survive the next decade, read this book ASAP to learn how to innovate faster, better, and cheaper―or else, you will succumb to digital disruption.” ―Navi Radjou, coauthor of Jugaad Innovation and From Smart To Wise
“As James McQuivey says, ‘Digital disruption is not only a possibility for your company’s future but the only possibility.’ Once you accept that premise, decisions that previously seemed courageous or outrageous will instead appear to be rational and inevitable. James offers a road map for business leadership in the digital age that is thoughtful, inspiring, and liberating.” ―Baba Shetty, CEO, The Newsweek Daily Beast Co.
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B009L7QD1S
- Publisher : Amazon Publishing (February 26, 2013)
- Publication date : February 26, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 15.4 MB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 256 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,035,656 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #291 in Organizational Change (Kindle Store)
- #492 in Business Technology Innovation
- #1,164 in Computers & Technology Industry
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Josh Bernoff is the author, coauthor, editor, or ghostwriter of eight business books. Book projects on which he has collaborated have generated over $20 million for their authors.
His most recent book is "Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters -- A Comprehensive Guide" (Amplify, 2023). He is also the author of "Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean"(HarperBusiness, 2016). Toronto’s Globe and Mail called it “a Strunk and White for the modern knowledge worker.” He was coauthor of "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies" (Harvard Business Press, 2008), which was a BusinessWeek bestseller.
Josh writes a blog post on topics of interest to authors every weekday at Bernoff.com. His blog has generated 4 million views.
He lives with his wife, an artist, in Portland, Maine.
James McQuivey, Ph.D.
James is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption. He develops consumer models to help companies understand the power of digital consumers and strategy models to help companies in every industry prepare to serve those newly empowered consumers. His travels to meet with clients have sent him to Oslo, San Diego, Barcelona, Anchorage, and nearly everywhere else on the planet. No matter the locale he can be found imploring clients to think and act like digital disruptors.
James is in high demand as a speaker, keynoting and contributing to major events like CES as well as private client events. He comments regularly in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and has contributed bylined columns for sites like Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and Forbes. He also appears frequently on news outlets like CNBC and NPR. He was recently featured in the critically acclaimed documentary Page One about the changes in the newsroom at The New York Times due to digital newsgathering and distribution. He is also a significant contributor to Stay Tuned, a new documentary on the future of TV produced by Julia Boorstin at CNBC.
In the fourteen years since he first joined Forrester Research as an online retail analyst, James has opened Forrester’s coverage of the automotive and travel industries as well as run the Consumer Technographics research arm of the company -- the largest and longest-running survey effort in the world focused on consumer use of and interaction with technology. His analysis of millions of survey responses is what led him to conclude that digital was preparing consumers for something completely different.
James came to Forrester from a happy life in academia. He was a graduate fellow at Syracuse University’s acclaimed S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications where he earned his Ph.D. He also taught at Boston University.
James lives in Needham, Massachusetts with his wife and the four youngest of their six disruptors.
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Customers find the book interesting and easy to read. They describe it as an important read for businesses looking to survive the next decade. However, some readers feel the pacing lacks substance and excitement.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book interesting and easy to read. They appreciate the useful insights and perspective it provides on digital disruption. The context is timely and relevant, with great examples and a good overview of how technology is changing traditional business models.
"This book was a quick read and offers a process to start innovating in your company and organization right now...." Read more
"...They facilitate one to innovate the adjacent possible; by providing the opportunity for rapid innovation cycles and learning from the inevitable..." Read more
"...There is a lot of useful information to take from this book, but I feel like they’re more suggestions than they are anything else...." Read more
"...without embracing digital disruption – but the book does provide some useful insights into how you can become a perpetrator rather than a victim of..." Read more
Customers find the book easy to read and practical for businesses. They say it's an interesting and worthwhile read about a timely topic. The book is well-written with good examples. However, some readers feel the author's credibility lacks consistency.
"This book was a quick read and offers a process to start innovating in your company and organization right now...." Read more
"...6. The book overall does a great job articulating what you as a leader of the digital disruption journey of your company should focus on doing –..." Read more
"...While it was a decent read, I feel there could have been more information to make it even better." Read more
"...Excellent advice while we are still relatively early into the information age...." Read more
Customers find the book has a slow pace and lacks substance. They find it boring and lacking in depth. The examples used lack consistency, leaving readers unsatisfied.
"...financial executive for the past 17 years, I found the book to be somewhat boring...." Read more
"...stars is that beyond the topic or bringing up the subject, it has little substance...." Read more
"It had some food info, but also had a fair amount of fluff...." Read more
"Lots of good data in this. Fails to excite me. Too much detail on such a small spectrum in respect of perspective. Heavy going and repetitive." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2014This book was a quick read and offers a process to start innovating in your company and organization right now. I like the fact that the book emphasizes innovation toward the customers next need. Innovation just for the sake of innovation is not useful or productive. This book can also be used to define a process for reviewing your company's products and services. Innovating to the " adjacent possible" is a great way to determine how to enhance your offerings. I highly recommend this book and will be using it for one of my projects in 2015.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2015“Digital Disruption” by James McQuivey of Forrester Research is most often the first book I recommend to client executives preparing for digital journeys at their organizations. That is because the book most of all emphasizes what it is to have a disruptor’s mindset. I for one think this mindshift is the all important first step. Once you get into the right ‘frame of mind’ to embrace the power and possibility of digital technologies to create value to your customers, you the right preparation for the journey. It helps that the author’s broader research interest in Innovation.
‘People + Infrastructure = Disruption’ forms the key sections of the book. The discussion rallies around a few guideposts in drawing up a digital strategy – the following is a list I gleaned (not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the book) that I found myself adopting into my consulting practice :
1. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking about the incremental product features but ask yourself what the adjacent benefits the customer derives from your offerings. The book presents an alternative framework to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs– Comfort, Connection, Uniqueness and Variety that people desire. Map the product experiences to these needs.
2. In the digital environment, practices for establishing and maintaining barriers to competition matter little and are counterproductive. What matters is ability to deliver value to the customer. Such value comes from seeing what customers need.
3. The discussion on infrastructure includes my favorite topic of the power of digital platforms. Digital Platforms are what the railways or highways were to businesses in the last century. They facilitate one to innovate the adjacent possible; by providing the opportunity for rapid innovation cycles and learning from the inevitable failures. Digital platforms are available to everyone; and are perfectly suited for large companies to exploit without exorbitant investments.
4. The excitement of the developments in digital technologies is that the distance between an idea and the digital realization of that idea is now shortened. The impact comes from the fact that if ten times as many people can participate in bringing ten time as many ideas each to market, only one or two of those ideas need to succeed in order to completely disrupt your business
5. The case studies in the book span internal incubation and external partnering strategies that one could pursue in their digital innovation journeys
6. The book overall does a great job articulating what you as a leader of the digital disruption journey of your company should focus on doing – rapidly identifying a list of the next things your customers want and quickly giving them the few that are easiest for you to deliver. The key message is - Stop trying to predict the future of your products, focus instead on the next possible thing your customers needs and let the future find you !
While I find the emphasis on finding the ‘next adjacent customer need’ a strong lynchpin for ideas on digital disruption, it is not complete in itself in my opinion. Perhaps the next edition of the book would benefit from it if it included:
- discussions on exploiting hard usage data as an asset for pointing to ideas for digital disruption
- structured analysis methods to get at the 'adjacent possibilities'.
- the challenges unique to larger companies in drawing up their digital strategies – eg., branding, how you put digital at the heart of your business while not abandoning your legacy
- Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2014I had hoped that this book would provide more of a how-to, but I didn’t get that. There is a lot of useful information to take from this book, but I feel like they’re more suggestions than they are anything else. I was also left with quite a few questions when I finished reading it that I didn’t find the answers to in the book, or at least not the complete answers. While it was a decent read, I feel there could have been more information to make it even better.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2013Digital Disruption provides a solid discussion of the attitudes, tools and strategies involved in creating disruptive opportunities for yourself and your organization. James McQuivey does a good job discussing the changing context created by a digital environment where free tools and open access to markets eliminates traditional barriers to entry and advantage. Digital Disruptor is recommended reading for those looking to upgrade their management practices and approaches by re-energizing their innovation tools and techniques.
McQuivey's central premise is that if people plus infrastructure equal disruption, then digital innovators plus digital infrastructure equals digital disruption. The rest of the book focuses on what these digital disrupters are, the tools they use and how you can become a digital disrupter. This is more of an innovation book than one based on applying digital technology to business.
McQuivey uses a number of individual and company examples to illustrate what it means to be disruptive from FerroKin, Disney, FitNow among others. McQuivey uses these observations to illustrate the concepts of digital disruption across three sections:
Part 1: What is digital disruption?
Part 2: Adopt a digital disruptor's mindset?
Part 3: Behave like a digital disruptor?
Part 4: Disrupt yourself now.
The book focuses on management and business tools to answer these questions. Overall these techniques re-iterate and update customer focused tools and techniques.
Digital disruption is the ability to create value by meeting customer needs at a lower cost, with faster development times and a greater impact on the customer experience than anything that came before. That is a good description of performance-based disruption - dong things better, faster, and more efficiently. Digital disruptors are seen as actors that engage in disruption. These actors range from individuals to small companies to groups inside of large companies. The `digital disruptor' becomes the persona and focus of the book with the goal of describing bow digital tools allow digital disrupters come at you from all directions - and from all ages, backgrounds and nationalities.
The book covers management tools more than digital technology. In fact it discharges the importance of technology in the fist paragraph of part two, page 19, when it points out that `their edge (digital disruptors) does not come from technology, technology is just a means to a different end, an end that most people can't even conceive of because they do not have a disruptors mindset.'
Adopting a digital disruptor's mindset requires seeing past the problem to the solution. That involves recognizing and moving away from an `inside out ` bias toward one that starts and ends with the customer. Armed with that attitude and perspective the organization can drive the following transformations: from Make to Give, from Product to People, from Sell to Want all of which leads up to a benefits based mindset. This requires engaging various `free' models deployed on digital platforms that deploy new products rapidly and create and maintain digital customer relationships. McQuivey uses a revised version of needs as a means of advocating this different way of thinking in terms of Comfort, Connection, Variety and Uniqueness. This is a helpful framework and a good update on classic Maslow based thinking.
Behaving like a digital disruptor involves adopting a different approach to innovation one based on seeking ideas from the `adjacent possibilities. Teams find these possibilities by a three step process of1) seeking adjacent possibilities, 2) depending on convergent adjacencies and 3) persisting on the path to innovation. This process forms the basis for understanding innovative ideas that are delivered through delivering a total product experiences that `wrap around and through a product, even a very analog product, to amplify, expand and digitally redefine the way the customer experiences the product.'
That represents the book in a nutshell
Overall:
Digital Disruptor concentrates on describing the attitudes and mental models of disruption more than the specifics of digital technology and how it drives innovative solutions. This book is in the tradition of `Re-engineering the Corporation' in pointing out the case for change. However, executives looking for a technology based discussion will find little in the book to help them as technologies like mobile computing, social, analytics etc. are mentioned more in passing than being a focus of the discussion. Much of the fundamentals beneath this argument relate to using technology to do things better and in new ways rather than creating new sources of value and revenue. The illustrative case stories, sprinkled throughout the book effectively illustrate the author's points, but do not go into an analysis or exploration of what they did to be digitally disruptive.
The book provides a good way to engage executives in a general discussion about where, how and when to think about disrupting the status quo in their industry and in their organization. Those looking for more specific ways to create digital value can certainly benefit from reading Digital Disruptor, but they will need to supplement their reading with other materials that concentrate on more on the `how to' of creating customer value and company revenue via digitizing the business.
Top reviews from other countries
- CasioReviewed in Mexico on February 23, 2020
3.0 out of 5 stars Regular business book
Have some good ideas, the main message is about customer experience.
Tiene buenas idea as, el mensaje principal es sobre experiencia al cliente.
- JyothiReviewed in India on February 19, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Disruptive way in explanation.
A disruptive way explain what it is and it how it looks like a life in near future. Must to read
- DiegoReviewed in Brazil on February 14, 2017
3.0 out of 5 stars Book for business consultants.
It is a reasonable book suitable for business consultants. The author uses his experience in several companies to demonstrate the concept of digital disruption and the way companies can innovate digitally. If you are from the academic field, like me, you will probably find that the book lacks theory.
- Tennille M GrahamReviewed in Australia on October 25, 2016
4.0 out of 5 stars Great read
A great read that makes you question how the normal marketing and business will survive in this new age. I love how the author provided case studies and questions to consider.
- MalgorzataReviewed in Germany on June 13, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars i recomned
will give you and insight what to understand by digital disruption, how to disrupt, what is needed to create disruption, well written , easy to read, good summer study