The Innovator’s DNA
The book I chose to read this semester was The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen which leaders and media around the world have recommended. The book gives an insight into how disruptive innovators operate the way they do and how we as individuals can encapsulate such behaviors into our daily lives and into our organizations to move from idea to impact.
The reason for choosing this book was I was already on the verge of completing this book and was gifted this book by one of my professors in the previous semester. I believe one of the reasons why he provided me with this book was as an entrepreneur this solidified my thinking process and helped me execute some of the ideas into my venture. Although before reading this book I assumed it would be another self-help book or along the lines of providing case studies to only prove a point, I am glad I was proven wrong.
The book positively surprised me and I got to learn more than what I bargained for. I had already taken cliff notes from this book which I invest in my daily practice and to quote one of them is to go trend-spotting by reading articles, books, and blogs, and dismantling these trends would lead to creatively experimenting with a new product.
The major insight from this book that I gathered was a general overview of the book in itself where we get to learn about the five skills that are present in the DNA of every disruptive innovator which include Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting. I also got to learn from the examples of some of the most innovative companies on the planet and what helped them put these unique methods into practice was a result of people, processes, and philosophies.
Not only did I learn tips for developing experimenting skills but it also helped me reaffirm some of the practices which I had already been implementing. For instance, practices such as disassembling a product or always piloting new ideas are beneficial for developing experimenting skills. One major takeaway from the book would be the notion of “DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL” also given by the example of Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel where he talks about how most of what he learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error.
I give credence to the book for helping me implement some of the ideas in our class and also correlating the concepts learned in class to Innovators DNA. As a group testing out a new hypothesis which was never done before it was essential to always be piloting new ideas. Discovery skills such as observing and questioning go a long way as you not only understand who you are trying to serve but also understand the problems from their perspective. Also as a group, it is essential to have a mix of different personalities which we as a group were grateful to begin with. Discovery-driven leaders need the delivery-driven skills of people who excel at execution to succeed and we were fortunate enough to have identified the different personalities in our group at the very start.
In conclusion, I believe I couldn’t have chosen a better book for this class where I not only got great insights for my career ahead but was also able to bridge the ideas from class to the real world through the help of this book.
