Notes From ‘Digital Disruption’

I picked up James McQuivey’s ‘Digital Disruption’ on a recommendation, and indeed it’s one of the better books I’ve read on the subject that manages to feel relevant years after publication.

So what is the book about? Well:

Digital disruptors don’t have to be young, but in many cases they are because their minds were formed in an era when digital possibilities were rapidly erasing analog boundaries. The rest of us came up in business school and industry in an era where the answer to most questions about innovation was no. The digital disruptor’s mindset is one in which the default answer is yes.

The author goes on to say:

Digital disruptors think about opportunity differently. Even though technology plays a key role in their actions, their edge 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 don’t have the disruptor’s mindset.

There are many example of disruptors strewn throughout the book, with my favorite being a one-man creator of military camouflage that’s used by armies around the world. Upset about the tens of millions of dollars his country was spending on the technology, he just decided to make it himself:

With a few hours of work using an off-the-shelf computer graphics program (one he still refuses to disclose for fear that it will inspire competitors), Guy created his own pattern he called GUYPAT and posted it on the web to make a political point. He didn’t know then that his whole life was going to change as a result of his mindset leading him to digitally disruptive actions. But his life did change, completely, when someone working closely with King Abdullah II of Jordan spotted the pattern and called Guy.

This kind of thinking is possible because there has been a shift in this world’s tech, and what used to be inaccessible no longer is:

The more tools we free, the more people — and the more companies, including big ones — we free to take advantage of them and to benefit from their use. Apple knows this. You could see it in February of 2012, when Apple announced the iBooks Author tool. This totally free toolset allows anyone willing to agree to Apple’s terms of service to create multimedia eBooks for the iPad that can contain text, video, photos, and basic interactivity — all without any programming or coding experience. The tools are free, and if you want to liberate your creative ideas, you can even give your books away for free. Or, you can choose to sell them on the iBookstore, where Apple takes a cut of your sales in exchange for having made you a digital publisher. Free tools spawn more free tools. So Amazon created the digital self-publishing platform, now called Kindle Direct Publishing, more than three years ago. Signing up for it is free, and using its fairly basic toolset, you can publish your own novel to the community of more than 30 million people that read Kindle books on a variety of devices. Here again, free leads to profit. The list of Kindle self-made millionaires is growing, following in the footsteps of early self-publishing authors like Amanda Hocking, a paranormal-romance author who caused a stir in 2011 when publishers found out she was bringing in six figures every month from a collection of eBooks costing around ninety-nine cents each. That’s the paradox and the power of totally free: It makes some disruptors totally rich.

McQuivey also managed to predict a shift in openness that is just now starting to happen, with companies like Apple opening up many of their tools further than ever before:

Platform providers understand that their core value depends on their ability to encourage as many interactions and transactions as possible over their platforms. It’s happening at Facebook, it’s happening at Amazon, and it’s even happening at Apple, where the company continues to reevaluate its monastic practices in favor of more openness. The door to this kind of openness is still less than halfway open at Apple, but the significant weight of digital disruption being applied to the door will eventually blow it wide open until there is a near-zero friction policy in effect at every one of these major platforms.

What this sort of disruption needs, more often than not, is someone who has a shift in mentality. This is perhaps best encapsulated by an excited airline executive who ‘got it’ before his peers:

I met up with an IT executive of a European airline in Paris. I had just come off the stage where I had presented the idea of total product experience to a room full of IT executives from a variety of industries. After the speech, this executive bounded up to me, his excitement palpable. “This is exactly what I have been trying to tell my company,” he said. “We are no longer just selling seats on a plane. We are selling a total travel experience that is wrapped in a digital envelope.”

As a consumer, I want an experience, not a seat. Disruption is underway, all around us.