Big bang disruption – larry downes, paul nunes | Free Book Summary

Big bang disruption – larry downes, paul nunes

Disruptive innovation has taken on a new form that deviates from the traditional model by initially entering the market as a low-cost substitute for a high-end product before gradually improving in quality and moving up the customer chain. 

Instead, the innovation quickly penetrates every customer segment while outperforming competitors in terms of both price and quality from the outset. This kind of “big bang” disruption can virtually overnight destroy entire product lines.

Recognizing Big-Bang Disruption

Big-bang disruptors are rewriting the rules of industry after industry—but only until the next wave of disruption arrives.  

Big-bang disruptions typically have a virtually integrated supply chain rather than a vertically integrated one: they are manufactured and deployed using cloud infrastructure. 

Seeing it coming

Recognizing warning signs is critical to survival. However, because early market-based experiments almost always fail, the familiar signals sent by low-end customers abandoning ship may never arrive.

You need new tools to recognize radical change coming sooner than your competitors, which means interpreting the true meaning behind seemingly random experiments.

Pay attention to the truth tellers

Your truthtellers might be easy to spot, if not accept. They could be employees working on the front lines of competition and change, far below the ranks of senior management. They might not even be your employees. 

Longtime customers, venture capitalists, industry analysts, and science fiction writers may all be truth-tellers.

How to identify truth-tellers

Truth tellers are frequently eccentric, and their clarity can be confused with arrogance and stubbornness. Consider Steve Jobs, as well as other technology luminaries such as Bill Gates, Alan Kay, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Slowing the disruption

Ensure that disruptors cannot profit from their inventions until you are ready to acquire them, or you can win with your own product. 

Once a big-bang disruption has taken off, it’s impossible to stop it.

You can delay their profitability by lowering prices, securing long-term contracts with customers, or forming strategic alliances with advertisers and other companies critical to your competitors’ plans.

A fast escape and a quick pivot

Senior management must face the reality that even long-successful strategies can be abruptly upended, necessitating a radical re-creation of the business.

To compete with undisciplined competitors, you must be prepared for an immediate exit from current markets and be willing to sell once-valuable assets.

A new kind of diversification

Diversification has always been a risk-mitigation strategy in cyclical industries. A diverse set of businesses is essential as industry change becomes less cyclical and more volatile. 

Fujifilm, for example, has survived the digital photography transition by diversifying into other products and services ranging from nanotechnology to the production of flat-panel TVs.

Your business is already getting disrupted right now

You can’t see big-bang disruption coming. You have no control over it. You can’t beat it.  

The innovator’s disaster is a big-bang disruption. And it will continue to make executives in every industry break out into cold sweat for a long time.

The impact of big-bang disruptors is undoubtedly amplified for technology- and information-intensive businesses, but most industries are vulnerable.

The good news

Big-bang disruptions hold enormous potential for those who can quickly learn the new rules of unrestricted development, unrestrained growth, and undisciplined strategy. 

Your current business may be replaced by something more dynamic, volatile, and profitable. And the transformation will occur abruptly rather than gradually. In other words, not a whimper, but a bang.

The 12 Rules Of Big Bang Disruption

Rule 1: Talk to Your Truth-Tellers 

Rule 2: Determine Your Market Entry 

Rule 3: Conduct Apparent Random Market Experiments 

Rule 4: Survive Catastrophic success

Rule 5: Take advantage of winner-take-all markets. 

Rule 6: Establish Bullet Time

Rule 7: Plan for Saturation

Rule 8: Sell Assets Before They Turn Into Liabilities 

Rule 9: Don’t Quit While You’re Ahead. 

Rule 10: Get Out of Your Own Black Hole 

Rule 11: Become a component of someone else. 

Rule 12: Transition to a New Singularity