Startups, growth-stage companies, and private equity–backed companies all have one thing in common: They need high-growth individuals to execute high-growth plans. As a leader trying to achieve ambitious organizational goals, you need people who can do more than just keep up; you need people who can set the pace. You need high-growth individuals.
Disrupt Yourself helps high-growth individuals--and those trying to attain this status--learn the tools and frameworks necessary to make changes that matter. This book helps you understand how these frameworks of disruptive innovation can apply to your particular path, whether you are:
- A self-starter ready to make a disruptive pivot in your business
- A high-potential individual charting your career trajectory
- A manager looking to instill innovative thinking within your team
- A leader facing industry changes that make for an uncertain future
Whitney Johnson used the theory of disruptive innovation to invest in publicly traded stocks and early-stage private companies, and now she applies the framework to the personal and professional growth of individuals. We are living in an era of accelerating disruption, and no one is immune. Johnson makes the compelling case that managing the S-curve waves of learning and mastery is a requisite skill for the future. If you want to be successful in unexpected ways and achieve your wildest goals, follow your own disruptive path. Dare to innovate. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself.
Author
Whitney Johnson, one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world (Thinkers50), is an expert on helping high growth organizations develop high growth individuals. She is an award-winning author, word class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning, and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. Whitney is a popular contributor for the Harvard Business Review. She has 1.7 million followers on Linkedin where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on the Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times. In 2019, she was ranked #3 on the Global Gurus' Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates as a "Top 15 Coach" by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith.
An innovation and disruption theorist, she is the author of the bestselling Build an A Team (Harvard Business Press, 2018), a Financial Times and CEO Read, Book of the Month, and the critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself (2015). Publisher's Weekly described it as "savvy...often counter-intuitive...superb" while the Boston Globe called it the "'What Color is Your Parachute?' career guide for the entrepreneurial age." In these books, she codifies her frameworks for developing high growth individuals and organizations--the Personal Disruption and the S Curve of Learning frameworks.
Whitney was the co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard's Clayton Christensen, where they invested in and led the $8 million seed round for Korea's Coupang, currently valued at $9+ billion. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising, and the development of the fund's strategy. As a former award-winning Wall Street stock analyst, she understands momentum and growth. She was an Institutional Investor-ranked equity research analyst for eight consecutive years and was rated by Starmine as a superior stock-picker.