Disrupt Yourself: Play To Your Distinctive Strengths

Personal Disruption (n.): The act of using a practice employed by companies — wherein a product deemed inferior by the market leader (Amazon v. Borders, Uber v. Yellow Cab) eventually upends the industry — and applying it to yourself and your career.

As the co-founder of a boutique investment firm with Clayton Christensen, Whitney Johnson came to realize that the frameworks of disruption not only apply to innovation and investing, but to individuals. She outlines the guardrails that speed our progress as we disrupt in her book Disrupt Yourself, applying them to the pathway of personal and professional growth and corporate innovation.

In this video, Whitney drills down on one specific aspect of personal disruption: playing to our distinctive strengths. Take some time to listen as she explains how to identify your strengths and analyze which ones can be of most use in your current role. Learn how to leverage those strengths to meet your customer’s unmet needs, determine if you’ve got the right people in the right roles, discover untapped reservoirs of talent, and increase the overall productivity of your employees and your team.

We are living in an era of accelerating disruption—managing the S-curve waves of learning and mastering is a requisite skill. If you want to walk through the doors of opportunity, play to your distinctive strengths.

If you enjoyed this video, you may also enjoy our upcoming webinar with Lisa Fain And Lois Zachary, as they discuss bridging differences for better mentoring. The workplace has become more diverse: mentors and mentees come from very different backgrounds and have limited understanding of each other’s cultures and outlooks. But mentoring remains the most powerful tool for creating meaningful relationships, furthering professional development, and increasing engagement and retention.

Join Lisa and Lois on February 27th at 2:30 pm (EST) to gain insight into increasing your own self-awareness and preparing to embrace and leverage differences within mentoring relationships. If you've ever wondered how to bridge the diversity gaps in your mentoring relationships, this webinar is for you! Learn more and register here.