I have earlier defined Level 7 Leaders as liberators and compromise busters, who are changing our world.
What is it about them that makes them so different?
Let’s explore a few of the ideas put forth by Harvard business professor Clayton M. Christensen and friends (see articles below)
The first thing that comes to mind is that Level 7 Leaders have an innovator’s DNA [1]; they see the world differently and disruptively. They discoverer their world in five special ways. By:
1. Associating – the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields
2. Questioning – constantly ask questions that challenge common wisdom (querying why, why not, what if)
3. Observing – scrutinize the behavior of consumers to generate their uncommon business ideas
4. Experimenting – actively try out new ideas in real life through launching pilots or by creating prototypes
5. Networking – meet people with different kinds of ideas and paradigms who live in different knowledge domains
GENERATE
Such compassionate leaders seek disruptive opportunities because established industry leaders will not be motivated to pursue them [2] . The probability of creating a successful, new growth business is 10 times greater if the innovators pursue a disruptive strategy rather than sustaining an incremental growth strategy.
In contrast to sustaining innovations, disruptive innovations appeal to consumers who are unattractive to the incumbents. Although disruptive innovations typically involve simple adaptations of known technologies, entrants almost always beat incumbents at this game because established companies lack the motivation to pursue nontraditional markets.
Bureaucratic dinosaurs target large, obvious markets which invariably get priority over disruptive opportunities. Disruptive innovators understand every major, attractive market that exists today, was at its inception small and informal. Level 7 Leaders can see the major growth markets of tomorrow as small and poorly defined today; more importantly, they see a crying need going unfilled.
LIBERATE
Our heroes focus on taking people out of their pain. They start by doing this quietly and unassumingly in small ways. But when their impact is big the marketplace changes. Level 7 Leaders enjoy windfall markets not for the sake of money but rather because they undo people’s burdens.
So our liberating leaders work in overlooked areas of established markets or they create entirely new markets in which, it seems, no one else can see.
There are two distinct types of disruptive innovations [3]. The first type creates a new market by targeting non-traditional consumers; the second competes in the low end of an established market. Consumers historically locked out of a market because they lacked the skills or wealth, welcome a relatively simple product that allows them to get done what they had always wanted to get done.
These markets typically start out small and ill defined. They don’t meet the growth needs of large companies. And the incumbent feels no pain at first. Because it creates new consumption, the disruptor’s growth doesn’t affect the incumbent’s core business. But as the innovation improves, it begins to pull customers away from the incumbent. And the incumbent doesn’t have the ability to play in this new game.
The second type of disruptive innovation takes root among an incumbent’s worst customers. These low-end product disruptions, that the previously ill-served customer buys, do not create new markets, but they can quite quickly create new growth.
EMPOWER
Once a viable disruptive growth strategy has been defined, Level 7 Leaders learn to nourish these same strategies, so they can survive and eventually thrive in the turbulent entrepreneurial environment they have created for themselves. This includes strategies to unite and empower those who want to jump on the new bandwagon.
These unassuming champions, to support the small army of supporters joining the cause, need to determine which resources, processes and values to leverage to enable their new ventures to succeed. The motivation to process such disruptive innovations “should be urgent” and central to their many new followers who enlist, helping them to create internally innovative processes and to shape yet more liberating plans.
Sources:
[1] The Innovator’s DNA: Dyer, Jeffrey H., Gregersen, Hal B., Christensen, Clayton M., Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Dec2009, Vol. 87, Issue 12
[2] Foundations for Growth: Christensen, Clayton M.; Johnson, Mark W.; Rigby, Darrell K.., MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring2002, Vol. 43 Issue 3, p22-31
[3] Six Keys to Creating New-Growth Business: Christensen, Clayton M.; Raynor, Michael E.; Anthony, Scott D.., Harvard Management Update, Jan2003, Vol. 8 Issue 1, p3-7