Instead of Surviving Business Disruption, Consider Reinvention

As a small business owner, you've probably heard the call for all businesses to innovate in order to survive. You might have been inspired by innovative startups that were able to successfully challenge centuries-old businesses. Likewise, you might have read about centuries-old businesses who redefined their approach to business to thrive.

Then you wondered, “How do I innovate like that with my current budget and resources?”

Reinvention: Accelerating Results in the Age of Disruption provides that answer for you by focusing on the essential ingredients that are needed to begin innovating and continue it through your entire business.

What is Reinvention About?

Like other books on business innovation, Reinvention makes the case for continuous innovation and flexible business strategy to survive in today's business world. Unlike those books, however, Reinvention focuses on the essential qualities (not specific tools) that are part of innovation. In other words, the book doesn't tell you what to innovate. The book provides the mindset of an innovative company at its most basic user-friendly level.

To be even more specific, Reinvention provides a specific tools (Reinvention Formula and Reinvention Agility Matrix) for diagnosing the type and ability to do successful innovation. This formula is given as a set of factors to consider before your business tries out that new innovation. All you have to do is plug in the factors surrounding innovation into the formula and you can get a relatively good feeling about where you might go next. Readers can continue to check their results against the results of the Reinvention Formula to see how they are progressing.

Reinvention, however, doesn't just focus on business innovation. It also uniquely focuses on individual career innovation. The book argues that the workers of the future need to focus on adaptability, reinvention and continuous learning in a method similar to business. Like businesses, job seekers will face an uncertain future filled with competition and change. Building the habit now of learning and adapting is the key to evolving with the future, rather than passively becoming a victim.

Co-authors of Reinvention Kate Sweetman and Shane Cragun are also principals of Sweetman Cragun, a global advisory firm specializing in business innovation. Both also have extensive experience completing projects on every continent (except Antarctica) and working with clients from a variety of fields (NASA, governments, etc.)

What Was Best About Reinvention?

The best part of Reinvention is its unique approach to the topic of innovation. Most business advice focuses predominantly on the technical aspects of innovation at the expense of the mindset behind that innovation. This approach expands the conversation from questions like “What new app are you creating?” to “How can we transform the resources we have to successfully amaze our customers?” What's more, the book examines achievements ranging from Thomas Edison's light bulb to one of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's most well-known speeches, demonstrating the applicability of the book's perspective across different industries.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

Reinvention does an incredible job of expanding the perspective of innovation beyond the way it is traditionally discussed, but it could be improved by showing a business using each of its tools from beginning to end. Reinvention provides many case studies, but these case studies highlight only parts of its overall philosophy.

Why Read Reinvention?

If you are interested in innovation but don't know where to start, Reinvention will provide the conceptual tools and case studies to radically expand your perspective. Using a simple formula, the book helps business owners of all types figure out their readiness for innovation and how to use that assessment to make competitive and strategic innovation.

Job seekers will also find this book extremely helpful because it reinforces the interdependence of jobs in the future. On one side, the book presents a chaotic future with industries being replaced and re-engineered rapidly. On the other hand, the book offers proactive solutions for dealing with that future. Those solutions involve creating workers who are ready to work in businesses that are able to deal with an uncertain future. To summarize, job seekers can learn skills to prepare for the future. And businesses can learn how to make those future skills work for them.

This article, "Instead of Surviving Business Disruption, Consider Reinvention" was first published on Small Business Trends