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By Jack Welch

Over the past 15 years, I’ve held Q&A sessions with over a million people at more

than a thousand events around the world. In all but a handful of these events,

people bring up their bosses – and vent about them. This topic comes up without

fail, no matter where I am, or what industry or company I’m speaking to.

The troubles range from, “My boss is too difficult and demanding” to “My boss

doesn’t really care about me, it’s all about her” to “I’ve been busting my butt and

my boss just doesn’t recognize my performance -- he feels that everyone is

equally wonderful” to “There’s no focus on how much you do, it’s who you

know.” I can’t think of a lament I haven’t heard.

The basic question is the same… People want to know what they should do in

these situations. “I just can’t stand it. Do I quit? Do I ask for a transfer?”...“Do I

go above the boss to his or her boss?” Or “Am I just plain stuck with this guy?”

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for a defined period of time before you jump” to “Going to the boss’s boss is

almost always a fast way to lose” to “Try to open up a good, candid but

non-incriminating conversation with your boss . . . Coming in from the side –

not head on.” Despite having offered just about every possible answer for relief,

more often than not, I haven’t satisfied the unhappy employee.

Several months ago, I came up with what I think is the better answer, as far as

career development is concerned. I’ve turned the question back on the

questioner, by asking a new question that might prove helpful, not only in their

current situation but going forward – a question, I hope, will help more people

become better bosses in the process:

WOULD YOU WANT TO WORK FOR . . . YOU?

Yes, it takes a certain threshold of self-awareness to recognize your own flaws,

but you should see the look on people’s faces when they stop to honestly think

through their own leadership characteristics. The self-confident, self-aware

person, upon reflection, seems to really respond to this question. The follow up

reception I have received has been incredibly positive, demonstrated by the

emails and letters from people in the audiences who found this exercise really

useful. Many of them had taken the chance to spend some quiet time reflecting

on both their strengths and their flaws -- and, from their notes, appeared open to

dealing with their weaknesses in order to become stronger, more effective

leaders. Leaders who people want to follow.

I was hoping that maybe the LinkedIn audience would benefit from wrestling

with that same introspective question.

“WOULD YOU WANT TO WORK FOR . . . YOU?”

If not, why not, and what are you going to do about it?

Jack is Executive Chairman of the Jack Welch

Management Institute. Through its online MBA program,

the Jack Welch Management Institute transforms the

lives of its students by providing them with the tools to

become better leaders, build great teams, and help their

organizations win. He is co-author, with Suzy Welch, of

the new book, The Real-Life MBA -- Your No-BS Guide to

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Written by

as a #1 Wall Street Journal and Washington Post best-seller.

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For a generation of CEOs, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma was a

guiding light on how to survive industry disruptions. His book educated

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What the legendary Clayton Christensen gets wrong about Uber, Tesla and disruptive innovation

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respond to the threats. Of late, however, journalists and academics have

questioned the accuracy of Christensen’s industry analyses and challenged his

broad generalizations. His response, in a new Harvard Business Review article,

is that his theories have been misunderstood and their basic tenets misapplied.

He posits that his prescriptions have been a victim of their own successes.

Regardless of whether the criticisms are valid, Christensen’s ideas have had a

positive impact on industry. Companies such as Proctor and Gamble, GE, and

Salesforce credit them with having helped them stay ahead. They provided an

excellent way of thinking about innovation.

But Christensen’s theories are now outdated, and there is little to be gained by

arguing about the accuracy of the case studies on which they were based. The

harm is in continuing to be guided by them — because they teach companies to

look in the wrong places for competitive threats and encourage them to separate

the innovative disruptors from the core businesses; to put them in new company

divisions. We are now in an era in which technologies such as computing,

networks, sensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics are advancing

exponentially and converging, thereby allowing industries to encroach on and

disrupt one another.

Christensen says that Uber and Tesla Motors aren’t genuinely disruptive, not

fitting the tenets of his theory of disruptive innovation. In that, the competition

comes from the lower end or an unserved part of a market and then migrates

upward to the mainstream market. He says that Uber has gone in exactly the

opposite direction by building a position in the mainstream market and then

addressing historically overlooked segments. And Tesla Motors can’t be

disruptive because it is tackling the high end of the car market. “If disruption

theory is correct, Tesla’s future holds either acquisition by a much larger

incumbent or a years-long and hard-fought battle for market significance,” say

Christensen and his co-authors in the paper.

Christensen’s disruption theory is not correct. The competition no longer comes

from the lower end of a market; it comes from other, completely different,

industries. For the taxi industry, Uber came out of nowhere. At first Uber tried

competing with high-end limousines. Then it launched UberX to offer cheap taxi

service. Now it wants it all. Through UberFresh, it is piloting same-day grocery

delivery; through UberEats, it promises lunch in 10 minutes. Uber is challenging

supermarkets, Amazon.com, and the catering industry — all at the same time.

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finishes writing the software for its self-driving cars, it will create a genuine

tsunami of disruption in every industry that depends upon transportation.

Tesla has already proven the superiority of its electric cars. Now it is changing

their economics. With its Gigafactory, which is expected to come online in 2017,

it will halve the cost of batteries and increase their range. These will keep getting

better — and cheaper. Tesla is talking about releasing a $35,000 car in 2017. I

won’t be surprised if it delivers a version in the early 2020s that travels more

than 500 miles on a single charge and costs $25,000. And it plans to use the

same battery technology, in Powerwall to provide affordable storage to solar

homes so that they can be disconnected from the grid and be energy

independent. This cross-industry focus will lead to economies of scale that will

disrupt both the transportation and energy industries. Tesla is more likely to

acquire General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen than to have to battle them.

Apple, which has already disrupted the computing and music industries, now

has its eye on health care and finance. The Apple watch functions as a medical

device; its artificial intelligence will monitor us 24×7 and begin to take the role of

our personal physicians. Apple’s ResearchKit has already started gathering

clinical-trial data and will upend the pharmaceutical industry by keeping track of

the effectiveness and side effects of the medications we take. ApplePay, Apple’s

first entrant into the finance industry, will start doing the job of credit-card

processors and will disrupt the finance industry over the next decade as it

becomes a platform on which we transact commerce.

Google, Facebook, SpaceX, and Oneweb are in a race to provide Wi-Fi Internet

access everywhere through drones, microsatellites, and balloons. At first, they

will provide their services through the telecom companies; then they will eat

their lunch. The motivation of the technology industry is, after all, to have

everyone online all the time. Their business models are to monetize data rather

than to charge cell, data, or access fees. They will also end up disrupting the

cable industry, entertainment, and every industry that deals with information.

Disruption is no longer a narrow field that can be handled by a new division or

department of a company. It is happening wherever technology can be applied.

Companies need all hands on board — with all divisions working together to find

ways to reinvent themselves and defend themselves from the onslaught of new

competition. This is a company-wide effort which requires bold new thinking.

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Written by

For more, follow me on Twitter: @wadhwa or visit my website:

www.wadhwa.com

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