What are your disruptive skills?
blogs.hbr.org
What are your disruptive skills?
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#2Don't forget that your disruptive skill may not be one skill, but an unusual intersection of ordinary skills.
It's tough to claim to be one of the world's best php programmers, unix gurus, or apparel e-commerce experts.
But there may not be many excellent php programmers who are also unix gurus and apparel e-commerce domain experts. For the right customer, that combination is your disruptive skill.
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#3She keeps using the word "disruptive", but actually only discusses uniqueness of skills. Probably just a bit of PR.
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#4I got a big "Help us improve our site" overlay that greyed out the content I was trying to read. Here's a suggestion to improve any website that includes these sorts of ads: stop "disrupting" the people who want to read your content.
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#5agree with you ryanmcgreal but i liked the core message of the article--thought it had value--most hbr articles read similar
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#6Every time someone says 'disrupt' my skill is at suppressing the desire to vomit a little.
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#7Don't forget that your disruptive skill may not be one skill, but an unusual intersection of ordinary skills. It's tough to claim to be one of the world's best php programmers, unix gurus, or apparel e-commerce experts. But there may not be many excellent php programmers who are also unix gurus and apparel e-commerce domain experts. For the right customer, that combination is your disruptive skill.
I agree. In addition to skills, this can be expressed in terms of interests, as Larry Wall did in this interview:
http://www.techgnosis.com/wall1.html
WALL: I not only want Perl to be a good 'glue' language, I want Perl people to be good 'glue' people.
FEED: What makes a good 'glue' person?
WALL: Let me distinguish two different kinds of joiners. You have people who will join a movement and be totally gung-ho about it. That's great. We need the cheerleaders.
But that's merely a form of tribalism. What we also try to encourage are the kind of joiners who join many things. These people are like the intersection in a Venn diagram, who like to be at the intersection of two different tribes. In an actual tribal situation, these are the merchants, who go back and forth between tribes and actually produce an economy. In theological terms we call them peacemakers.
In terms of Perl language, these are the people who will not just sit there and write everything in Perl, but the people who will say: Perl is good for this part of the problem, and this other tool is good for that part of the problem, so let's hook 'em together. They see Perl both from the inside and from the outside, just like a missionary. That takes a kind of humility, not only on the part of the person, but on the language. Perl does not want to make more of itself than it is. It's willing to be the servant of other things.
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#8Every time someone says 'disrupt' my skill is at suppressing the desire to vomit a little.
Yes. A "disruptive skill?" How exactly is that different from "a skill that could be really useful?" Is this a skill that somehow lets you singlehandedly overturn a market, or are we just tossing around buzzwords?
Maybe we should discuss our disruptive value-adds for high-impact verticals.
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#9Every time someone says 'disrupt' my skill is at suppressing the desire to vomit a little.
Yes. A "disruptive skill?" How exactly is that different from "a skill that could be really useful?" Is this a skill that somehow lets you singlehandedly overturn a market, or are we just tossing around buzzwords? Maybe we should discuss our disruptive value-adds for high-impact verticals.
I believe, in this case, it was "a skill that disrupts others' previously-established judgement of your worth to them."
Re: What are your disruptive skills?
#10It baffles me that someone can accurately assess that "you are strong in searchlight intelligence." It seems so difficult to measure. I can't imagine claiming that at an interview and supporting it with a few anecdotes.