Creative Disruption: What You Need to Do to Shake Up Your Business in a Digital World (Financial Times Series) [Paperback]

If you are like me you probably buy quite a few business books (especially those trying to make sense of digital change) but get fed up after the first couple of chapters. 'Creative Disruption' is admirably straightforward, straight-talking and well written. Where many efforts descend into jargon and unsupported overclaims for the pace and depth of change, Waldman's book strikes a healthy balance between his obvious enthusiasm and excitement about the impact of the internet, and his very precise specification of what has changed, why, and with what effect.

Refreshingly, the cases he focuses on are not the dotcom superstars or the dinosaurs they have slain, but rather some of the pre-digital companies which have reformulated their businesses to survive and even thrive.

This book will make you see your own business through a new lens.

This hybrid of memoir and business book advises incumbent organizations threatened by digitalization how to survive in their changed environment. The author was director of digital strategy for the UK's The Guardian newspaper - and as such intimately involved in a rare example of successful reinvention by a legacy media firm. Even so, overall Waldman is pessimistic about legacy firms' chances. Even The Guardian isn't in the clear: `it had done a better job than many others - but the hard maths of the situation remained challenging and will, I suspect, remain so for many years to come'.

Waldman's shake-up recipe involves pretty fundamental change to the incumbent's operations. It has three core thrusts:

1. Clean up the core business, since regardless of the new digital world this is where the majority of assets and liabilities reside and will do so for the foreseeable future. Changes here have a disproportionate impact on the business as a whole. This involves sticking to your fundamental activity, but reinventing how you do it.

2. Grow by finding `adjacencies' - new businesses in areas that have some overlap with existing capabilities, resources and know how.

3. Innovate `at the edges' to create products and services that can transform the core business or pave the way to adjacencies. Innovation can come from internal corporate venturing or stakes in start-ups, but BDAs (big digital acquisitions) should be avoided.

This insider account is analytic, reflective, and easy to read. There are some illuminating industry asides: cannibalizing your own products is `eating your babies first'; bad decisions get made because `Hippo's' (Highest Paid Person's Opinions) prevail; complaining to regulators is futile (`the corridors of power are long and winding and it's possible to get lost in there'). Most useful of all is a venture capitalist's sobering rule of thumb -an entrepreneur making a disruptive launch against an incumbent can reckon on two to three years to build up their business before the incumbent will be willing to cannibalize itself and compete.

In conclusion, this is a valuable, pragmatic compliment to more academic works - Christensen in particular. I would have welcomed an overarching visual model that pulled together all the elements in Waldman's recipe, and the cases could be a bit more concise, but all in all it supplies a unique perspective and should be mandatory reading for executive board members of legacy media organizations.

The test of a good business book is in the reading, and Simon Waldman has written this book with the reader in mind.

The straight talking, clear prose (avoiding the repetition and endless rewording of so many other business books), offers sensible advice on the options that face business leaders whose sectors and businesses are deeply disrupted by the digital shift.

As an MD practised in new business modelling and restructuring, I found the book to be a resounding affirmation of the inevitable need for deep core transformation. Anyone familiar with Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't will identify with the wisdom Simon Waldman shares with his readers in the pages of "Creative Disruption". You can order this book with your eyes closed; it is sure to become a classic.