The Disruptors: How 15 Successful Businesses Defied the Norm, reviewed

We review  The Disruptors: How 15 Successful Businesses Defied the Norm by Sally Percy. Sally Percy is a business journalist and editor, specialising in leadership and management.

The Disruptors: How 15 Successful Businesses Defied the Norm, reviewed

This is a good book in some ways, as it is always interesting when you get to learn about some companies that you perhaps have heard less about. At the same time, while reading the 15 case studies, we did wonder if there is some degree of confirmation bias going on. Is the common element that these companies are, or at have had success, rather than that they did anything particularly well. As Bill Gates said, to paraphrase, success is a lousy teacher. It makes you assume that the choices you made were awesome and, looking back, you did everything right.

Some of the examples may age less well too. Elon Musk is included, which is, or rather would have been no surprise perhaps five years ago, whereas now it is hard to understand how relentlessly he is destroying his own reputation and actively turning people off buying his Tesla products among others. With the A24 example, it seemed like a narrative of a company growing, but how different is this arc of growth to that of Miramax? And we know that didn’t turn out so well. We would have liked longer side bars, with a clearer exposition and explanation of why and what these particular people did that was disruptive or innovative, rather than simply growing and trying new sectors in which to make media content.

It is an interesting and thought provoking read, but it is always a challenge to ensure that the profiles are not mere hagiography to the people featured. Was Elon really fearless, innovation, driven and daring, or merely a trustafarian tech bro, who is revealing his true, more insidious nature as time goes by. It would have been nice to have had a more critical analysis of how company X performed better than company Y for our tastes.

Sally Percy is the author of new book The Disruptors: How 15 Successful Businesses Defied the Norm, published by Kogan Page on 03 September.

Sally Percy is a business journalist and editor, specialising in leadership and management. She is also a leadership contributor to Forbes.com and a commercial copywriter, speechwriter and ghostwriter. She is author of The Disruptors: How 15 Successful Businesses Defied the Norm (Kogan Page), 21st Century Business Icons: The Leaders Who Are Changing our World (Kogan Page) and Reach the Top in Finance: The Ambitious Accountant’s Guide to Career Success (Bloomsbury).

The Disruptors

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