July 22, 2022

A Conversation with Whitney Johnson

50 minutes

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors and author of Disrupt Yourself: Master Relentless Change and Speed Up Your Learning Curve. Discussed in the book is how an S-curve can be used to explain how people learn and grow. Whitney uses the example of her own career and how, after experiencing explosive growth and reaching the top of the S-curve, she wanted to fill an emotional need that was not being fulfilled on Wall Street. She explores all about this S-curve, from the element of risk involved in disruption to playing out the process of an S-curve to maximize learning and growth.

HIGHLIGHTS

Leaving Wall Street to write Disrupt Yourself and apply it to herself

The S-curve helps to understand how people learn and grow

Experimenting and the vulnerability of being wrong

Embrace constraints because the greatest creativity comes from them

QUOTES

Whitney explains how the S-curve explains how people grow: "I was already thinking that disruption applies to products and services and people, I think there was a natural sort of extension of that, and again I come from the stock market, I was used to thinking about momentum, what makes a stock go up, what makes the stock go down, how do you drive that momentum, there was this notion for me of wait a second, I think this applies to people too. How does this S-curve apply to us?"

Whitney on why jumping jobs prevents learning and can make unfit leaders: "There is that cycle that it's important to play that out. And I think, actually, that's where the Peter principle can come in is that if you jump too many times, you're getting all these basically false starts and so you're not learning anything. Then, all of a sudden, and I think this sometimes happens is, this is why people lose their jobs, is because they kept climbing, they haven't learned anything."

Whitney on using constraints to your advantage: "As you're trying to climb an S-curve, your constraints, whatever they are and you're going to have them because you always do, is how do you turn those constraints not just into a victim of why me, and not even neutralize them, but how can those constraints be transformative for you?"

Find out more about Whitney in the links below:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitneyjohnson/

Website: https://whitneyjohnson.com/

Podcast: https://whitneyjohnson.com/right-risks/