Can i be your enemy

I'm a night owl and married to a musician who often gets home quite late. So for me, getting to work at 7 a. I used to feel horridly inferior to the folks who got up at 5 am and conked out at 9 pm-even though I don't think I worked any fewer hours than they did, just later ones. Then one day I got a contract to write a book on a newsy subject and I had only one month to do it. Under that extreme deadline pressure, my ideas about the hours I "should" work went out the window and I had no choice but to figure out a schedule that actually allowed me to function during a crunch project.

That turned out be starting late morning, working till early evening, taking a couple hours' break for exercise, dinner, and socializing, and then back to work till late night. That's still the rhythm that works best for me. What works for you may be completely different.

My point is, you should listen to your own inner clock and structure your day accordingly. Take yesterday. I posted a column to this site, interviewed the fascinating Emerson Spartz , spent time promoting my work and connecting with my network on social media, caught up on a couple of days' worth of email, had a two-hour meeting with a financial advisor, and sent a pitch on a complex technology topic to Computerworld.

That's a pretty decent workday, but there were still three items left on my daily to-do list at the end of it. I could have let it upset me but I didn't. Determining that the low- and middle-market data-storage segments might experience rapid growth, EMC took aggressive action. The team and its executive sponsor may well need to serve as evangelists for the plan.

Executives are typically bombarded by emerging technologies, most of which will not amount to serious competitive threats and deserve to be ignored. Compounding the difficulty, diverse organizational constituencies bring different biases to the problem and honestly disagree about what is a genuine threat as opposed to a false alarm.

On the other hand, the people in new business development worry that waiting too long to invest in the next wave will destroy the company. But it does get a group of smart, opinionated managers to sit down together to think systematically about threats to the core business, and to surface ideas about how to avert or co-opt those threats.

People inside corporations get so anxious about serious external threats that they have trouble looking at them dispassionately. The rigor that this process imposes can spell the difference between flailing around and acting effectively in the face of a serious competitive threat.

Typically, the disrupter offers lower performance and less functionality at a much lower price. And gradually, the new product or process improves to the point where it displaces the incumbent. Disruptive innovations enter the market and gain leverage in a surprisingly predictable way. Second, the insurgent enters the main market if it succeeds in overcoming barriers to entry such as incumbent patents and access to channels and capital.

Fourth, customers will change suppliers, if their switching costs are not too substantial. Finally, the incumbent is displaced to some degree; this can range from minor annoyance to total destruction.

As the diagram suggests, the disruption can fail during any of these stages—so an incumbent should take the time to assess the likelihood that an insurgent could clear each stage successfully. Is Disruption a Genuine Threat? The methodology includes two components: an analytical instrument and an organizational process. At each stage of the disruption process, a variety of factors makes the disruption more or less likely to succeed.

The incumbent may hold a patent that can block an insurgent from entering the main market, for example. Our instrument helps managers analyze the six stages of the disruption process by identifying, rating, and weighting the contributing factors in each stage. Library of Contributing Factors At each stage of the disruption process, some common factors can make a disruptive innovation more or less likely to occur, including the following:.

Each contributing factor is stated on the left in its disabling condition and on the right in its enabling condition. In rating a contributing factor, the assessment group determines where along the continuum the disrupter lies. Since not all the factors being rated will have the same level of influence, you need to weight each factor.

You calculate the weighted score for each contributing factor by multiplying the raw rating by the weight. Then you can find the score for that particular stage of the disruption process. It is simply the average score of all the factors divided by the average weight. In our example, the score is 1. After calculating the scores for all six stages, you can graph the disruptiveness profile.

This is a visual representation of the final scores for all six stages with the disabling forces on the left and enabling forces on the right. It shows the rating and final scores for all six stages of the disruption process.

First, you need to identify and describe the potential disruption. This task may involve more than the direct substitution of one product for another. In cases involving more than mere substitution, you must name and describe a constellation of insurgents.

And you have to start thinking about timing during this step; for instance, you need to assess if a potential disruption is, say, one, three, or five years out. Next, the assessment project needs an executive champion, a group leader, and an assessment team. We also learn of our tendency to accuse others of having bad character when they behave badly, rather than considering environmental factors that may have influenced their behavior. Our behavior can be easily redirected by environmental cues and circumstances, though we more often recognize these environmental influences when we ourselves behave badly than when others do.

Understanding this bias can help us in our attempts to help people change their problematic behavior—such as a child who is not studying. Gilovich and Ross go through many of the most important discoveries in social psychology research and explain how they work.

In their final chapters, they apply this research to important issues of our time, such as increasing human happiness, reducing conflict between groups, educating at-risk youth, and combating climate change. We learn that to increase happiness, we should spend on experiences rather than possessions, try to savor peak experiences, and give to others rather than give in to indulging ourselves.

To reduce conflicts, we must understand how our naive realism thwarts our ability to compromise. To educate at-risk youth, we must teach a growth mindset and tie achievement to personal goals. And, to reduce resistance to combating climate change, we must tweak our joint sense of purpose by creating a community of individuals doing their part. Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great.

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Make the first move to open the lines of communication. If you feel comfortable, talk to them in person. However, you can also contact them online or via text message. Invite them to meet you in a neutral location. That means they may feel nervous about meeting up with you. Pick a place where neither of you have strong ties so that you can both feel like equals. However, it might be best to avoid asking them to meet you at your lunch table or at your home.

Wanna come? Give them a reason to see you as a friend. Let them know that you want to make up. Maybe we could try being friends. Look for common ground that you can use to build a friendship. While you and your enemy may have differences, you likely have some things in common. Talk to them to learn more about them. Then, find common interests that unite you.

Having mutual friends will help you and your enemy become better friends. Reach out to their friend group and invite them to do a group activity. You can do this before or after you reach out to your enemy to open the lines of communication. Part 2.