"Be Not Afraid of Greatness,
Some Men Are Born Great,
Some Achieve Greatness, and
Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them."

William Shakespeare

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The history of humanity is a story or journey of how a species of underdogs became top dog on planet Earth. The history of individuals such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Jobs is a story of how an underdog became a top dog. The history of companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Southwest Airlines, Cirque du Soleil, and Virgin is a story of how an underdog became a top dog. But, is there a template or recipe of how any underdog can systematically become a top dog in business, personal life, and/or society?

Finding a template on how to systematically achieve greatness is the holy grail of business research and publishing. So far that template has not been found. Business authors, who have attempted to decode and provide a "template" for achieving business greatness include Michael Porter (“Competitive Strategy” and “Competitive Advantage”), Tom Peters (“In Search of Excellence”), James Collins & Jerry Porras (“Built to Last”), James Collins (“Good to Great”), Clayton Christensen (“The Innovator’s Dilemma”), and W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne (“Blue Ocean Strategy”). With the exception of Porter and Christensen as well as Kim & Mauborgne, the aforementioned authors take a fragmented (Newtonian) and inward-looking approach rather than a living systems (Darwinian) perspective to systematically achieving greatness.

To date, none of the above approaches provides a comprehensive explanation of how Steve Jobs/Apple consistently enters an industry as an underdog and becomes a top dog. It’s important to note that none of the above authors explicitly defines and focuses on a business model as a unit of analysis, design, and presentation. The systematic transformation of “underdog to top dog” remains as elusive as ever. Or, does it?

For over 20 years, I’ve been trying to understand how living systems achieve greatness and in particular, how underdogs become top dogs. As I discovered that there was no handbook on how to systematically achieve greatness especially for an underdog-entrepreneur or startup, I intensified my study over the last five years of greatness in organizations. Earlier this year, I launched an underdog book publishing project that uses a new (distributed) crowdsourcing model. The project started with me presenting a proposed title of a book and asking group members on LinkedIn about their thoughts on the title of the book. Based on their feedback and comments, the title was revised and further ideas presented to members who became de facto collaborators. In the end, this novel book publishing project had over 50 such distributed collaborators from 20 countries around the world. The final main title of the book is a suggestion from a collaborator. The full title of the visual handbook is:

“UNDERDOG TO TOP DOG: How Leaders Like Steve Jobs and Apple Create Disruptive Business Models”

A FREE PREVIEW of the book can be obtained from Lulu.com: http://goo.gl/YXGLo

or from SlideShare.net: http://www.slideshare.net/RodKing/underdog-to-top-dog-preview

As the sub-title of the book indicates the book presents a template (Disruptor's Arrow of Time) that can be used to understand, map, and plan how to systematically achieve greatness in business, personal life, and society. The core approach is Value Disruption Design (VDD) which is a methodology for systematically creating disruptive business models. The mission/cause of VDD and our book project is to “Radically improve the world’s level of greatness.”

We hope that you can join us in making a difference at business, personal, societal, and global levels.

Would you? Together, we can make the world a much better place.

Best,
Rod.