Turning the Giant: Disrupting Your Industry with Persistent Innovation

Automation industry veteran and former president of Fisher-Rosemount Systems and executive vice president of Emerson, John Berra, delivers a spirited manual for facing adversity in professional life. He draws on his personal experience turning corporate obstacles into opportunities and his four-decade ascent from Monsanto control engineer to the leader of a $6.7 billion automation division to contend that the giants professionals face—self-doubt, competition, innovation, corporate bureaucracy, skepticism, and success—are not enemies to be slain but tensions to be leveraged and managed. Designed to be read as both a playbook and a memoir, the chapters in Turning the Giant: Disrupting Your Industry with Persistent Innovation trace a career spent “ringing out the wires” in enduring the anguish of a denied promotion, stifling engineering pools, and steering the Fisher-Rosemount merger toward a unified automation powerhouse. “Properly channeled frustration can become a spark for innovation,” Berra argues, leaving readers less inclined to flee from discomfort and more prepared to convert setbacks into forward momentum.  

Berra chronicles the experiences of salespeople, engineers, and plant managers who faced hostile field environments, skeptical management, and entrenched global competitors, illustrating how the disciplined turn of each giant can build industry-shaping breakthroughs while demanding ever-greater reserves of grit and integrity. At one point, Berra recounts his decision to sequester fifty handpicked engineers in Austin’s “Hawk Site,” isolating them from corporate interference to develop the DeltaV control system. He describes the experiment as both essential and audacious. “Turning giants is wonderful,” he concludes, urging readers to run toward their obstacles rather than away from them, because the real deal is understanding how to turn a strong “no” into a “yes.” There is an element of stoicism in this book that makes it a required study for any leader who takes themselves seriously. Candid and inspiring, this pragmatic guide deserves to be widely read.