Money and Finance
- Clayton Christensen Responds To New Yorker Takedown Of 'disruptive Innovation'
The article he's responding to was the one I had linked to yesterday, HERE. Link to: Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of 'Disruptive Innovation' When the New Yorker this week published Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s...
- The Disruption Machine: What The Gospel Of Innovation Gets Wrong. – By Jill Lepore
UPDATE: Clayton Christensen responded to this article, HERE. Link to article: THE DISRUPTION MACHINEPorter was interested in how companies succeed. The scholar who in some respects became his successor, Clayton M. Christensen, entered a doctoral program...
- Clayton Christensen Wants To Transform Capitalism
Sixteen years ago a book by Clayton Christensen changed business thinking forever. The Innovator’s Dilemma looked at industries ranging from disk drives to steel to mechanical excavators and exposed a surprising phenomenon: When big companies fail,...
- Clayton M. Christensen On Disruptive Innovation In Health Care
Interview: Disruptive Innovation: Can Health Care Learn From Other Industries? A Conversation With Clayton M. ChristensenArticle: Disruptive Innovation In Health Care Delivery: A Framework For Business-Model Innovation – By Jason Hwang and Clayton M....
- When Capitalism And Corporate Self-interest Collide - By John Kay
Adam Smith understood the difference between policies that favoured free trade and policies that favoured established business. “The interest of the dealers in any particular branch of trade or manufacturers,” he wrote, “is always in some respects...
Money and Finance
Clay Christensen's Life Lessons
Thanks to Will for passing this along.
On a warm April evening, Clayton Christensen arrived at his home in Belmont, Mass., desperate for a peanut butter sandwich. Christensen is diabetic, and with his blood sugar low, he seemed out of sorts. As he crushed the sandwich in a few massive bites, it had the effect on him that spinach does on Popeye. No longer confused about why a reporter had been waiting on his stoop, the 60-year-old Harvard Business School professor and celebrated author of The Innovator’s Dilemma began to form his thoughts with two distractingly huge hands. He said that he’d sometimes regretted calling his most admired theory “disruptive innovation,” because the disruptive part strikes some as more alarming than advantageous. He confided that he read the entire World Book Encyclopedia by age 12. And he shared two intimate encounters he’d had with God, including one on the eve of a “widow-maker” heart attack in 2007, the first of three life-threatening health issues in as many years.
At the turn of the century, The Innovator’s Dilemma became a surprise best-seller and a holy book for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, where Christensen’s theory arrived ready-made to explain what Internet companies were going to do to established businesses. Andy Grove swore by it. Steve Jobs admired it, although Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, points out that Christensen predicted that if Apple (AAPL) kept on using only its own software, the iPod would likely remain a “niche product.”
Pointedly, Christensen demonstrated that it wasn’t because of obsolescence or ineptitude that top companies falter, the way General Motors (GM) did after Toyota Motor (TM) rose up (and the way Toyota is now, under pressure from Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors). Rather, what caused executives and companies to fail was doing everything right. They listened to their customers, constantly improved their products and services, and maximized profits. Their undoing came from failing to do something counterintuitive: pursuing new opportunities at the low end of their markets. Hence, the dilemma of Dilemma: When do you cannibalize your own business in order to save it?
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Related link: Clayton Christensen on Charlie Rose
Related books:
How Will You Measure Your Life?
The Innovator's Dilemma
Related previous posts:
Clayton Christensen Presentation: Reinventing IT
Clayton M. Christensen on Disruptive Innovation in Health Care
- Clayton Christensen Responds To New Yorker Takedown Of 'disruptive Innovation'
The article he's responding to was the one I had linked to yesterday, HERE. Link to: Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of 'Disruptive Innovation' When the New Yorker this week published Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s...
- The Disruption Machine: What The Gospel Of Innovation Gets Wrong. – By Jill Lepore
UPDATE: Clayton Christensen responded to this article, HERE. Link to article: THE DISRUPTION MACHINEPorter was interested in how companies succeed. The scholar who in some respects became his successor, Clayton M. Christensen, entered a doctoral program...
- Clayton Christensen Wants To Transform Capitalism
Sixteen years ago a book by Clayton Christensen changed business thinking forever. The Innovator’s Dilemma looked at industries ranging from disk drives to steel to mechanical excavators and exposed a surprising phenomenon: When big companies fail,...
- Clayton M. Christensen On Disruptive Innovation In Health Care
Interview: Disruptive Innovation: Can Health Care Learn From Other Industries? A Conversation With Clayton M. ChristensenArticle: Disruptive Innovation In Health Care Delivery: A Framework For Business-Model Innovation – By Jason Hwang and Clayton M....
- When Capitalism And Corporate Self-interest Collide - By John Kay
Adam Smith understood the difference between policies that favoured free trade and policies that favoured established business. “The interest of the dealers in any particular branch of trade or manufacturers,” he wrote, “is always in some respects...