About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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This was a short book on how and why dominant companies consistently get undercut by disruptive technologies. It uses the disk drive industry as a case study to illustrate the decisions that get made by market leaders which make sense in context, but inevitably lead to obsolescence. I thought the second half of the book, exploring how to cultivate disruptive innovation, was more interesting, in its ideas of how to construct a company and its culture that would be open to new ideas. Sounded like the kind of place I would like to work at.
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[...] Some companies try to address this question by putting processes in place by which to make decisions, step-by-step guides to guide employees. These processes may even use different decision criteria for different decisions. The problem with such processes is that they don’t cover new situations, so employees need to consult their bosses to ensure they make the “right” decision by company standards. This slows the company response time down, which means that it may miss the chance to exploit new opportunities (shades of The Innovator’s Dilemma). [...]
[...] Martin did articulate well how a company is often started around finding a heuristic to solve a mystery, and then spends the rest of its existence refining that heuristic into ever more efficient algorithms. But if the company isn’t careful, another company will find a new mystery that disrupts the original company’s business model (aka the innovator’s dilemma). [...]