Innovators Dilemma



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ISBN 9780060521998 Published Jan. 2003
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Innovator's Dilemma
The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
By Clayton M Christensen 

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The Thinkers50
Posted Nov. 21, 2011 2:41 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Congratulations are in order for friend of the company Marshall Goldsmith, one of the really good guys in this business, on winning the 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award as the World’s Most-Influential Leadership Thinker.

Now sponsored by the Harvard Business Review, The Thinkers50 is a decade-old, biannual global ranking of management thinkers that uses ten criteria to rank thinkers: originality of ideas; practicality of ideas; presentation style; written communication; loyalty of followers; business sense; international outlook; rigor of research; impact of ideas and the elusive guru factor. Goldsmith has all of those qualities in spades, ranked number seven on the overall Thinkers50 list and was certainly deserving of the award in Leadership he took home.

Business Book Readers will know Marshall from his excellent and highly influential books, most recently What Got You Here Won't Get You There and MOJO. Friends and followers of the company might remember him from the LeaveSmarter event we held with him here in Milwaukee last year (you can find a video excerpt from that event at the end of this post).

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution and, this year, The Innovator's DNA won the award in Innovaton and was number one in the overall rankings.

And there are other categories and awards in the Thinkers50 as well, including the Thinkers50 Book Award, which Pankaj Ghemawat won for his new book World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It, in which he rejects "flat world" view of the global economy and offer a more nuanced, semi-globalized view.

Other Think50 2011 category winners include:

For a complete list of this year's Thinkers50 and where they all rank, a lot of great video with those who made the list and everyone who made the shortlist for the awards, head on over to Thinkers50.com.



Culture and The Innovator's Cookbook
Posted Aug. 29, 2011 11:30 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

When you booted up Windows 95, a man named Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno made that experience more remarkable and memorable. He made the little league game at the end of the movie Traffic seem profound and timeless—a gentle, reassuring reminder that the universe is stitched together of individual, seemingly mundane moments. His music makes one think and write things like that, takes you to different dimensions and other worlds. Just writing this post caused me to stumble across a YouTube video that is nothing but the Windows 95 Startup Sound for 10 Minutes, and not only did I listen to it, but I took the brilliant advice of the only intelligent comment I've ever come across on YouTube and played it in multiple tabs at once. The result was 10 minutes of bliss. Window 95 slowed down 23 times is also lovely (and if you happen you watch the equally slowed down Microsoft commercial that accompanies it, pause it at minute 2:12).

I write of Brian Eno today because he has showed up in two books that have floated across my desk recently. Both books—Culture, edited by John Brockman, and The Innovator's Cookbook edited by Steven Johnson—are compilations of material that include interviews with Eno. You may know the editors... Steven Johnson from his wonderful 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, and John Brockman from his many compilations, including This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future, My Einstein and The Mind—the last of which was released alongside Culture earlier this month. Brockman is also the author of The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.

In Culture, Eno observes that art "seems to to be something we are biologically inclined to do," that "all human groups engage in something that we call artistic behavior" and talks about the need to develop a language for having a conversation about the arts. He compares the transition he's looking for to the way Darwin changed the field of natural history forever by giving it a common language—taking it from a science that simply collected material to one that could develop theories about the material collected. He goes on to discuss his own theory that we codify most of our knowledge in metaphors, and that "Science ... enables us to come up with a structure upon which we can build useful metaphors.: He continues: "This is why artists are interested in science ... because science keeps coming up with big ideas, like chaos, like complexity, that we then think, ah , yes, perhaps that's how a lot of things work. Then we have a new metaphor." Speaking of the spectrum, or continuum, our minds move along, he says:


If I drew [a] spectrum of the highly rational to the highly intuitive, what I would have to say is that we don't spend much of our time at either of those extremes. We spend most of our time somewhere along the middle.

You have art writers who constantly celebrate the "intuition" extreme and think that this is the sort of apex of human existence, and you have scientists who by default, almost, dignify the other one. That's where they live, or that's where they'd like to live. They want to be able to make the kind of statements that push that boundary. What I would like to see is a conversation that admits that we spend most of our time somewhere in the middle, and we ought to find a way of thinking about it.

I suppose at the root of all this is the feeling that possibly the only way that humans can remain cooperative is by those of us who are artists or who are interested in the arts realizing that we have some kind of a job to do. It's no good anymore, as far as I'm concerned, for artists to just take the bohemian attitude of, oh, it just comes out of me, and I don't know what I'm doing, etc. I just can't stand that; I don't want this romantic attitude that says artists shouldn't be a part of this planet. This is a real job, and it has to do something.

In Steven Johnson's The Innovator's Cookbook, coming out in October from Riverhead Books, he discusses how technologies spark innovation, not the other way around:


I think one thing that is interesting that I don't think people acknowledge is that normally we think that technologies arise out of good ideas. So somebody has a brilliant scientific notion or artistic notion and then they create the technology to realize it. But actually I more and more think that it's the technology that precedes the understanding of the principles. This is what happens in science a lot: a tool is invented, and the tool then leads to some new realization, something that you could now do or see or understand that you could never have understood before. I think that often happens in the arts. Think for instance of my favorite example—because it's the one I've spent my life working in—the recording studio. The multitrack studio was invented for completely mundane reasons so that engineers could could more easily balance the voice against the rest of the performers. They didn't have to make all those decisions before the recording; they could do it afterward. But of course, that humble invention gave rise to a whole different way of making music, really a different understanding of music completely.

Beyond Eno, Brockman's book contains Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) and Douglass Rushkoff (author of Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business, Life, Inc. and Program and Be Programmed) among many others. Johnson pulls from the minds of Clayton Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma), Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class), Tom Kelley (The Art of Innovation) and more. The two books also share Stewart Brand (author of Whole Earth Discipline among other books) as a contributor. Taken together, they make for a really interesting read about culture, innovation, the culture of innovation, and the innovation of culture. I highly recommend both books—and Brian Eno.



Second Acts and our Paperback
Posted Aug. 24, 2011 10:41 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

With weary conviction, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote near the end of his life that "There are no second acts in American lives." He gets picked on a lot for that, mostly because it's an easy and somewhat eloquent introduction to the many stories that get written about second acts in American life. He also wrote that "All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath." If that one is true, our resident wordsmith and editor-extraordinaire, Sally Haldorson, has been holding her breath for quite a while now, making her way through the upcoming paperback edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

It's the book's second act, and it has been reworked significantly with some additions we think you'll love. We're looking forward to the book's release later this year, but I'm sure we'll have to revisit it yet again for a third act someday, because business book publishing didn't stop after our book was finished and neither did the authors of the books that were chosen. And the authors aren't making future editions easier for us, either. They continue churning out wonderful new acts that add to the story and trajectory of their work.

Here is a list of the books coming out just this calender year from authors included in The 100 Best, along with the books that got them there:

And these are not just the second acts for most of these authors—this will be Michael Lewis's fourteenth book. With all of the great new authors entering the game today that we need to discover and read, this level of continued productivity and excellence seems almost unfair to our collective free time.



The Innovator's DNA - An Excerpt
Posted July 19, 2011 8:17 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

You may know Clayton Christensen for his classic works on innovation, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. In fact, The Innovator's Dilemma was included as one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Todd wrote something that struck me as I revisited the review he wrote for the book today.

Many in publishing have a romanticized view of the industry’s origin, beginning with Johannes Gutenberg and the movable type printing press he invented in 1453. While that treasured form has changed little in the past five and a half centuries, the way the book is sold and distributed has changed dramatically in the last thirty years. Independent bookstores first struggled against the mall chains of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, then the big box retailers, Barnes & Noble and Borders, and now, the online superstore, Amazon. And these retail redistributions pale in comparison to the tectonic shifts that lie ahead in print-on-demand and electronic distribution of books. In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen shows how management practices that typically serve executives well fail in the face of just such disruptive innovations.

That seems very relevant to the ongoing Borders saga. And while Borders may be beyond help, today Harvard Business Review Press is releasing a third book in the Innovation series that may help you out, The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, and we were able to get an excerpt for you. Christensen wrote this book with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen. The excerpt we have is from their introduction.

The Innovator's DNA
BY JEFF DYER, HAL GREGERSEN, AND CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN

Innovation. It’s the lifeblood of our global economy and a strategic priority for virtually every CEO around the world. In fact, a recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one “leadership competency” of the future. The power of innovative ideas to revolutionize industries and generate wealth is evident from history: Apple iPod outplays Sony Walkman, Starbucks’s beans and atmosphere drown traditional coffee shops, Skype uses a strategy of “free” to beat AT&T and British Telecom, eBay crushes classified ads, and Southwest Airlines flies under the radar of American and Delta. In every case, the creative ideas of innovative entrepreneurs produced powerful competitive advantages and tremendous wealth for the pioneering company. Of course, the retrospective $1 million question is, how did they do it? And perhaps the prospective $10 million question is, how could I do it?

The Innovator’s DNA tackles these fundamental questions—and more. The genesis of this book centered on the question that we posed years ago to “disruptive technologies” guru and coauthor Clayton Christensen: where do disruptive business models come from? Christensen’s best-selling books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, conveyed important insight into the characteristics of disruptive technologies, business models, and companies. The Innovator’s DNA emerged from an eight-year collaborative study in which we sought a richer understanding of disruptive innovators—who they are and the innovative companies they create. Our project’s primary purpose was to uncover the origins of innovative—and often disruptive— business ideas. So we interviewed nearly a hundred inventors of revolutionary products and services, as well as founders and CEOs of game-changing companies built on innovative business ideas. These were people such as eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Research In Motion’s Mike Lazaridis, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff. Virtually all of the innovators we quote, with the exception of Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin), and Howard Schultz (Starbucks)—who have written autobiographies or have given numerous interviews about innovation—are from our interviews.

We also studied CEOs who ignited innovation in existing companies, such as Procter & Gamble’s A. G. Lafley, eBay’s Meg Whitman, and Bain & Company’s Orit Gadiesh. Some entrepreneurs’ companies that we studied were successful and well known; some were not (for example, Movie Mouth, Cow-Pie Clocks, Terra Nova BioSystems). But all offered a surprising and unique value proposition relative to incumbents. For example, each offered new or different features, pricing, convenience, or customizability compared to their competition. Our goal was less to investigate the companies’ strategies than it was to dig into the thinking of the innovators themselves. We wanted to understand as much about these people as possible, including the moment (when and how) they came up with the creative ideas that launched new products or businesses. We asked them to tell us about the most valuable and novel business idea that they had generated during their business careers, and to tell us where those ideas came from. Their stories were provocative and insightful, and surprisingly similar.

As we reflected on the interviews, consistent patterns of action emerged. Innovative entrepreneurs and executives behaved similarly when discovering breakthrough ideas. Five primary discovery skills—skills that compose what we call the innovator’s DNA—surfaced from our conversations. We found that innovators “Think Different,” to use a well-known Apple slogan. Their minds excel at linking together ideas that aren’t obviously related to produce original ideas (we call this cognitive skill “associational thinking” or “associating”). But to think different, innovators had to “act different.” All were questioners, frequently asking questions that punctured the status quo. Some observed the world with intensity beyond the ordinary. Others networked with the most diverse people on the face of the earth. Still others placed experimentation at the center of their innovative activity. When engaged in consistently, these actions—questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting—triggered associational thinking to deliver new businesses, products, services, and/or processes. Most of us think creativity is an entirely cognitive skill; it all happens in the brain. A critical insight from our research is that one’s ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of behaviors. This is good news for us all because it means that if we change our behaviors, we can improve our creative impact.

After surfacing these patterns of action for famous innovative entrepreneurs and executives, we turned our research lens to the less famous but equally capable innovators around the world. We built a survey based on our interviews that taps into the discovery skills of innovative leaders. To date, we have collected self-reported and 360-degree data on these discovery skills from over five hundred innovators and over five thousand executives in more than seventy-five countries. We found the same pattern for famous as well as less famous leaders.

We then turned to see what we could learn about the DNA of innovative organizations and teams. We started by looking at BusinessWeek’s annual ranking of innovative companies. This ranking, based on votes from executives, identified companies with a reputation for being innovative. A quick look at the BusinessWeek lists from 2005 to 2009 shows Apple as number one and Google, number two. OK, intuitively that sounds right. But we felt that the BusinessWeek methodology (executives voting on which companies are innovative) produces a list that is largely a popularity contest based on past performance. Indeed, do General Electric, Sony, Toyota, and BMW deserve to be on the list of most innovative companies today? Or are they simply there because they have been successful in the past?

To answer these questions, we developed our own list of innovative companies based on current innovation prowess (and expectations of future innovations). We thought the best way was to see whether investors—voting with their wallets—could give us insight into which companies they thought most likely to produce future innovations. We worked with HOLT (a division of Credit Suisse Boston that had done a similar analysis for The Innovator’s Solution) to develop a methodology based on a company’s “innovation premium”—a stock market premium based on investors’ belief that a company will produce innovations, and even bigger income streams, in the future. It is a premium that every executive, and every company, would like to have.

We unveil our list of the most innovative companies—ranked by innovation premium—in the book. Not surprisingly, we found that our top twenty-five companies include some on the BusinessWeek list—such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Procter & Gamble. But we also learned that companies such as Salesforce.com (software), Intuitive Surgical (health care equipment), Hindustan Lever (household products), Alstom (electrical equipment), and Monsanto (chemicals) have similar premiums. And as we studied these firms in greater detail, we saw several patterns that shed light on the DNA of innovative organizations, and how you too can actively encourage and support others’ innovation efforts.

We hope that The Innovator’s DNA will encourage you to reclaim some of your youthful curiosity. Staying curious keeps us engaged and our organizations alive. Imagine how competitive your company will be ten years from now without innovators if its people didn’t find any new ways to improve its processes, products, or services. Clearly, your company would not survive. Innovators constitute the core of any company’s, or even country’s, ability to compete.

© Copyright 2011 Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen

All rights reserved

Excerpted from The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JEFF DYER is the Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy at the Marriott School, Brigham Young University. He is widely published in strategy and business journals and was the fourth most cited management scholar in 1996-2006.

HAL GREGERSEN is a professor of leadership at INSEAD. He consults to organizations around the world on innovation, globalization, and transformation and has published extensively in leading academic and business journals.

CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the architect of and the world’s foremost authority on disruptive innovation.



Friday Links
Posted May 20, 2011 10:47 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ They will cost you $6.95 each (unless you have a subscription), but if all you read over the weekend are this year's McKinsey Award winners, you'll return to work on Monday much smarter for the effort. The McKinsey Award is given out each year to recognize the best articles published in the Harvard Business Review. This year's overall winner is Clayton Christensen—Harvard Professor and author of The Innovator's Dilemma and the soon-to-be-released The Innovator's DNA —for his article asking his graduating class How Will You Measure Your Life?

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

Second place was shared between Roger Martin, author of the recently released Fixing the Game, and the authors of The Other Side of Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. Martin's article was on The Age of Customer Capitalism, Govindarajan and Trimble's on how to Stop the Innovation Wars

➻ I've linked to Umair Haques HBR posts before, and I'm doing so again because he asked a provocative and important question this morning.

Here's a question: What if, just maybe, it's our way of life itself that's a bubble?

To illustrate why I ask, consider this set of questions: How's your house price doing? Where would your 401K be, if central banks withdrew life support for banks? How steep is a college education this year (hint: on average, 10-15% more than last year)? How are weekly grocery and gas prices doing? Where are commodity prices—not to mention gold—headed? Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble: these days, it seems, everywhere you look, there's a bubble inflating—or popping.

He calls this The Opulence Bubble, but he's not arguing that we stop growing or cease living comfortably, just that "'more, bigger, faster, cheaper' doesn't necessarily add up to or equal 'better, wiser, smarter, fitter, closer.'"

➻ Just one week after citing a University of Washington study in which E-textbooks flunked an early test, and stating that "schools may want to pause before jumping on the e-textbook bandwagon," Nicholas Carr is reporting that Florida schools are doing just that and will soon have Zero tolerance for print.

That's right: four years from now it will be against the law to give a kid a printed book in a Florida school. One lawmaker said the bill was intended to "meet the students where they are in their learning styles," which means nothing but sounds warm and fuzzy.

His closing remarks? "But remember: When print is outlawed only outlaws will have print." I really enjoy Nicholas Carr.

➻ Jon, Aaron, Carol and Jack are going to be outlaws from the office next week, at BEA in New York, and I really hope none of them are interested in How To Look for a Publishing Job at BEA because we need all of them here—very much. Please come home, guys.

➻ One reason I need Jack to come back is that he forwards videos like the one below of Paul Simon inviting a fan out of the crowd to play a song, writing "This is why music is special. It touches something inside us. Joyous."






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