Today’s book is a book about progress.
Yes, it’s a book about innovation—and how to get better at it.
But at its core, this book is about the struggles we all face to make progress in our lives.
If you’re like many entrepreneurs and managers, the word “progress” might not spring to mind when you’re trying to innovate.
Sports Academies are like Innovation and Incubation Labs
Karen Dillon joins us to share concepts from her book How Will You Measure you Life co-authored with her friend, Clay Christensen
“Butterflies, for all their graces, are merely caterpillars who persevere.” Guillaume Apollinaire, Honda and the emergent strategy in America.
This Thursday Thought highlights the imperative for growth imposed on organisations that have become slaves to stock analysts. When an incumbent, established organisation has enjoyed growth, they experience a challenge similar to the bodybuilder. They do not want to invest in the foundations but would instead focus on the visible growth, the vanity exercises. Investing in and developing disruptive innovation markets is akin to maintaining the ligament, tendon and muscle sheath work. By its very nature, the market size of a new opportunity is small, so the returns also look small. To make matters worse, they are slow, and when compared to the might and muscle of maturity, they look puny.
The Innovator’s Solution summarises a set of theories that can guide managers who need to grow new businesses with predictable success—to become the disruptors rather than the disruptees—and ultimately kill the well-run, established competitors. To succeed predictably, disruptors must be good theorists. As they shape their growth business to be disruptive, they must align every critical process and decision to fit the disruptive circumstance.
“I Don’t Have an Opinion, the Theory Has an Opinion” – Clayton Christensen, inoculating value attribution bias by using the lens of theory.
The paper I wanted to share today aims to provide a common language about the research process that helps management scholars spend less time defending the style of research they have chosen and build more effectively on each other’s work.
I felt this series on Clayton Christensen’s work and theories would be incomplete without this episode.
It is a great pleasure to welcome the co-author of that paper and a person who has built on this work considerably, Paul Carlile.
Apoptosis provides a fitting metaphor for what must happen in organisations to survive continuous cycles of change. Rather than letting the entire organisation die, the corporate body’s sectors, departments, and business units must regularly renew, just like a human body. Like any healthy process, the end of one cycle is the beginning of another, and it is better to embrace this law than to resist it. Easier said than done.
Our guest’s award-winning research introduces a new perspective on value creation and competition when industry boundaries break down in the wake of ecosystem disruption. His two books, The Wide Lens and Winning the Right Game, have been heralded as landmark contributions to strategy literature. Clayton Christensen described his work as “Path-breaking”, and Jim Collins has called him “One of our most important strategic thinkers for the 21st century.”
It is a pleasure to welcome Ron Adner.
Find Ron here: https://ronadner.com