It is a pleasure to welcome a great friend of Clay Christensen, yet another soul deeply touched by the man, the author of āStall pointsā and author of the 2014 paper, The Capitalistās Dilemma, Derek van Bever.
Organisations are egregores or egreg-ORGS. Organisations feed on the energy of their employees, suppliers and customers. Organisations reach their goals through the energetic alignment of their collectives. The thoughts and emotions of employees emit energy that is harnessed to create a collective entity greater than the sum of its parts. Egregores are not always harmful but have led to genocide, slavery and war. For this article, I want to highlight the idea of an organisation sapping the energy of its people and ostracising those who go against the grain.
Clayton Christensen mentored Bob Moesta, and they became fast friends. Bob was one of the principal architects of the Jobs To Be Done theory. He expands on the theory and shares his respect for his friend Clay.
In, “How Will You Measure Your Life?”, Clay Christensen and Karen Dillon apply the theories developed by Clayton Christensen to our lives.
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 Innovatorās Solution summarises a set of theories that can guide managers who need to grow new businesses with predictable successāto become the disruptors rather than the disrupteesāand 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.
āI Donāt Have an Opinion, the Theory Has an Opinion” – Clayton Christensen, inoculating value attribution bias by using the lens of theory.
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.