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 Innovatorâs Solution summarises a set of theories that can guide managers who need to grow new businesses with predictable successâto become the disruptors rather than the disrupteesâand 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.
âI Donât 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.
Our guestâs 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 âPath-breakingâ, and Jim Collins has called him âOne of our most important strategic thinkers for the 21st century.â
It is a pleasure to welcome Ron Adner.Â
Find Ron here: https://ronadner.com
Using the rational, analytical investment processes that most well-managed companies have developed, it is nearly impossible to build a logical case for diverting resources from known customer needs in established markets to markets and customers that seem insignificant or do not yet exist.
Clark G. Gilbert on Clayton Christensen, “Dual Transformation” and âFrom Resource Allocation to Strategyâ
As Clayton Christensen reiterated throughout his work, capable managers do not become incapable overnight; they act in what they believe is in the best interests of the organisation they serve. For the executives in Western Union, there was simply no way they could have anticipated that the telephone would ever get good enough to be a competitive threat. As the great innovator Buckminster Fuller said, âThere is nothing in the caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.âÂ