Businesses throw Hail Marys when encountering a crisis, such as declining sales or disruptive innovation, or technology suddenly upends their business plan. Equally, leaders throw Hail Marys to meet analyst expectations when they have been coasting in the game for a long time. In sports, there is a thin line between arrogance and confidence, and business organisations often fall into the success trap.
In today’s business world of flux, explore units are agile, decentralised, experimental cultures, loose work processes, strong entrepreneurial and technical competencies, and relatively young and neurodiverse employees. In contrast to the exploit units, these small entrepreneurial units are inefficient, rarely profitable, and have no established histories. They often deliberately violate the norms valued in older parts of the organization.
Because the explore units are wildly different from the exploit incumbent, explorers are often undermined by the parent company, whose short-term needs override exploration. While the exploit teams win in the short term, they sink the company in the long.
Leaders must rightsize the organisation for their current reality when confronting change, a difficult task, as Kodak discovered.
History is replete with examples where bankrupt organisations had all the ingredients they needed to endure, but their perspective biased their evaluation. In many cases, engineers at established firms had invented the same technology that led to their firm’s demise. However, the entrants led the commercialisation of disruptive technologies rather than incumbents because of the relativity problem.
It is a pleasure to welcome a great friend of Clay Christensen, yet another soul deeply touched by the man, the author of “Stall points” and author of the 2014 paper, The Capitalist’s Dilemma, Derek van Bever.
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.
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.
Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn’s “Disrupting Class” is an unsettling title for a book about the schooling process.
The title conveys multiple meanings.
The principal message is that disruption can usefully frame why schools have struggled to improve and how to solve these problems.
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.