Clayton Christensen’s book, in 2003, made the word disruptor into every managers’ vocabulary. Innovator’s Dilemma depicted the inability of a successful company to escape its own trap. The very things that made it successful are exactly the ones that will fail it. Since the company will be so well tuned to sustain its successful trajectory, all rational decisions and on-going optimizations will lead to its rigidity and eventual demise. That book gave thousands of smaller companies hope to win over the larger competitors: all they need to come up is a disruptor.
Honestly, for a couple of years, if you don’t utter the words disruption, disruptor, or disruptive technologies in an executive presentation, it is as if you picked the wrong dress code.
This is the, less popular, companion book. Many concepts are the same, but this one gave more details on how to attack with or defend against disruptions.
To summarize, Mr. Christensen presented two disruptive approaches:
- When the current product or technology have over-served the customers, the value shifts to the component suppliers and the disruption will be the integrators of modular components. Think how Dell, Intel, and Microsoft disrupted IBM and DEC.
- There are customers who cannot afford the standard products or technologies. In that case, an inferior offering can capture those non-consumers whose only other option is not having anything at all. This kind of disruption will gradually eat up the current leaders. Think Sony beating out vacuum tube stereo manufacturers.
I found the definition of capability interesting. Mr. Christensen defined it with three elements: resources, processes, and values. He observed that different companies have varied difficulty changing when their capability have different mixes.
At the end, I was less inspired than his first book. It is still a good refresher and thought provoker.
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