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Summary: Calling all innovators out there...
Review: This book takes a radical position that great companies can fail precisely because they excel at the commonly accepted practice of good management. And it shows companies how they can avoid that fate.
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Summary: The Blueprint for Your Dot.Com is At Hand
Review: In the space of a few months, I've bumped into a half-dozen corporate planners who've told me, "Drop everything you're doing and run--do not walk--to your nearest bookseller and get Clayton Christenson's The Innovator's Dilemma." Investigating further, I found that, in the industry press, Christenson's book is viewed as The New Gospel. Now having read the thing, I can see what all the fuss is about; by the final chapter, the counterintuitive idea that (under clearly specified conditions) "rigorous pursuit of your customer's interest can indeed sink your firm" seems as inevitable as the sunrise. Moreover, reading Christenson now, as Wall Street lurches through the Era of Dot.Com/Madness, it's easy to believe the book, and Chapter Nine in particular, has served a hefty percentage of recent internet start-ups as a template for mapping the market and assessing whether the technology offered is sufficiently disruptive. (Christenson's use of the term "technology" is process-related and more than just the latest widget). As a public sector drone, I was further impressed that Christenson's analytic approach is broadly, if metaphorically, applicable to a range of organizations--non-profit, non-commercial, public--trying to keep from being overrun by the forces of change. Some critics have pooh-poohed Christenson's analysis as old wine in a new bottle--"what's the big deal about successful firms having difficulty dealing with the low end of their markets?" etc.--but the lucid writing, clear plan, well-sprung analytic framework (particularly the integration of "value networks" and "technology trajectories"), and compelling marshaling of case material make this an enjoyable, often revelatory, and, yes, innovative dissection of how great firms become undone by new technologies.
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Summary: The Intro and First Chapters are worth the book
Review: Much of the focus on this book and its popularlity has been on innabilities of companies to adapt to major tech shifts and the great data to support this (though I wish there was a more accessible example outside of the disk drive industry that was as well researched). I would contend that there is a profound gem hidden early in the book regarding the concept of 'value networks'. (I'm sure some org behavior folks have thought about this but few people in the strategy -- esp. mgmt or change consulting -- have taken this to heart.) Organizations are a network of structural relationships between stakeholders (employees, suppliers, investors, customers, et al) that is highly inflexible (this is what creates the consistency necessary large orgs and their quality expectations, requirements). When organzations try to do something new, this network of relationships often keeps change in check. Forget the tech angle, this is about companies, momentum and inflexibility and how most companies can't change or dramatically evolve without leadership that recognizes that the entire network must be primed to accepted radical transformation and its requisite ambiguity (e.g., GE and Gerstner or Maytag and Lloyd Ward). Totally worth trudging through the numbers.
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Summary: Read it... or die
Review: If you've managed to develop something you wanna market but your actual customers won't accept it because they don't need it, please don't throw it away! This book will tell you what to do with it before a new competitor (a start-up company maybe?) grabs it and markets it succesfully to an emerging-not-discovered-yet base of customers. Do you understand now what's the innovator's dilemma?
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Summary: Absolutely a MUST READ, no delimmas!
Review: This book is a MUST READ. Unlike many business books in which ideas come out of thin air, this one is grounded in rock solid research. If you get this book, make sure you also read the author's article in the March 2000 Harvard Business Review. Key Lesson of this book: The most unexpected sources of trouble a perfect customer centric company are precisely those customer-centric mentalities. Every page of this book is worth the twenty something dollars. If you miss reading this one, you are missing out on some of the fundamental ideas that will shape the new economy. Beg, borrow (from your library), or steal...but do read this one! The last few pages are however filled with numerous statistics that do not necessarily fit in a more practioner oriented book like this.
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Summary: Entertaining little tale of a technology
Review: This is a fast, entertaining history of the development of computer disks. It does illustrate the dilemma stockholder-owned companies are in over new technologies, but it doesn't pretend to be a heavyweight treatise on economics, so I'm not quite sure why it produced such venom from some customer reviewers. Maybe you have to know (care?) about magnetic disks to enjoy and understand the book. I can imagine it might perplex, or even bore, anyone else.
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Summary: Typical dressed-up academic rehash
Review: Does no-one read anymore? Despite all the assembled love notes to Clayton Christen here, it would seem not. Because this book is a typical re-hash of old ideas in dressed-up tech-friendly clothing.F'rinstance, the idea that prior market leaders are often swept away in new waves of market innovations is as old as Schumpeter. Christensen adds some nice historical frisson to the story -- good for trotting out at Friday beer bashes and impressing management -- but nothing more. It has been documented before (and more entertainingly) in books about NeXT, Digital, Apple, IBM, and others. Even Computer Wars, Morris and Ferguson's more recent vintage book hits the same notes -- and you'd don't have to go back more than a decade to find that one. Anyway, nice stories, but this is the kind of opportunistic and wildly over-applicable theorizing that gives rise to too many conferences. Whoops, too late.
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Summary: A Frightening Book for Anyone in a Hi-Tech Industry
Review: This is a fascinating and frightening book for anyone who works in an industry where a product can become obsolete quickly. Christensen uses computer disk drives to tell his story, but the principle is basic. Public companies can't afford to abandon profitable old technologies for newer generation products, but will lose market share later if they don't. Christensen provides all the graphs and tables you could want to make his point.
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Summary: Identifying the horns of the dilemma.
Review: Prior to reading this book, I chalked up the misfortunes of the well run companies of our time to the vagaries of the market place and put them in the same shoulder shrugging category of "bad things happen to good people." But now I have a new way of looking at success and failure due to disruptive technology. I better understand my own frustrations of trying to do new things in a large corporation given the further insight from Christensen that assets are really managed by customers, not our own managers. That is what makes this book scary. There seems little hope of any large corporation staying on top of disruptive technology unless they follow the prescription of segregating those innovations from the usual corporate overhead structure. That means spinning off groups, taking equity positions in start-up firms, and/or completely funding start-ups to grow the new markets. The writing is clear, the data gathered is thorough and fully documented with ample notes, the logic is concise, and the conclusions are entirely logical. Christensen gives us formulas for success including agnostic marketing to help us recognize emerging markets. The case studies are at once interesting and compelling. This is a must read for managers in any industry. Dr. Andrew S. Grove, Chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation had this to say, "This book addresses a tough problem that most successful companies will face eventually. It's lucid, analytical-and scary."
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Summary: Superb capture of Change
Review: The author Christensen has done a splendid job showing us the elements of change and how they affect product launches, the cycles, and the very survivability of the organization. Numerous case examples add flavor to the book. I commend him for not ignoring the people aspects that lead into change. Bottom Line: highly recommend this book. Also suggest leadership books by Blanchard and "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."
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