Quotes About Change

This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

Necessity remains the mother of invention.

Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.

If good management practice drives the failure of successful firms faced with disruptive technological change, then the usual answers to companies, problems—planning better, working harder, becoming more customer- driven, and taking a longer-term perspective—all exacerbate the problem.

Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. There

On the one hand, if you have a strategy that really is working, you need to deliberately focus to keep everyone working together in the right direction. At the same time, however, that focus can easily cause you to dismiss as a distraction what could actually turn out to be the next big thing.

We adhere to the saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," while not really questioning whether "it" is "broke.

As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.

Robert B. Barr and John Tagg, "From Teaching to Learning—A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," Change

Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead. A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one.

Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.

Figure I.1 The Impact of Sustaining and Disruptive Technological Change

hedonic regression analysis to identify how markets valued individual attributes and how those attribute values changed over time.

Ojomo, "Obsession with ending poverty is where development is going wrong," Guardian, February 8, 2017

There had, therefore, to be a reason why good managers consistently made wrong decisions when faced with disruptive technological change.

understand and harness the principles of disruptive innovation.

when people encounter a significant threat, a response called "threat rigidity" sets in. The instinct of threat rigidity is to cease being flexible and to become "command and control" oriented—to focus everything on countering the threat in order to survive.

Clayton M. Christensen

Clayton M. Christensen

When disruptive change appears on the horizon, managers need to assemble the capabilities to confront the change before it has affected the mainstream business. In other words, they need an organization that is geared toward the new challenge before the old one, whose processes are tuned to the existing business model, has reached a crisis that demands fundamental change.

Managers whose organizations are confronting change must first determine that they have the resources required to succeed. They then need to ask a separate question: does the organization have the processes and values to succeed?

Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it.

Experts' forecasts will always be wrong. It is simply impossible to predict with any useful degree of precision how disruptive products will be used or how large their markets will be. An important corollary is that, because markets for disruptive technologies are unpredictable, companies' initial strategies for entering these markets will generally be wrong.

The leading firms in the established technology remain financially strong until the disruptive technology is, in fact, in the midst of their mainstream market.