Quotes About Adaptation

Would it insult you if I used your alphabet? I don't think I could start from scratch.

successful companies don't succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong. The

The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business's success.

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.

Getting something wrong doesn't mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.

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.

They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don't even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. Those

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.

People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this…is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror-because data is only available about the past.

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.

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

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

But do you know what? Gravity doesn't care! It will always pull things down, and I may as well plan on it.

Adopting new technologies can improve the way we solve Jobs to Be Done. But what's important is that you focus on understanding the underlying job, not falling in love with your solution for it.

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.

Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together.

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.

The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.

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?