Quotes About Adaptation

When managers assign employees to tackle a critical innovation, they instinctively work to match the requirements of the job with the capabilities of the individuals whom they charge to do it.

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.

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

If history is any guide, companies that keep disruptive technologies bottled up in their labs, working to improve them until they suit mainstream markets, will not be nearly as successful as firms that find markets that embrace the attributes of disruptive technologies as they initially stand.

Discovery-driven planning

Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

The past is a good predictor of the future only when conditions in the future resemble conditions in the past. And what works for a firm in one context might not work for another firm in a different context.

While some people will argue that you should always have the next five years of your life planned out, others have followed a strategy of just seeing what has come along and will tell you that it's worked well for them.

Just Because You Have Feathers …

The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. As a parent, you will try many things with your child that simply won't work. When this happens, it can be very easy to view it as a failure. Don't. If anything, it's the opposite.

When the organization's capabilities reside primarily in its people, changing capabilities to address the new problems is relatively simple. But when the capabilities have come to reside in processes and values, and especially when they have become embedded in culture, change can be extraordinarily difficult.

Coping with the relentless onslaught of technology change was akin to trying to climb a mudslide raging down a hill. You have to scramble with everything you've got to stay on top of it, and if you ever once stop to catch your breath, you get buried.

As you're living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you're heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they're not supporting the strategy you've decided upon, then you're not implementing that strategy at all.

the firms that led the industry in every instance of developing and adopting disruptive technologies were entrants to the industry, not its incumbent leaders.

Because an organization's structure and how its groups work together may have been established to facilitate the design of its dominant product, the direction of causality may ultimately reverse itself: The organization's structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products.

Managers who confront disruptive technological change must be leaders, not followers, in commercializing disruptive technologies.

that leadership is more crucial in coping with disruptive technologies than with sustaining ones, and that small, emerging markets cannot solve the near-term growth and profit requirements of large companies.

Creating experiences for your children doesn't guarantee that they'll learn what they need to learn. If that doesn't happen, you have to figure out why that experience didn't achieve it. You might have to iterate through different ideas until you get it right. The important thing for a parent is, as always, to never give up; never stop trying to help your children get the right experiences to prepare them for life.

Why do well-managed companies fail? He concludes that they often fail because the very management practices that have allowed them to become industry leaders also make it extremely difficult for them to develop the disruptive technologies that ultimately steal away their markets.

But in disruptive situations, action must be taken before careful plans are made. Because much less can be known about what markets need or how large they can become, plans must serve a very different purpose: They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.

Few people have physically and emotionally survived more than one SAP implementation project.42

important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it's time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.

We know that people who fail in their jobs often do so not because they are inherently incapable of succeeding, but because their experiences have not prepared them for the challenges of that job—in other words, they've taken the wrong "courses.

The very processes and values that constitute an organization's capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.