If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher
The old rules of management, the ones taught in MBAs, were created for a different time. And while the 20th century was not that long ago, everything has changed since then — but management practices haven’t caught up.
Traditional management practices are all about optimising the existing business and looking after the existing clients. Under the old rules, we would break our market into segments, look at our competitors in each segment and do our competitor analysis, and then fight to increase our market share in these segments. Our profit and share price provided the scoreboard and told us how well we were managing the organisation.
But the world has changed. Everything is faster; product cycles are shorter; and we are swamped with more information than ever before. I remember a few years ago when Google passed a billion searches a month. There are now more than a billion Google searches a day. That means that on average, every person on the planet searches Google once a week.
Your competitor could now be two kids in a garage, a start-up in Silicon Valley — or in Bangalore, India. Your customers don’t know what’s best for them, and traditional models of management are failing.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by disruptive innovation theorist Clayton Christenson provides stark evidence of this. He demonstrates why outstanding companies that ...
