What Makes Great Leaders Great: Management Lessons from Icons Who Changed the World

CHAPTER 21

Practice Creative Destruction

LEARNING FROM

Joseph Schumpeter

The process of creative destruction is firmly associated with the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950). Many people are familiar with the concept, yet few organizations apply it systematically. Schumpeter’s main underlying idea is set out in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”¹

Schumpeter was the first influential economist to vehemently advocate the view that a dynamic imbalance, caused by the ...