I picked up a copy of The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen ex-of HBS, on the cheap somewhere some years ago. Published in 1997, people in the tech world still talk about it and apply his thinking, so I figured there must be something there. When my office was out in RTP I had it by my desk for a long time and it was one of those books I really meant to read. But I never actually read books like these. They are just too boring. What I will do is listen to them in the car. We had a ton of credits on Libro.FM (long story, which I will spare you) so I snapped and up and listened to it there.
Alas, the guy who was reading it had one of those ridiculous generic would be avuncular white guy voices, which didn't spice it up much. Nonetheless, I learned a fair amount. Christensen's main question is why well-managed profitable organizations continually get their legs cut off by disruptive innovation. Looking at examples from the disc drive, mechanical excavator, automotive, motorcycle and other industries, he cooks up a framework which shows that big organizations are under-incented to take risks to go after small, low-margin, emerging markets, and that their employees are therefore similarly disincented to take risks on them. That's the short of it, roughly.
It was not the best book I've ever listened to but it didn't kill me.
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