E-Book Overview
Disruption- is a business buzzword that has gotten out of control. Today everything and everyone seem to be characterized as disruptive -- or, if they aren't disruptive yet, it's only a matter of time before they become so. In this book, Joshua Gans cuts through the chatter to focus on disruption in its initial use as a business term, identifying new ways to understand it and suggesting new tools to manage it. Almost twenty years ago Clayton Christensen popularized the term in his bookThe Innovator's Dilemma, writing of disruption as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen, and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption -- Fujifilm and Canon, for example -- and why some like Blockbuster and Encyclopedia Britannica have not. Departing from the conventional wisdom, Gans identifies two kinds of disruption: demand-side, when successful firms focus on their main customers and underestimate market entrants with innovations that target niche demands; and supply-side, when firms focused on developing existing competencies become incapable of developing new ones. Gans describes the full range of actions business leaders can take to deal with each type of disruption, from -self-disrupting- independent internal units to tightly integrated product development. But therein lies the disruption dilemma: A firm cannot practice both independence and integration at once. Gans shows business leaders how to choose their strategy so their firms can deal with disruption while continuing to innovate.
E-Book Content
The Disruption Dilemma
The Disruption Dilemma
Joshua Gans
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2016 Joshua Gans All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Sabon LT Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gans, Joshua, 1968– author. Title: The disruption dilemma / Joshua Gans. Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015039869 | ISBN 9780262034487 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Crisis management. | Organizational change. Classification: LCC HD49 .G36 2016 | DDC 658.4/056—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039869 10 9
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Contents
Preface
vii
1
Introduction
2
What Is Disruption?
3
Sources of Disruption
33
4
Predicting Disruption
49
5
Managing Disruption
65
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Self-Disruption
7
Insuring against Disruption
8
Reexamining Disruption
9
Future of Disruption
Notes Index
137 159
1 13
83 97
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Preface
The word disruption was brought prominently to managerial attention by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma.1 Since then, many business leaders have gone from being complacent about innovation and technical change as forces to being petrified by them. For Christensen’s message was simple: just managing well does not make you safe. Indeed, it could be your downfall. As a professor who keenly followed these developments daily, I wondered whether that initial message, for all the good that it did in shaki