Competition in the Digital Age
Clay Christensen passed away yesterday at the age of 67. It is hard to think of a management scholar in modern times who has had as broad an impact. There is nary an entrepreneur nor a business person who hasn't heard of his ideas. The same is true of academics. His is credited, most significantly, …
Continue reading "Clay Christensen: Mild-Mannered Disruptor"
One of the themes in The Disruption Dilemma, is that when a firm faces disruption, it is unlikely that the Clay Christensen promoted solution of setting up an independent business unit to compete with startups and itself in that new space will work. There are many reasons for this including, most importantly, that the last …
[This article was initially published in HBR Online on 19th October, 2017] Netflix hit the industry with some bombshell moves this month. First, it announced that it plans to spend $8 billion on original content next year (including on 80 new movies). This is far more than any other online player. Obviously, this is great …
[A later, edited version of this appeared in the Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2016 under the title "Newspapers are social media"] Digitization exposes weak links. Then it breaks them. So much so that it makes you wonder what people were thinking in the first place. And, according to Harvard Business School professor, Bharat Anand in …
Why do people buy books? If this were Family Feud, survey says: to be read. But in the real world, I have never found that convincing. To be sure, books get read but if you consider the life of a book, most of the time it is sitting on a shelf. Moreover, it is rarely …
[This post was originally published on HBR Blogs on 25 July 2016] Last week Elon Musk released the second installment of Tesla’s Master Plan. The first installment had been written in 2006. It outlined Tesla’s automotive strategy and it has been pretty much followed to the letter. The second installment moves Tesla beyond the traditional …
Emma Jacobs has a nice review of The Disruption Dilemma in the Financial Times. It is always pleasing to read that "[t]his is an interesting and well-written, pithy book dealing with one of the buzziest concepts in business." However, right at the end, she took issue with one thing: However, it is strange that Gans …
Marco Arment had an interesting post yesterday on whether Apple is in trouble because of the investments of others, particularly, Google, in AI. He wondered if it would be disrupted in the same way BlackBerry was but Apple itself. Amazon, Facebook, and Google — especially Google — have all invested heavily in big-data web services …
When an established firm aspires to experiment in a radical direction, management gurus recommend opening a skunk works—an organizational home for high-priority original thinking and projects. It is housed away from the organization’s main operations, sometimes in secret or with organizational barriers. Typically the projects involve something of value to the future but are not …
[This post was first published in HBR Blogs] The auto industry is facing a trio of disruptive technologies: electric batteries, autonomous vehicles, and the mobile phone. The first two have been long-standing threats, relatively speaking, and are embodied in one company, Tesla. Which is why the auto industry’s reaction to Tesla’s announcement on March 31 of …
Digitopoly 