Very little bullshit and a lot of compelling theory and sound reasoning about getting the initial conditions right when building new growth ventures. Indeed, the graduated version of the Innovator's Dilemma!

Not your typical shallow marketing book filled with mumbo-jumbo which could be condensed into a few pages.

This no-bullshit book dives deep into the case studies and research to provide great insights thinking about the strategy and execution of it. Few days after finishing it I still find myself thinking about some of the concepts introduced here (e.g. competing with nonconsumption).

I rate it 4 stars because it is not an easy read and listening to the audio version definitely didn't help with that. Will take some time in the future to actually read it.

Here are the main takeaways:

1. Never target an incumbent with a sustaining solution
In almost all cases, an incumbent will win if they are threatened by a sustaining technology. They will simply do more of what they’re good at, serving their customers with product improvements. The solution is to enter the market from below. Create a product that is not as good as the incumbents', but is cheaper, easier or more convenient. It’s important to begin with targeting a lower profit margin. Incumbents would rather let a low margin business go and concentrate on high margin growth (flee, not fight).

2. Customers ‘hire’ products to get specific ‘jobs’ done
"Companies that target their products at the circumstances in which customers find themselves, rather than at the customers themselves, are those that can launch predictably successful products."

3. Core competence is a dangerously inward-looking notion
"Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at. And staying competitive as the basis for competition shifts necessarily requires a willingness and ability to learn new things rather than clinging hopefully to the sources of past glory."

4. Proprietary architectures lead to overshooting what the market needs
An industry is always in a state of flux and never completely one or the other. The trick for senior managers is to build up the instinct for where the market is moving and to move towards it.
"Managers of industry-leading businesses need to watch vigilantly in the right places to spot these trends as they begin because the processes of commoditization and de-commoditization both begin at the periphery, not the core."

5. Use the emergent strategy to develop disruptive innovations
There are two fundamentally different processes for strategy formation: deliberate and emergent. Deliberate is common. It is analytical, rigorous, and formulated after a deep review of factors like market segment sizing, customer needs, competition, projected returns and so on.
Emergent strategy is the cumulative effect of all the day-to-day decisions made to invest and prioritize resources. These decisions are made from middle management and at the individual employee level. You can tell what a company’s strategy is by looking at what comes out of the resource allocation process and not what goes into it. This scenario should dominate when the future is hard to forecast and it is not yet clear which direction the business should take.

6. Appoint people for their ability to learn, not their track record
“It is not as important that managers have succeeded with the problems as it is for them to have wrestled with it and developed the skills and intuition for how to meet the challenge successfully the next time around … Failure and bouncing back from failure can be critical courses in the school of experience.”

7. Be patient for growth and impatient for profit

Launch new-growth businesses regularly, when the core business is in healthy shape. When financial results signal the need to do it, it is probably too late.
As an organization grows, continue to divide up business units so that each unit can launch new ventures and be patient for growth, as they are small enough to benefit from small opportunities (disruptive innovations will start out small).
Minimize the use of profit from the core business to subsidize losses in the new-growth ventures. Be impatient for profit and patient for growth. If a venture is profitable, it remains likely to continue even when the core business is struggling.


8. Launching disruptive businesses can be a repeatable process
1. The best time to invest in growth is when the company is growing.
2. Appoint senior executive to shepherd ideas and resource allocation.
3. Create a team and a process for shaping ideas.
4. Train the troops. Sales, marketing, and engineering, in particular, must be trained to spot disruptive ideas because these individuals are most likely to encounter them and see the opportunities.

87%
Excellent book, Made some great strategies as to how to expand using cost effectiveness.
I suppose the next thing that I would barely be interested in is if I could get some examples, Good examples and ideas to implement.

This did help me along, though. And helped me to evolve and develop my business ideas and build confidence.

New ideas, new paths, awesome awesome.

It is not an easy book, I wont lie.
And doing it in Audio format probably made it even harder.

It is written in a very formal style. And although he tries to summarise key points and keep referring back to them, there is just so much information/theory/examples in this book.

You need to be in the type of position in a company where you get exposed to these high level sales/ideas/innovation decisions for this book to probably make any sense.

It really does clarify a lot about why certain things work, and why others don't.

The book is truly insightful. Doing the Audio version you probably just need a summary sheet to reference back to, since there is no way you can recall all that was said.

Other books that I've read about building a business and entrepreneurship etc. always focus on an isolated case of how someone with unlimited funding made a success etc. This book, being based on theory and case studies made a lot more sense.

Solved a dilemma I had.

This probably one of my top 3 favorite business books. The innovators dilemma gets all the praise this book actually gives tactical advice. My favorite takeaway from it is that all truly disruptive innovative products target "non consumption" or users that previously couldn't afford or use an existing technology.

This is a follow-on book to The Innovator's Dilemma, which I read last year. In this book, Christensen details his management theory regarding the differences in how you should lead and allocate resources to a project, depending on whether the project presents an opportunity for sustaining or disruptive innovation.

Decent book that covers many of the same concepts in Christensen's other books about innovation. Not as good or insightful as his other work.

Picked up this book off-hand out of curiosity, but couldn't put it down. Many of the books in this genre are full of fluff, but this one is filled with theory and insight. This evening, I was reading an article on Google moving into the netbook arena next year with its mobile-based Android operating system. Steve Ballmer has repeatedly dismissed the idea of Android/Chrome being any threat to Microsoft Office, but Google is doing exactly what this book warns, positioning itself in a seemingly non-threatening space ripe for upward expansion.

A week after putting this down, I'm still thinking about the content.

Some ideas from this book are good, but it was written years ago, so many of the ideas are old and not possible to be applied in 2024.

nice read

I’m unable to take Christensen’s Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise course at HBS so read this book as my disruptive alternative to non-consumption. It achieved the job I needed it to do, which is to give me 50% of the course content for one audible credit and roughly ten hours of listening.

Jest aside, this book felt like a must read for folks building businesses. The idea of a ‘job to be done’ is now a mainstay in product management, the author’s focus on underlying cost structure as a key influencer of a strategy was salient, and I found the argument to be patient on growth but impatient with profit to be particularly provocative (personally I’ve usually seen the opposite) and compelling.