As technology continues to disrupt traditional industries shortening the average lifespan of corporations worldwide, Lead And Disrupt discusses how companies can be nimble and ambidextrous to solve the innovator’s dilemma.
Lead And Disrupt Summary
Lead And Disrupt shows how some companies manage to successfully innovate in disruptive markets to succeed while competitors fall by the wayside
Attempting to solve the Innovator’s Dilemma, O’Reilly and Tushman explain the factors that predict how successfully corporate leaders are able to navigate a changing world, presenting a guidebook for those looking to transform a company in a changing industry.
Below are some of the key insights from the book.
Key Insights
- All dinosaurs can rise to become unicorns and Unicorns can fall to become dinosaurs almost overnight.
- All corporate failures are a failure of management and leadership (Drucker)
- The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company was 25 years in the 1980s but today it is less than 12.
- Organisations evolve like species with the key concepts being variation, selection and retention of competitive advantages.
- In the first 10 years of Amazon’s existence, Jeff Bezos highlights 25 pivot moments where the company either explored or exploited an innovative path
- These include: investing in dotcoms, collaborations, affiliate programmes, SWAT teams for music and film and auctions to compete with eBay.
- Sears became the biggest retailer in the world by pivoting from a catalogue to out of town retail outlets during demographic shift. It failed to compete with Walmart as a result of a similar demographic and cultural shift.
- Kodak played defensive while Fujifilm took proactive steps to shift its organisational strengths into new markets and build new organisational strengths at the same time.
- The story of IBM’s rise, fall and transformation is a story of its Emerging Business Opportunity units (EBOs) which operated with clear strategic direction, senior level support and the flexibility to work outside of typical quarterly goals.
- Jeff Bezos reattaches his 1997 letter ‘Long Term, Low Margin’ belifs to each Amazon shareholder update. ‘How innovative can you need results within the same quarter’.
- When taxi drivers take part in strikes against digital disruption, the user base of Uber is known to increase substantially.
- You are either in the business of finding out how to charge more or finding out how to charge less – Jeff Bezos