Good morning.
Clay Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, is the most influential business book of the last three decades. It imprinted on every good business leader’s mind the possibility that, even if they did everything “right,� they could find their company facing fatal disruption from a low-cost competitor. “Disrupt yourself� became a modern business mantra as a result.
Christensen died on Jan. 23 at the age of 67, due to complications of a long battle with leukemia. His last interview with Karen Dillon, his long-time collaborator, is being published this morning by MIT Sloan Management Review. CEO Daily got an early peek. Excerpts here:
On his concern about U.S. productivity and growth:
“I absolutely worry about this. In…The Prosperity Paradox, we describe three types of innovation…’sustaining innovations,’ which… is the process of making good products better…’efficiency innovation,’ which is when a company tries to do more with less…and ‘market-creating innovations,’ meaning they build a new market for new customers.’ [The last category] are the source of growth in any economy… My sense is that we in the United States, like many other developed countries, are investing far too much energy in efficiency and sustaining innovations, and not enough in market-creating innovations.�
On the limits of Big Data:
“Big data…tends to gloss over or ignore anomalies… [It] tends to be far more focused on correlation rather than causation, and as such ignores examples where something doesn’t follow what tends to happen on average. It’s only by exploring anomalies that we can develop a deeper understanding of causation.�
On share buybacks:
“Buybacks are not inherently wrong, but at an extreme they indicate an inability of a firm (and perhaps an entire economic system) to identify market-creating opportunities.�
On why companies still haven’t solved the innovator’s dilemma … even though his book came out 23 years ago:
“Companies certainly know more about disruption than they did in 1995, but I still speak and write to executives who haven’t grasped the implications of the theory. The forces that combine to cause disruption are like gravity…they are constant and always at work within and around them. It takes very skilled and very astute leaders to be navigating disruption on a daily base.�
“In my experience, it seems that it’s often easier for executives to spot disruptions occurring in someone else’s industry rather than their own, where their deep and nuanced knowledge can sometimes distract them from seeing the writing on the wall.�
More news below. And be sure to look at this new research by Fortune Analytics which shows, among other things, that a surprisingly large percentage of Amazon Prime customers—29%—also bought online from Walmart during the holiday season.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
