The Innovator's Dilemma

Clayton Christensen reveals why the best-managed companies fail not despite their excellence but because of it. Through the disk drive industry's brutal cycles, from 14-inch to 8-inch to 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch architectures, he shows how Seagate's engineers built working prototypes only to have IBM's lukewarm response kill the project. The Law of Resource Dependence explains the mechanism: customers and investors, not managers, control where money flows. Sears, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Control Data all fell into the same trap of listening too well.

You'll learn:

- Why performance oversupply opens the door for inferior technologies

- How Conner Peripherals captured portable computing while Seagate hesitated

- What value networks reveal about organizational blind spots