Investing In Our People Is Going To

In My First Career I Had Founded My Own Company, With A Group Of Mit Professors, Before Coming To Harvard To Finish My Doctorate, And So I Had A Deep Respect For The Brains, Talent, And Dedication Of Managers. That Made It Hard For Me To Believe The Attributions In The Business Press That Stupid Management Was To Blame. So I Looked Elsewhere For An Explanation.

But Actually Theory Is Very Practical. Gravity Is A Theory, For Example. It Allows You To Predict That If You Step Off A Cliff You Will Fall; You Don't Have To Collect Data On That.

By The Time It Becomes Obvious That A Technology Will Have Truly Disruptive Impact, It Is Often Too Late To Take Action. This Is One Reason Why We Are Such Advocates Of Using Theory To Try To Analyze Industry Change. Conclusive Evidence That Proves That A Company Needs To Take Action Almost Never Exists. In Fact, The Data Can Fool Management, Lulling Them Into A False Sense Of Security.

If You Want To Make Better Theory, You've Got To Use The Best That's Available And Look Through The Lens Of Another Discipline To See If You Can Uncover More Anomalies. By Looking At The Phenomena Of Failure From The Perspective Of Sales, Marketing, Finance, General Management, And The Equity Markets, I Was Able To See Things That Rebecca [henderson] Hadn't.

In Most Instances, Biotechnology, Though A Radically Different Approach, Is A Sustaining Technology: It's A Dramatically Improved Way Of Targeting Problems That We Hadn't Been Able To Solve With The Conventional Approach Of Mainstream Pharmaceutical Companies.