What You Need Is A Fundamental Humility

In A Large Successful Company Where Your Power Base As Ceo Isn't All That Secure, It's Hard For A Ceo To Pursue A Truly Disruptive Strategy.

Quite Often Startups Were First Out Of The Gate With A Sustaining Technology. But Somehow The Leaders Got The Technology And Stayed Atop Their Industries. Sometimes They Acquired The Startup; Sometimes They Just Developed The Technology As A Follower And Used Their Muscle And Mass To Win. But They Always Won.

The Reason Why It Is So Difficult For Existing Firms To Capitalize On Disruptive Innovations Is That Their Processes And Their Business Model That Make Them Good At The Existing Business Actually Make Them Bad At Competing For The Disruption. Companies In Fact Are Specifically Organized To Under-invest In Disruptive Innovations! This Is One Reason Why We Often Suggest That Companies Set Up Separate Teams Or Groups To Commercialize Disruptive Innovations. When Disruptive Innovations Have To Fight With Other Innovations For Resources, They Tend To Lose Out.

Questions Are Places In Your Mind Where Answers Fit. If You Haven't Asked The Question, The Answer Has Nowhere To Go. It Hits Your Mind And Bounces Right Off. You Have To Ask The Question - You Have To Want To Know - In Order To Open Up The Space For The Answer To Fit.

It's Like In Biological Evolution: The Population Will Evolve, Even Though Individuals Can't. The Same Thing Happens In The Corporate World: The Population Of Business Units Within Corporations Evolves, Even Though Individual Business Units Can't. That's Because The Capabilities Of Business Units Reside In Their Processes And Their Values, And By Their Very Nature, Processes And Values Are Inflexible And Meant Not To Change.