The Innovator's Dilemma

The Library Essay

Failure by Doing Everything Right

Clayton Christensen's study, published in 1997, begins with a puzzle from the disk-drive industry, where well-run leaders were overthrown generation after generation. His explanation became one of the most influential ideas in modern business: the incumbents failed precisely because they listened to their best customers and funded their highest-margin products, while cheap, initially inferior technologies matured in markets beneath their notice until it was too late.

Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, named the pattern disruption, a word the world has since worn smooth, though his version was a precise mechanism rather than a slogan. The book taught executives to fear the trajectory of the inadequate, and its dilemma is genuine; the prescribed defences require a discipline most successful organisations find nearly unnatural.