Reddit reviews The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
We found 20 Reddit comments about The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
> The Innovator's Dilemma
Yup.
https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244
In a nutshell, successful incumbents to any industry are so focused on holding onto their present success that eventually a new, smaller entrant who is blocked out from the current market and often has very little to lose, embraces a new technology/paradigm and uses this to disrupt the incumbent, who can't move fast enough to adapt.
Happy to help :) It is a near lifetime of just being a business junky and just loving to read about this stuff. The best and easiest book I give people when they want to learn business is the Personal MBA.
http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-Master-Art-Business/dp/1591845572/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375464773&sr=1-1&keywords=personal+mba+josh+kaufman
It is a solid, easy to read overview of business. You wount become an expert from it, but it is a 'explain like I am five 'introduction into business.
For innovation and new market development specific (My specialty) I'd go with Crossing the Chasm Quick read
http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244
Lastly, take a strategic finance class. No numbers, simply the logic behind what is value. I've been told The Wall Street MBA is a good read but I can't vouch for it.
http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-MBA-Second/dp/007178831X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375464915&sr=1-1&keywords=wall+street+mba
Finance will ultimately change how you think. And not entirely for the better...
That's easy:
Step 1: don't
The end.
Alibaba launched in launched in 2010, back that was innovative enough and it was the right time, today a decade later that market / business model is mature so.
Step 2: look around and see what Innovation can you bring into the market?
This book will help https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244
Hah, that's apt.
It's happened over and over again, see the example of old coke steel mills vs electric steel mills in the book, "The Innovator's Dilemma, how industries get disrupted. It's been clear to me for a long time that bitcoin was a disruptive technology.
Some would say I read too much, but I really enjoyed:
founders at work: Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. (This is one of my favorite books ever!)
the art of the start:Kawasaki provides readers with GIST-Great Ideas for Starting Things-including his field-tested insider's techniques for bootstrapping, branding, networking, recruiting, pitching, rainmaking, and, most important in this fickle consumer climate, building buzz.
the innovator's dilemma: Focusing on “disruptive technology,” Christensen shows why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, The Innovator’s Dilemma presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
And in terms of getting your life together to the point where you are responsible enough to lead others, I would highly suggest Getting Things Done by David Allen
People will tell you to read The Innovators Dilemma:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244
But that's still a book written by/for business people so lacking true insight. This is mostly based on my experience as [redacted] in the [redacted] industry (sadly I can't expose myself to doxxing as most people in my industry are SJW).
I might put together more thoughts around this into an independent post but a rough outline of what happens:
Edit: This is a pretty typical example of the change of thinking that occurs: http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug
Extra bonus points, research what happened with Julie Ann Horvath after she complained about the rug.
I'm sorry if the reply turned out a bit too general, but the individual steps depend a lot on the specifics :)
As I said before, it's crucial that you understand the problem domain as good, or better than your customers. I like to think of it as the Fog of War in strategy game maps. I can only effectively perform once I have explored enough territory to see the big picture. Here's roughly how I would try to wrap my head around such a challenge, if the company hired me to help:
Customer
Who are the customers? It's actually possible to think of the customers just in terms of their needs and desires. But it's useful to know their demographic attributes, so you can choose whether your solution is going to be a lateral or a niche one. For instance.. Trello is a lateral solution, because the kan-ban methodology can be applied to many different types of problems. On the other hand, It could be argued that 500px is a niche solution, because it caters to photographers more than meme authors. It's very easy for 500px to figure out where photographers hang out online and in the real world, should they choose to reach out to them in any way.
The job (Problems / Desires)
The customers usually have some sort of job to be done. That job is driven by their desire for a benefit, or a lingering problem that needs solving. Those benefits can range from monetary to peace of mind or social status. And problems can range in severity. Furthermore, different customer segments can rate some problems and benefits as more important than others. This is the combinatorial explosion of stakeholders and their points of view, that informs a strategy of a good product designer, and causes an uninformed designer to arrive at an optimal solution only through brute force or sheer luck.
Solution
Sometimes the solution has to be drawn up from scratch, optimized or entirely re-imagined. So what is the existing solution? What would an utopian solution look like? A complex problem might require a solution in the form of a toolkit of multiple core activities (Like Google, HubSpot or Moz). A focused solution though, can be embodied in a single product (Caffeine.app keeps your mac from going to sleep). If a solution is complex behind the curtains, but you make it simple and gratifying from the user's point of view, it may seem like magic to them.
Business
The things that you do behind the curtains are some core activities, that might require some key resources. That's how the business makes sure it spends less than it earns on a customer (unit economics). It's easy to paint a picture where the world is split between sociopathic capitalists with a greedy agenda & empathic designers, who champion the user's priorities. But a similar solution with a sound business foundation will always be better for the customer, because it stands a better chance of outperforming the economically inferiour solution in the long run. It's the job of a designer to balance between the two aspects. So much so, that the Elements of User Experience places big emphasis on both Business Objectives & User Needs.
Communication
Once you love your people, and you have a way to show it to them, you'll have to start and maintain some sort of relationship. You can identify Touch Points or Channels. If, for instance, your customers are tourists looking for a place to grab a meal before boarding the next train, you can administer your solution right then and there, at the train station. But most of the time you'll be reaching out to your potential users somewhere between you and them, probably through a third party (online publication, app or ad network). It may take multiple exposures in different contexts, before somebody decides to give your solution a try. So a customer might bump into your message at certain touch points, open a communication channel like a newsletter or notification subscription, and only then decide to commit. There's often talk about a multiple stage funnel, through which we try to shove as much of our target market. But you can also look at customer lifetime stages as vertebrae in the cohort spine. For instance.. Slicing out customer segments by lifetime lets SoundCloud identify differences between a newcoming podcaster & a long-time podcaster, and communicate with each of them appropriately, even though most of the people that care about SoundCloud are producers and record labels. Staying on top of communication also helps you avoid conversion attribution mistakes, so you can communicate more effectively.
Here are some resources related to those subjects:
A bit more business related:
Once I have a good understanding, I would focus on Information Architecture, Experience Design, Production & Iteration. I can't spare the time to write about those now, but here are some related resources:
I might write more about the specific subjects of IA and UX later, when I find the time. In the meanwhile, check any of the three books with italicized titles, if you haven't already.
Peace o/
It's called Disruptive Technology and Disruptive Business Models.
A Harvard professor by the name of Clayton Christensen wrote a few books on this topic.
Edit: and also, usually the laggards disappear: blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia, blackberry, et al
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062060244/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_uPnlxb7Y0NYF1
> It’s a horrible state of affairs for the tablet industry, unless you’re Apple or Amazon. And it’s almost entirely the fault of the iPad.
Strange view of it. I guess in a "negative space" sort of way: it's Apple's fault because of what Apple didn't do exactly like the non-iPad tablet vendors, which they did because that's how they've always done things. Apple didn't drink the commodification Kool-aide these other vendors did so it's their fault they didn't fail like those who did drink and did fail. A bit twisted.
The fate of non-iPad tablets is entirely the fault of non-iPad manufacturers. They are the ones who outsourced to the point they could no longer innovate themselves (especially true of HP - I worked for HP for 10 years and know the internal politics and strategies that led them to this point). These vendors are the ones who picked a separated HW/SW product architecture that assures a low cost yet well-matched appliance solution is almost impossible. These vendors are the ones who triggered the price-based race to the bottom (rather than value-based sustainable margins - which used to be HP's forte) that resulted in selling at prices below cost-of-goods. It's 100% self-inflicted stupidity on their parts. They had a choice. They picked all the wrong choices. This largely because they had (and still have) a static view of their worlds and markets - to them a tablet is just a particular type of PC.
Apple had nothing to do with any of that - Apple sells on value and innovation as a sales strategy which is created by unified SW/HW enabling a well-tuned appliance product of value. That's what was necessary to disrupt the market - the ability to 1) be aware of product "impedance mismatches" that were forming and 2) be better adaptable to creating a correct "impedance match". That latter requires "getting out of the box" of what you are and what your product is. When you are as strongly disconnected from your own product manufacturing as HP is, shit like this is simply inevitable. This is why I long ago sold off all my HP stock earned during my tenure at HP.
I lived through the Mini-Micro transition. Frankly it's "deja vu all over again". All these "hater" industries (per the article) are the 2010s versions of the "minicomputer" industries of the early 1970s who were displaced by microcomputers. They couldn't compete because they made lots of strategic decisions and held world-views that assured they couldn't adapt with the "next big thing" - all simply classic Innovator's Dilemma fare that assured that some day they'd be caught flat-footed. That day has come, that's all.
Waving the flag for HP or RIM or any of these is tantamount to waving the flag for Wang or Data General in the 1970s.
It would be nice if some other vendors could actually innovate to compete but historical evidence of how "Innovator's Dilemma" situations usually play out suggests it can not be any of the prior generation players who can or will ever do that. It requires new faces who aren't loaded down by preconceived expectations of the old technology generation. Either you change yourself before the revolution comes (and by doing so create the revolution) or you are consumed by the revolution. This is how technology works.
> Yet, there’s a reason that during World War II, the government built aircraft factories and allocated scarce materials like steel and rubber through the War Production Board.
Why didn’t they just say “Request For Proposal: Fighter Jets”. Aren’t we contracting that out now?
> …there’s a reason that large businesses have professional managers to plan their operations, and don’t rely on internal markets.
Large corporations start to have the same problems of central planning that communist countries have. Management becomes a bottleneck. It can be very hard to create the right ecosystem for innovation (read The Innovator’s Dilemma). In the interest of avoiding redundancy, balkanization, cannabalizing revenue, big companies often create a situation where they can’t innovate. Many of the biggest corporations in the US 30 years ago are no longer on top.
> In a world of low interest rates, which seem to be here for the foreseeable future, there is no danger of a runaway debt spiral.
The damage caused to a country by this kind of debt crisis and runaway inflation is so catastrophic that we should be very risk averse. What makes these spending plans different from when Zimbabwe/Argentina/Greece/Venezuela got into trouble?
Also, carbon tax is not the only proposal. I wish cap and trade had more legs, but seems like that ship has sailed. I also wish we would allow the price of energy to vary with supply and demand. There’a problem with renewable energy that the wind isn’t always blowing and the sun isn’t always shining. Let prices drop when there’s excess supply. There are lots of automated, energy-intensive tasks that can be programmed to be done only when prices drop. Data centers doing heavy computing. Laundry. Some kinds of manufacturing and chemical processing.
And nuclear energy should be on the table.
Here are all the books with amazon links, Alphabetical order :)
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For anyone wanting a good read on disruption The Innovator's Dilemma will certainly clear a lot of things up about emerging markets replacing existing ones. It uses great examples even if they are a little dated.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244
It's a classic example of the Innovator's Dilemma. These are companies with decades of investments and expertise in oil, which is their core competency. That being said, most oil companies are heavily invested in alternative energy and (as mentioned) it's hard to justify investment in loss-leading technology when you can simply observe the landscape for years and then buy the winners.
Try to learn from other success stories like Amazon for instance. Also, I've heard this is a good book, The Innovator's Dilemma
Leave this book on a few desks:
> I can’t figure out why a high valued company with a negative free cash flow is thriving a lot better than the others.
It has to do with Disruption and Innovation. This book will give you 1/2 of the answer, the business half; the other half is how the finance world and Wall Street valued these companies.
See also https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244
The role of an advisor can test relationships; it's important that you understand your friends goals before you begin providing him with advise, and it will be important to set some 'ground rules'.
Before I provide people with advise I ask them whether they are interested in building a project, learning a skill, or building a company. Knowing this I can direct them to the right resources...
If your friend is interested in building an app direct him to websites like Pluralsight, Thinkful or Udemy, so he can learn how to code. On the other hand, if your friend is interested in startups, have him read books and blogs on startups. I've found that 4 Steps to an Epiphany, The Innovator's Dilemma , and Mark Suster's blog (a VC based in California) to be useful for both first time and seasoned entrepreneurs.
One final of thought; the role of an advisor is to provide guidance and feedback - make sure it's clear to your friend that you are willing to provide him with this, but that it is ultimately up to him to build his idea.
ProTools is poorly designed, sitting on a heap of legacy, and is built by feature request. The result is shit software. Any developer could explain this phenomenon, it's well known and very little can be done to fix it without pissing off a legion of entrenched users who have learned it the hard way. Cubase suffers from the same problem, which is why it is also not "the best bet for learning audio production."
Read a few chapters of The Innovator's Dilemma and you'll recognize very much what I'm talking about.