Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
If a company truly wants to resolve the innovator's dilemma, it does need to be able to create wave after wave of disruptive innovation. And those disruptive innovations will typically grow to the point where they do cause some pain for leading companies. But most disruptive innovations create substantial new growth before they cause that pain.
How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling.
You can invest to create the new growth business while the core business is still growing, because new business units don't need to get big fast. But when the core business stops growing, investing to create new growth businesses becomes impossible.
To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.
Most companies think of disruption as a threat. But disruptive innovations have tremendous growth potential. If incumbent companies can learn how to harness the forces of disruption, they too can improve their ability to create new-growth businesses.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: