What if the very practices that made your company successful were the same ones destined to destroy it?
This provocative question lies at the heart of Clayton M. Christensen’s groundbreaking 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. In the introduction, Christensen presents a counterintuitive thesis that has reshaped how we think about innovation, management, and corporate survival.
The Puzzle: Why Do Great Companies Fail?
Christensen opens by presenting a mystery that had puzzled business scholars for decades. Companies like Sears, IBM, Xerox, and Digital Equipment Corporation were not run by incompetent managers. In fact, they were widely celebrated as some of the best-managed companies in the world. Fortune magazine praised Sears in 1964 for having an organization where “everybody simply did the right thing, easily and naturally.”
Yet these titans fell. Not because they grew complacent, arrogant, or risk-averse—but rather, Christensen argues, precisely because they followed the rules of good management. They listened to their customers, invested in new technologies, studied market trends, and allocated capital to innovations promising the best returns.
This is the innovator’s dilemma: the management practices that work brilliantly for sustaining existing products can become fatal liabilities when disruptive technologies emerge.
Sustaining vs. Disruptive Technologies
Central to Christensen’s framework is the distinction between two types of technological change. Sustaining technologies improve existing products along dimensions that mainstream customers already value. These innovations—whether incremental or radical—make good products better. Established firms excel at sustaining innovation because it aligns perfectly with their processes: listen to customers, invest in R&D, and deliver enhanced performance.
Disruptive technologies are different. They often underperform established products initially. They’re cheaper, simpler, smaller, or more convenient—but not as powerful. Mainstream customers typically don’t want them, and they offer lower margins than established products. By every rational business metric, investing in disruptive technologies looks like a bad decision.
And therein lies the trap.
The Disk Drive Industry: A Laboratory for Disruption
Christensen built his research on the disk drive industry—an industry characterized by relentless technological change. Between 1976 and 1995, the industry witnessed extraordinary turbulence: all but one of the 17 major firms failed or were acquired, along with 109 of 129 new entrants. Yet these firms didn’t fail because they couldn’t innovate. The established leaders were actually the pioneers in almost every sustaining innovation in the industry’s history.
They failed because each generation of smaller disk drives—from 14-inch to 8-inch to 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch—was a disruptive technology. Each new size initially offered less capacity than the larger drives and didn’t meet the needs of existing customers. But each found new markets (minicomputers, desktop PCs, laptops) that valued different attributes like size and portability. By the time these smaller drives improved enough to compete in mainstream markets, it was too late for the incumbents.
The Management Paradox
What makes Christensen’s argument so powerful—and uncomfortable—is its implication for managers. He’s not saying that failed companies were poorly managed. He’s saying they were excellently managed for the wrong context. The three patterns he identifies are damning:
First, disruptive technologies were often technologically straightforward—the established firms could have built them.
Second, established firms were leaders in sustaining innovations, proving their R&D capabilities were strong.
Third, despite developing working prototypes of disruptive technologies, management repeatedly chose not to commercialize them—because their customers didn’t want them.
In other words, these companies failed not because of technical limitations or lazy leadership, but because their rational resource allocation processes—designed to give customers what they want—systematically starved disruptive innovations of the resources they needed to survive.
Reflection: Why This Still Matters
Reading Christensen’s introduction nearly three decades after its publication, the insights feel more relevant than ever. We’ve watched Kodak, despite inventing digital photography in 1975, file for bankruptcy in 2012 because it protected its profitable film business. We’ve seen Blockbuster pass on acquiring Netflix for $50 million, only to become a cautionary footnote in business history.
What strikes me most is the emotional difficulty of Christensen’s prescription. He’s asking managers to invest in products their best customers explicitly say they don’t want. He’s asking them to pursue lower margins when shareholders demand growth. He’s asking them to cannibalize successful products before competitors do. These are not just strategic challenges—they’re psychological and organizational ones.
The introduction also offers a subtle but important comfort: failure in the face of disruption is not a character flaw. The managers at these companies weren’t villains or fools. They were trapped by systems, incentives, and rational decision-making processes that work beautifully—until they don’t. Understanding this helps us approach disruption with humility rather than hubris.
Key Takeaways
Success can breed failure. The practices that create market leadership can blind companies to disruptive threats.
Listening to customers isn’t always the answer. Current customers will optimize for current solutions, not future ones.
Disruptive technologies look unattractive—by design. Lower margins and smaller markets are features of disruption, not bugs.
Good management is situational. What works for sustaining innovation can be catastrophic for disruptive innovation.
Christensen’s introduction sets the stage for a book that doesn’t just diagnose the problem but offers solutions—creating separate organizations, finding new markets that value disruptive attributes, and learning to fail early and cheaply. But the introduction’s lasting contribution is simpler and more profound: it reframes failure not as the result of incompetence, but as the shadow cast by success itself.
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The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen was first published in 1997 and remains one of the most influential business books ever written. Steve Jobs called it one of the few books that deeply influenced his thinking.
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