Clayton Christensen

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The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Build a better mousetrap, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, Dean Kamen, fail fast, Google Glasses, job automation, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, market design, minimum viable product, prediction markets, Quicken Loans, Salesforce, shareholder value, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Zipcar

See Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson, “Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds” (white paper, October 2012), https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf 6. Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan, Competing Against Luck (New York: HarperBusiness, 2016). 7. See William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014). 8. See Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, “Creating Shared Value,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 2011). 9. Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” Harvard Business Review (December 2005). 10.

Indeed, process need, unlike the other sources of innovation, does not start out with an event in the environment, whether internal or external. It starts out with the job to be done. But neither Drucker nor Levitt used the label “job to be done” in any consequential way to refer to their ideas or approaches to solving business problems. It wasn’t until Clayton Christensen popularized the term in The Innovator’s Solution, the follow-up to his landmark work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, that the concept became widespread. Although modern references of JTBD point back to Christensen, definitions of JTBD vary in practice. Table 1.1 at the end of this chapter presents how a “job” is defined by thought leaders in the field.

In qualitative interviews, ODI uncovers all of the desired outcomes that people want from getting a job done in a given domain. In a separate step, these desired outcomes are prioritized with a quantitative survey. ODI increases the adoption of innovation by creating products that address unmet needs. MILKSHAKE MARKETING REVISITED Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen often frames JTBD with a story involving milkshakes. He and his team were reportedly working with McDonald’s to understand how to improve milkshake sales. Previously, the fast-food chain had tried changes to their milkshakes—making them thicker, chunkier, fruitier, etc. They also segmented consumers by demographics (e.g., age group) and tried to match those categories to different product variations.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Chapter 3 describes how succeeding with transformation B requires three actions: identifying a historically constrained market that disruptive forces will open, iteratively developing a business model to win in that market, and acquiring or hiring complementary capabilities to compete successfully against new and emerging competitors. Xerox: The Capabilities Link Now for the C part of the equation, the capabilities link. In 1997, Innosight cofounder and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen released The Innovator’s Dilemma, describing how well-run incumbents fail in the face of disruptive change. The capabilities link flips the dilemma. It allows a company to strike a balance wherein it leverages just enough capabilities to gain an advantage versus other competitors, but not so many capabilities that by definition its ability to do something new is constrained.

Driving Transformation A: Four Lessons The essence of transformation A is changing the how—finding more effective and efficient ways to address customer needs to maximize the resilience and relevance of your historical core business. At first blush, this kind of change sounds straightforward enough. After all, you don’t have to discover or demonstrate that you’re targeting a real market need. However, companies often find it painfully difficult to change how they operate. Clayton Christensen’s famous book The Innovator’s Dilemma contains numerous case examples of market leaders in industries, ranging from steel to accounting software, that struggled to respond when an entrant emerged with a disruptive way to solve an existing problem. As coauthor Mark Johnson details in his 2010 book Seizing the White Space, the core problem is that over time companies develop rules, norms, and metrics designed to perpetuate how they create, capture, and deliver value.

Although customers often struggle to describe what they want, they often are eloquent in explaining what they’re trying to accomplish, the reasons they pick one solution over another, their frustrations with existing solutions, and so on. More specifically, you need to do one of two things. Either conduct detailed research (if you do, we highly recommend reading Competing Against Luck, a 2016 book by Clayton Christensen, our colleague David Duncan, Taddy Hall, and Karen Dillon) or rely on the accumulated experience of your team to provide detailed answers to these five questions. Why have people historically bought from us? What do we provide that they really care about? What is the disruptive shift in our market?


pages: 207 words: 57,959

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

HP sixty year compounded annual growth rate reference from Barnholt discussion as well as from “Garage Gives Birth to Measurement Giant” by John Minck and Barry Manz, Microwaves & RF, August 2001. Faced with the need for large chunks of revenue growth, big bets are a mistake that corporate managers repeatedly make, consistent with the empirical findings in The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, Collins Business (2003), and The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, Harvard Business, 2003. Jim Collins presents similar insights in How the Mighty Fall, self-published (2009). “Achieving failures” reference taken from interview with Eric Ries. West Point education programs and evolution in military thinking and training: Interviews with Colonel Casey Haskins, Major Donald Vandergriff, and Brigadier General H.R.

Dyer and Gregersen found that, like Yunus the anthropologist, exemplar innovators closely observed details, particularly about other people’s behaviors. “In observing others, they act like anthropologists and social scientists,” Dyer and Gregersen wrote in their Harvard Business Review study summary (coauthored with Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen). The authors frequently cite Steve Jobs, who is well known around Silicon Valley for constantly studying the world for ideas. Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve’s Brain, captures Jobs’ insatiable curiosity well. Jobs noticed the first graphical interface on a visit to Xerox’s PARC research center in 1979, which would later inform the Macintosh’s interface.

Collins, Jim. How the Mighty Fall. Jim Collins, 2009. In this book, Collins examines patterns companies tend to follow from success to decline and supports that general arc with rich case studies. The patterns Collins highlights closely resemble the patterns from psychology literature, as well as Clayton Christensen’s research in The Innovator’s Solution. Collins’s stages of organizational decline and case studies, such as the risk of big bets, are very insightful. Collins, Jim and Jerry Porras. Built to Last. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Jim Collins, who would later write Good to Great, was a professor at Stanford Business School with Professor Jerry Porras when they wrote this book.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Indeed, Rothstein’s downward-sloping question-asking chart continues to plummet right through the college years. University professors I interviewed confirmed a dearth of student questions, even among bright Ivy Leaguers. “For twenty years I’ve been teaching at the Harvard Business School,” professor Clayton Christensen told me. “And I love this place, but the intuition to ask questions, the curiosity, is much less than twenty years ago.” As to the cause: “If all you do as you’re growing up is watch stuff on a screen—or go to school, where they give you the answers—then you don’t develop the instinct for asking questions,” Christensen said.

40 In studying “master questioners,” Hal Gregersen inquired about their childhoods and found that most had “at least one adult in their lives who encouraged them to ask provocative questions.” The Nobel laureate scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi was one such child; when he came home from school, “while other mothers asked their kids ‘Did you learn anything today?’ [my mother ] would say, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’” Clayton Christensen thinks parents can help their kids be more inquisitive by posing what if questions “that invite children to think deeply about the world around them.” But Christensen thinks it’s also important to encourage kids to solve problems in a hands-on way, via challenging household tasks and chores.

How can we make a better experiment? If we brainstorm in questions, will lightning strike? Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty? Should mission statements be mission questions? How might we create a culture of inquiry? Why do smart businesspeople screw up? Clayton Christensen is today considered one of the foremost experts on business innovation. A veteran professor at the Harvard Business School, Christensen introduced the term disruptive innovation1 into the business lexicon two decades ago, and it has become both a cliché and a driving force in business ever since.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (2010). 226 Sophie Christie, ‘Tesco Clubcard vs Nectar: Best loyalty schemes’, Telegraph, 30 Aug. 2013 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk> (accessed 8 March 2015). 227 Walter Kiechel, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (2010), 65. 228 See ‘Q1 2014 Revenue up 2.3 percent Crossed the 50,000 Employee Threshold in India’, CapGemini Newsroom, 29 April 2014 <http://www.capgemini.com/investor/press/q1-2014-revenue-up-23-crossed-the-50000-employee-threshold-in-india> (accessed 8 March 2015); Mini Joseph Tejaswi, ‘Accenture to hire aggressively in India’, Times of India, 18 July 2012 <www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 229 Clayton Christensen, Dina Wang, and Derek van Bever, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2013 <https://hbr.org> (accessed 8 March 2015). 230 <http://www.deloittemanagedanalytics.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 231 Clayton Christensen, Dina Wang, and Derek van Bever, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2013 <https://hbr.org> (accessed 8 March 2015). 232 <http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk>. 233 Hal R.

Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy (2005). 4 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997). 5 Paul Geroski and Constantinos Markides, Fast Second (2005). 6 Philip Augar, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of London’s Investment Banks (2008). 7 Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers (2013), 19–22. 8 This is an updated version of the distinction between ‘automation’ and ‘innovation’ in Richard Susskind, The Future of Law (1996), 49–50. 9 Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, The End of Lawyers? (2010), and The Future of Law. 10 See Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), and Jill Lepore, ‘The Disruption Machine’, New Yorker, 23 June 2014. 11 See e.g.

In 2014 Associated Press started to use algorithms developed by Automated Insights to computerize the production of several hundred formerly handcrafted earnings reports, producing fifteen times as many as before.218 Forbes now provides similarly for earnings reports and sport, using algorithms developed by Narrative Science.219 The Los Angeles Times uses an algorithm called ‘Quakebot’ (which is currently followed by 95,600 people on Twitter) to monitor the US Geological Survey for earthquake alerts, and automatically to compose articles if an event takes place.220 Users can struggle to tell the difference.221 2.6. Management consulting In 2013 Clayton Christensen claimed, in a Harvard Business Review article, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, that change was ‘inevitable’ in consulting, and that those who had traditionally helped others in management difficulties were themselves ‘being upended’.222 Duff McDonald concluded his book The Firm with the observation that consulting was more ‘hotly contested than it has ever been’.223 Lucy Kellaway suggested in the Financial Times that, ‘fifty years hence, McKinsey won’t exist’.224 Christopher McKenna called the industry ‘the world’s newest profession’, whose status as a profession is ambiguous, and whose future remains uncertain.225 As Christensen notes, the consulting business model has changed little in the past 100 years.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We first identified the ExO paradigm as a weak signal in 2009, and noticed over a two-year period that several new organizations were following a specific model. In 2011, futurist Paul Saffo suggested to Salim that he write this book, and we have been seriously researching the ExO model for the last three years. To do so, we: Reviewed sixty classic innovation management books by such authors as John Hagel, Clayton Christensen, Eric Ries, Gary Hamel, Jim Collins, W. Chan Kim, Reid Hoffman and Michael Cusumano. Interviewed C-Level executives from several dozen Fortune 200 companies with our survey and frameworks. Interviewed or researched ninety top entrepreneurs and visionaries including Marc Andreessen, Steve Forbes, Chris Anderson, Michael Milken, Paul Saffo, Philip Rosedale, Arianna Huffington, Tim O’Reilly and Steve Jurvetson.

What they will do, and what they are built to do, is to keep getting bigger in order to take advantage of economies of scale. Scale—but linear scale—is the raison d’être of the linear organization. John Seely Brown calls this “scalable efficiency” and maintains that it is the paradigm that drives most corporate strategy and corporate architectures. Clayton Christensen immortalized this type of thinking in his business classic, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fall. Most large organizations use what is called a matrix structure. Product management, marketing and sales are often aligned vertically, and support functions such as legal, HR, finance and IT are usually horizontal.

Note that today there is a whole category of the media industry—named for the underlying physical media it’s been trying to sell—which is actually made up of information businesses that have now been digitized. We believe the television industry will be the next to fall to the information ax. 3. Disruption is the New Norm In his influential bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen points out that disruptive innovation rarely comes from the status quo. That is, established industry players are rarely structured or prepared to counter disruption when eventually it appears. The newspaper industry is a perfect example: it sat by for a decade as Craigslist systematically disrupted the classified advertising model.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

As Jerry Useem suggested in a New York Times article, “Business School, Disrupted,” that question resulted in HBS facing what was, in effect, a choice between the ideas of its two most prominent faculty members—Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. While a number of its closest competitors, including Wharton and Stanford, had begun offering free so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs, with the goal of reaching as many people as possible, there were questions about whether doing so posed risks to brands that had taken decades to develop. And so, the choice: Were HBS to hew to the ideas of Michael Porter, the mandates of distinctive positioning that underlie much of his work would argue not just for a fee, but a substantial one. On the other hand, were it to hew to the ideas of Clayton Christensen, the mandates of disruption that underlie much of his work would argue for making it cheap and for responding quickly.

“Certain things about modern corporate society are unseemly and suboptimal,” says Gerald, “but HBS could play a role in determining the remedy. We need them to, as the only ones who can really untangle these knots are the ones in power.” He then proposes another way to look at it: “HBS professor Clayton Christensen talks about resources, priorities, and processes. The resources are there. But what about the processes people go through from day one at HBS until they graduate? How are they designed? Intention can have huge effects. As for priorities, we need only look at the people they celebrate and recognize.

A Harvard MBA (’88) and Baker Scholar, Wetlaufer had worked as a reporter at the Miami Herald and the Associated Press, as well as a consultant at Bain & Company. It seemed, for a time, as if they’d finally landed on a keeper. The magazine increased its frequency to ten times a year, cast a wider net for stories, and made some great hires. One notable piece: In 2000, Clayton Christensen and Michael Overdorf’s article, “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change,” thrust Christensen’s theory of disruption into the national conversation. But Wetlaufer’s personal life was unraveling. Married with four children when she joined HBR in 1996, she and her husband divorced in June 2000.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

Emma Seppälä, “What Bosses Gain by Being Vulnerable,” Harvard Business Review, December 11, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/12/what-bosses-gain-by-being-vulnerable. 2. Rodolphe Durand and Chang-Wa Huyhn, “Approches du Leadership, Livret de Synthèse,” HEC Paris, Society and Organizations Institute, n.d. 3. Clayton Christensen, “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life. 4. Christensen, “How Will You Measure Your Life? Chapter Fifteen 1. Clayton Christensen, “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life. 2. Marshall Goldsmith and Scott Osman, Leadership in a Time of Crisis: The Way Forward in a Changed World (New York, NY: Rosetta Books, 2020).

My choice, obviously critical to me, would also influence how I interact with others and reverberate through organizations by way of the people I put in place to lead others. There were so many models to choose from: bookshelves are full of leadership books advocating different approaches with different leadership labels.2 Clayton Christensen gave this advice to graduating Harvard Business School students in 2010: “Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”3 This is a good framing to me. To make a choice about the kind of leader you want to be, think about three things: what drives you, the legacy you want to leave, and how to stay the course.

Similarly, both at Carlson and Best Buy, I established values days, during which every employee at the company would spend time discussing the company’s values with their peers, debating how well we were living these values and what we could do to live them more fully. Knowing and doing what is right is not always simple, of course. But Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen points out that it is easier to stick to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to stick to them 98 percent of the time: the marginal cost of doing something that goes against your values “just this once” might appear temptingly low, but it may ultimately land you in jail, as the waters get muddier and muddier once the first exception gets made.1 So, if you refuse to give in to the “just this once” and remember to tell the truth and do what’s right, choices become easier.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

These days the third world is known as the emerging markets, the Che Guevara T-shirts are made in China, and the wretched of the earth are enjoying growth rates that are the envy of the former colonial powers. Moreover, these emerging markets are likely to shake things up not only in their own backyards but in rich countries, too. Clayton Christensen has coined the term “disruptive innovation” for new products that slash prices and new processes that radically change the way they are made and delivered. Today, many of the most disruptive innovations hail from emerging markets. They will make a bigger difference to life in the West than lean production, the previous great disruptive management innovation from the East.

(McKinsey estimates that the achievement gap in education between low-performing states and the rest costs the country up to $700 billion a year, or 5 percent of GDP.5) Why do some nurses spend only 40 percent of their time with patients? People who are armed with these facts will put constant pressure on public services to explain and improve. The second idea goes under the very ungentlemanly name of disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen made his reputation looking at the way disruptive innovators have reconfigured markets and boosted productivity in the private sector. More recently, he has devoted a lot of his energy to the public sector, most provocatively to education. In Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, he argues that the education system was designed for a world where most students go on to do repetitive jobs and where teachers were confronted by large classes and confined by the technology of “chalk and talk.”6 But the information revolution is about to disrupt this model: the arrival of ever cheaper and ever more powerful computers is making it possible to customize courses for the needs of individual students.

The master’s lectures are packed with sad-sack people who are looking for a quick fix for their multiplying problems. But Covey is also a paid-up member of the management theory club, with an MBA from Harvard Business School and glowing endorsements from serious thinkers such as Warren Bennis and Clayton Christensen. He claims that one of his biggest inspirations was Peter Drucker, who insisted that “effectiveness is a habit” and provided him one of his seven habits, “first things first,” which, for reasons that are never explained, is number three in his list. FranklinCovey claims that 90 percent of Fortune 500 and 70 percent of Fortune 1000 companies are clients.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

And certainly the Kodak tragedy can be seen, at least in part, as a parable of a once-mighty monopolist, a Google of the industrial age, that couldn’t adapt to the digital revolution. Yes, Kodak failed to become a leader in digital photography, in spite of the fact that the company actually invented the digital camera, back in 1975.54 Yes, Kodak is, in part, a victim of what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen calls, in his influential 2011 book about why businesses fail, The Innovator’s Dilemma,55 the challenge of a once-dominant incumbent having to disrupt its own business model. Yes, a string of myopic executives failed to reinvent Kodak, with the result that a great company that up until the 1990s was often listed among the world’s top five most valuable brands56 has now become synonymous with failure.

Welcome to what Joshua Cooper Ramo, the former executive editor of Time magazine, calls “the age of the unthinkable.” It’s a networked age, Ramo says, in which “conformity to old ideas is lethal”58 and predictability and linearity have been replaced by what he calls an “epidemic” of self-organization where no central leadership is required. This is an age so destructively unthinkable, in fact, that Clayton Christensen’s theory of the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” which suggests an orderly cycle of disruptors, each replacing the previous economic incumbent, now has itself been blown up by an even more disruptive theory of early-twenty-first-century digital capitalism. Christensen’s ideas have themselves been reinvented by the bestselling business writers Larry Downes and Paul F.

Keith recommended me to Paul Carr and Jon Orlin at TechCrunchTV, and my show Keen On . . . was the first program on the network, running for four years and including over two hundred interviews with leading Internet thinkers and critics. In particular, I’d like to thank Kurt Andersen, John Borthwick, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Carr, Clayton Christensen, Ron Conway, Tyler Cowen, Kenneth Cukier, Larry Downes, Tim Draper, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Walter Isaacson, Tim Ferriss, Michael Fertik, Ze Frank, David Frigstad, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Peter Hirshberg, Reid Hoffman, Ryan Holiday, Brad Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly, David Kirkpatrick, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Robert Levine, Steven Levy, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew McAfee, Gavin Newsom, George Packer, Eli Pariser, Andrew Rasiej, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Schroeder, Tiffany Shlain, Robert Scoble, Dov Seidman, Gary Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Micah Sifry, Martin Sorrell, Tom Standage, Bruce Sterling, Brad Stone, Clive Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, Yossi Vardi, Hans Vestberg, Vivek Wadhwa, and Steve Wozniak for appearing on Keen On . . . and sharing their valuable ideas with me.


How Will You Measure Your Life? by Christensen, Clayton M., Dillon, Karen, Allworth, James

air freight, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, job satisfaction, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nick Leeson, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, working poor, young professional

It is quite stunning to see how accurately the plot in these movies has predicted the results from the actions that we have chosen. I am grateful beyond words for their courage in making the choices that have brought us such happiness. I dedicate this book to them—and hope that the thoughts in this book will help you, as they have helped us. —Clayton Christensen I MUST CONFESS: if you’d told me three years ago, just before I was to embark on an adventure to business school in a faraway land, that I was going to come out the other side as the coauthor of a book … well, I almost certainly would not have believed you. If you had told me that it was going to be a book based upon applying some of the most rigorous business theories in the world to finding happiness and fulfillment in life … well, in that case, I might have even laughed.

We have poured our hearts into this in the hope that we might be able to help you, and that would have been in vain were you not so generous to give us a chance to do so. I truly, truly hope that you’re able to get as much out of these pages as I did in helping to craft them. —James Allworth MEETING CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN changed my life. In the spring of 2010, as the editor of Harvard Business Review magazine, I had been casting around for an article that would add a little extra something to our summer 2010 double issue. I realized that the students about to graduate from Harvard Business School that spring had applied to business school when the economy was still rosy and everything seemed possible—but they were now graduating into a world of uncertainty.

I haven’t regretted a single decision I’ve made since the day I first left Clay’s office. It’s been an honor to work with my coauthors, Clay and James, on this book. This book is a reflection of many, many hours of discussion and debate among the three of us. I consider myself lucky to have had the invaluable benefit of a private tutorial in the theories of Clayton Christensen. But more important, I consider myself privileged to have had the chance to collaborate with a man who is brilliant, kind, and generous not some of the time, not much of the time, but all of the time. And James. I couldn’t possibly have imagined the journey we’d go on together when we first spoke back in the spring of 2010.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

“But there is also something predictable in the way the fear and apathy encountered at the beginning are accountable for the feelings of elation at the end. These intensities of the creative process can stimulate desires of consistency and control but history affirms that few transformative experiences are generated by regularity.” In organisations the great horror is failure. As the Harvard Professor, Clayton Christensen’s dissection of the Innovator’s Dilemma showed, safe and incremental thinking leads businesses to conspire in their own demise. The bigger a business becomes the more powerfully its culture presses down on riskier decisions and disruptive thinking. The message “Don’t screw up a good thing”, breathes through the air-conditioned corridors, from the walls, the logo, the share options and the annual bonus.

Our past interests will determine what we are exposed to in the future, leaving less room for the unexpected encounters that spark creativity, innovation, and the democratic exchange of ideas. The chance of anti-order starts to get squeezed. There’s a similarity here with the limitations of traditional business school thinking that Clayton Christensen has warned about in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. If we rely solely on past data to inform our future direction, then we will be like the giant enterprises who didn’t realise that at the fringes of their world disruptive innovators were planning to revolutionise and consume their markets.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

Indonesia played a critical part in the social and economic transformation of the Renaissance, as the Dutch colonised it and made it the centre of the world’s coffee production. For more than 300 years, bar four years of British rule, Indonesia was run by the Dutch. Today, though, apart from a few canals and old buildings, there is very little left behind. It was an extractive process, designed to make the merchants who were trading the coffee rich. In 1995, Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, introduced the term “disruptive innovation” in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. As the twin forces of digital technology and globalisation have shaken up and disrupted just about every aspect of our lives in the 21st century, disruptive innovation has become the rallying cry of a generation.

With its size and resources, it would have been a piffling investment. The reason it didn’t, though, was because it had become obsessed with what it did rather than why it did it. It had become preoccupied with getting people to consume more of its products rather than why they actually wanted to take photographs. In 1995, Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, introduced the term “disruptive innovation” in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. What Christensen was referring to in his book’s title was how, at certain points in history, the emergence of new and radical technologies has totally disrupted established business models and businesses – in some cases, completely sweeping them away.

By relaxing the need to control, and letting everyone get on with delivering on the social mission, surly staff become passionate participants, actively engaged. Toxic cultures become creative, healthy, and highly productive environments in which everyone thrives. We are at the beginning of what is perhaps the greatest period of social and technological change there has ever been, and the disruptive side effects Clayton Christensen predicted are everywhere to be seen – from once-safe businesses and business models to political systems and cultures. Nothing will be untouched. We all have a choice. We can try and hold on to and maintain social, political, and business mind-sets that no longer work. Or we can model and join the participatory innovators who are successfully reshaping the world.


pages: 202 words: 62,199

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto

But what most people don’t realize is that the problem is not just that the boundaries have been blurred; it’s that the boundary of work has edged insidiously into family territory. It is hard to imagine executives in most companies who would be comfortable with employees bringing their children to work on Monday morning, yet they seem to have no problem expecting their employees to come into the office or to work on a project on a Saturday or Sunday. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard business professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, was once asked to make just such a sacrifice. At the time, he was working at a management consulting firm, and one of the partners came to him and told him he needed to come in on Saturday to help work on a project. Clay simply responded: “Oh, I am so sorry.

They distract us from our purpose. They care only about their own agendas, and if we let them they prevent us from making our highest level of contribution by siphoning our time and energy off to activities that are essential to them, rather than those that are essential to us. So how do we take a page from Jin-Yung and Clayton Christensen and set the kinds of boundaries that will protect us from other people’s agendas? Below are several guidelines for your consideration. DON’T ROB PEOPLE OF THEIR PROBLEMS I am not saying we should never help people. We should serve, and love, and make a difference in the lives of others, of course.

I wrote about this subject further in a blog post for Harvard Business Review called “The One Thing CEOs Need to Learn from Apple,” April 30, 2012 6. King, third foreword to Ibid., xix. 7. Alan D. Williams, “What Is an Editor?” in Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do, 3rd rev. ed., ed. Gerald Gross (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 6. 14. LIMIT 1. Some minor details changed. 2. Based on a talk Clayton Christensen gave to students at the Stanford Law School in 2013 3. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992), 29–30. 4. I have found this story cited in several places: for example, Jill Rigby’s Raising Respectful Children in an Unrespectful World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), ch. 6.


pages: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

In particular, Bill Miller and Kyle Legg provided me with the needed flexibility to take on this challenge, and I hope that I can repay their confidence in full. A number of people graciously shared their time and knowledge with me. They told me stories, clarified points, or aimed me in the right direction when I was off track. These include Orley Ashenfelter, Greg Berns, Angela Freymuth Caveney, Clayton Christensen, Katrina Firlik, Brian Roberson, Phil Rosenzweig, Jeff Severts, Thomas Thurston, and Duncan Watts. Getting ideas right is not always easy. I was privileged to have a small group, each a leader in his field, read and critique sections of the book. My thanks to Steven Crist, Scott Page, Tom Seeley, Stephen Stigler, Steve Strogatz, and David Weinberger.

Most professionals are wary of the word theory because they associate it with something that is impractical. But if you define theory as an explanation of cause and effect, it is eminently practical. Sound theory helps to predict how certain decisions lead to outcomes across a range of circumstances. Paul Carlile and Clayton Christensen, both professors of management, describe the process of theory building in three stages.6 • The first stage is observation, which includes carefully measuring a phenomenon and documenting the results. The goal is to set common standards so that subsequent researchers can agree on the subject and the terms to describe it

Applying the theory that specifies when innovations succeed, he was able to predict, without knowledge of the outcomes, a statistically significant 85 percent of successes and failures.19 Further, he was able to identify where some of the failed businesses had gone wrong. Thurston then teamed up with Clayton Christensen to teach the theory to business school students. Their first pass at sorting the winners and losers was close to random, but by the end of the semester the students sorted with over 80 percent accuracy. The progress shows the theory’s value and that the students can learn the lessons and improve performance. 2.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

In writing the book I have benefited tremendously from the support, advice, and critical feedback of a host of individuals who gave generously of both their time and their insight: Howard Anderson, Julia Batavia, Diane E. Bilotta, Manish Bhandari, Adam Brandenburger, Colin Blaydon, Michael Brimm, Clayton Christensen, Sarah Cliffe, Rudi Coetzee, Dr. Richard J. Comi, Donald Conway, Richard D’Aveni, Yves Doz, Gregg Fairbrothers, Javier Gimeno, Ronny Golan, Vijay Govindarajan, Lars Guldbaek Karlsen, Morten Hansen, Peter Hanson, Hal Hogan, Natalie Horbachevsky, Bob Howell, Barak Hershkovitz, Chris Huston, Chan Kim, Jim Komsa, Kim LaFontana, Karim R.

Cooper’s Winning at New Products: Creating Value Through Innovation (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 5 72 percent of senior executives: Boston Consulting Group report, “Innovation 2010.” 5 two schools of thought: All great management books consider multiple facets of the problem but focus on different aspects. Insightful exemplars within the customer-focus school are Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997); W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004); Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm (New York: HarperBusiness, 1991); George Day’s Market Driven Strategy: Processes for Creating Value (New York: Free Press, 1999); and J.

[ CHAPTER 4 ] 84 value chains and supply chains: Classic books on value chains include Michael Porter’s Competitive Advantage (New York: Free Press, 1998) and Charles Fine’s Clockspeed (New York: Perseus Books, 1998). Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff introduce the role of complementors in Co-opetition (New York: Currency, 1996), and Clayton Christensen discusses the roles of value networks in affecting innovation incentives in The Innovator’s Dilemma (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). The value blueprint builds on these perspectives, with a focus on designing the most effective configuration to deliver the value proposition. 88 $550 device: “Sony Shows Data Discman,” New York Times, September 13, 1991. 88 The Rocket, developed by NuvoMedia: Martin Arnold, “From Gutenberg to Cyberstories,” New York Times, January 7, 1999. 88 That same year the SoftBook: Peter Lewis, “Taking on New Forms, Electronic Books Turn a Page,” New York Times, July 2, 1998. 88 Gemstar released two models: Ken Feinstein, “RCA REB1100 eBook Review,” CNET.com, February 21, 2001, http://reviews.cnet.com/e-book-readers/rca-reb1100-ebook/4505-3508_7-4744438.xhtml. 89 proof that the electronic book was ready for the mainstream: Doreen Carvajal, “Long Line Online for Stephen King E-Novella,” New York Times, March 16, 2000. 90 Random House’s e-book revenues doubled: Nicholas Bogaty, “eBooks by the Numbers: Open eBook Forum Compiles Industry Growth Stats,” International Digital Publishing Forum, press release, July 22, 2002, http://old.idpf.org/pressroom/pressreleases/ebookstats.htm. 90 “difficult to find, buy and read e-books”: Steven Levy, “The Future of Reading,” Newsweek, November 26, 2007. 90 Paltry content and intense digital rights management: Ginny Parker Woods, “Sony Cracks Open New Book with Reader,” Toronto Star, February 20, 2006. 90 “We’ve been very cautious in launching [the Reader]”: Michael Kanellos, “Sony’s Brave Sir Howard,” CNET.com, January 17, 2007, http://news.cnet.com/Sonys-brave-Sir-Howard/2008-1041_3-6150661.xhtml. 90 almost 20 percent cheaper than the Librié: Sony Librié ebook Review, eReaderGuide.Info, www.ereaderguide.info/sony_librie_ebook_reader_review.htm. 90 10,000 titles available at Connect.com: Edward Baig, “Sony Device Gets E-Book Smart,” USA Today, October 5, 2006. 91 the iPod of the book industry: David Derbyshire, “Electronic BookOpens New Chapter for Readers,” Daily Telegraph, September 28, 2006. 91 much fanfare from the press: Amanda Andrews, “Sony’s Hitting the Books,” Australian, February 28, 2006. 92 lowering publisher confidence: George Cole, “Will the eBook Finally Replace Paper?


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Both Al and Bill have always been gracious with their time, and have taught me with patience. They are great role models, and I feel privileged to be associated with both of them. These essays draw from the work of many fabulous scientists, too many to list individually. But a handful of thinkers deserve special mention, including Clayton Christensen, Paul DePodesta, Norman Johnson, Scott Page, Jim Surowiecki, and Duncan Watts. Thanks to each of you for sharing your ideas with me so generously. Steve Waite’s suggestions were also of great benefit to me. I’d like to thank Myles Thompson, my publisher and editor at Columbia University Press, for his boundless enthusiasm and unwavering belief in the power of these ideas.

We can say the same about much of management theory.4 More specifically, investors generally dwell on attribute-based categorizations (like low multiples) versus circumstance-based categorizations. A shift from attribute- to circumstance-based thinking can be of great help to investors and managers. Take a lesson from the slime mold. The Three Steps of Theory Building In a thought-provoking paper, Clayton Christensen, Paul Carlile, and David Sundahl break the process of theory building into three stages (see exhibit 4.1). I discuss each of these stages and provide some perspective on how this general theory-building process applies specifically to investing:1. Describe what you want to understand in words and numbers.

EXHIBIT 36.3 Average Annual Growth Rate for Companies Entering the Fortune 50 Source: Reprinted with permission from Corporate Strategy Board, “Stall Points,” 15. Copyright 1998 AAAS. Advising companies what to do in the face of slowing growth is an industry in and of itself. It is true that large companies have a difficult time innovating as successfully as smaller companies for a host of reasons. I enthusiastically recommend a book by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution, which provides managers with a useful innovation framework. But the truth is that not all companies can grow rapidly forever. Extrapolative Expectations A review of the evidence on firm size and growth rates suggests that investors should temper their growth expectations as companies get larger.


pages: 278 words: 83,468

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

Even after a company achieves initial success, it must continue to pivot. Those familiar with the technology life cycle ideas of theorists such as Geoffrey Moore know certain later-stage pivots by the names he has given them: the Chasm, the Tornado, the Bowling Alley. Readers of the disruptive innovation literature spearheaded by Harvard’s Clayton Christensen will be familiar with established companies that fail to pivot when they should. The critical skill for managers today is to match those theories to their present situation so that they apply the right advice at the right time. Modern managers cannot have escaped the deluge of recent books calling on them to adapt, change, reinvent, or upend their existing businesses.

See also Chapter 14, “Join the Movement.” Chapter 1. Start 1. Manufacturing statistics and analysis are drawn from the blog Five Thirty Eight: http://​www.​fivethirtyeight.​com/​2010/​02/​us-​manufacturing-​is-​not-​dead.​html Chapter 2. Define 1. The Innovator’s Dilemma is a classic text by Clayton Christensen about the difficulty established companies have with disruptive innovation. Along with its sequel, The Innovator’s Solution, it lays out specific suggestions for how established companies can create autonomous divisions to pursue startup-like innovation. These specific structural prerequisites are discussed in detail in Chapter 12. 2.

For more, see http://​platformsandnetworks.​blogspot.​com/​2011/​01/​launching-​tech-​ventures-​part-​i-​course.​html 8. http://​www.​robgo.​org/​post/​568227990/​product-​leadership-​series-​user-​driven-​design-​at 9. http://​venturebeat.​com/​2010/​02/​11/​confirmed-​google-​buys-​social-​search-​engine-​aardvark-​for-​50-​million/ 10. This is the heart of the Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. 11. For more, see http://bit.ly/DontLaunch Chapter 7. Measure 1. By contrast, Google’s main competitor Overture (eventually bought by Yahoo) had a minimum account size of $50, which deterred us from signing up, as it was too expensive. 2. For more details about Farb’s entrepreneurial journey, see this Mixergy interview: http://​mixergy.​com/​farbood-​nivi-​grockit-​interview/ Chapter 8.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The commoditization of operating systems, databases, web servers and browsers, and related software was indeed threatening to Microsoft’s core business. But that destruction created the opportunity for the killer applications of the Internet era. It is worth remembering this history when contemplating the effect of on-demand services like Uber, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence. I found that Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, had developed a framework that explained what I was observing. In a 2004 article in Harvard Business Review, he articulated “the law of conservation of attractive profits” as follows: “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Intel had done this by becoming the sole source for the processor, the brain of the PC. Microsoft had done it by controlling access to its software operating system. Open source software and the open communications protocols of the Internet had changed the game for Microsoft and Intel. But my map told me that the game didn’t end there. Per Clayton Christensen’s Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits, I knew that something else was going to become valuable. In a word: data. In particular, I thought that building a critical mass of user-contributed data led to self-reinforcing network effects. The term network effect generally refers to systems that gain in utility the more people use them.

Meanwhile, the declining cost of anything made by machines would argue that the work that humans alone can do should become more rather than less valuable. The remainder of this chapter will discuss some ways in which that future is and is not unfolding. The chorus of doubt about the jobless future sounds remarkably similar to the one that warned of the death of the software industry due to open source software. Clayton Christensen’s Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits holds true here too. When one thing becomes commoditized, something else becomes valuable. We must ask ourselves what will become valuable as today’s tasks become commoditized. CARING AND SHARING What might we do with our time, if there were a universal basic income sufficient to meet the necessities of life, or if paid working hours were reduced by the same amount as domestic labor, and wages increased?


pages: 161 words: 44,488

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

Just as we continued to scale the Internet 30 years after its invention, we will continue to solve and update the blockchain’s scalability needs. Just as we continued to update automobile safety regulations in ways that were unforeseen during the invention moment, we will continue to update the regulatory requirements around the blockchain over the lifetime of its evolution. NOTES 1. A term popularized in Clayton Christensen’s book (The Innovator’s Dilemma) suggesting that successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers’ current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business models, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma. List of U.S. executive branch czars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S.

IDC Study, http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers. 5. These are popular programming languages. 6. https://cryptoconsortium.org/ 4 BLOCKCHAIN IN FINANCIAL SERVICES “The worst place to develop a new business model is from within your existing business model.” –CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN FINANCIAL SERVICES INSTITUTIONS will be challenged by how much they are willing to bend their business models to accommodate the weight of the blockchain. Their default position will be to only slightly open the door, expecting to let as many benefits seep in, with the least amount of opening.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Makes Official Complaint to China over Internet Censorship,” Financial Times, June 22, 2009. 331 “What Google should fear”: author interview with Yossi Vardi, February 28, 2008. 331 When Marissa Mayer said: author interview with Mayer, August 21, 2007. 331 “What separates us”: author interview with Stacey Savides Sullivan, August 21, 2007. 331 “are utopians”: author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007. 332 In the 1990s: an excellent exploration of long-term capital’s demise is contained in Roger Lowenstein’s When Genuis Failed: The Rise and Fall of f Long-Term Capital Management, Random House, 2000. 332 “’Google returned links”: Nat Ives, “Media Giants Want to Top Google Results,” Advertising Age, March 23, 2009. 333 when Eric Schmidt envisioned: Miguel Heft, “Google Ends Its Project for Selling Radio Ads,” New York Times, February 13, 2009. 333 “They have no experience”: author interview with Danny Sullivan, March 20, 2008. 333 “a great company”: author interview with Fred Wilson, January 22, 2008. 333 “Google is like that fourteen-year-old”: author interview with Strauss Zelnick, January 9, 2008. 334 Although Mary Meeker believes Google is a great company: author interview with Mary Meeker, January 23, 2009. 334 “There is nothing about their model”: author interview with Clayton Christensen, April 17, 2009. 335 “There is no end in sight”: author interview with Fred Wilson, January 22, 2008. 335 “to the falsehood that you can grow”: author interview with Clayton Christensen, April 17, 2009. INDEX About.com Abrams, Jonathan AdSense advertising formula Google charges mechanism of revenue sharing Advertising, traditional concerns about Google data collection methods versus Google methods Internet, impact on as marketing companies online ads, increase in outlook for future recession of 2008, impact on spending on ads, increase in Advertising by Google.

And now with wives, and a son born to Brin in early 2009 and Page expecting his first child in the fall of 2009, and with incomprehensible wealth and two huge airplanes more conveniently at their disposal—Brin and Page persuaded NASA to waive its prohibition on private planes parking or using the nearby NASA facility—both young men are in the office less, jumping on their planes to take photographs in Africa, to explore the wilds of Alaska; Page likes to tool around in his Tesla electric car or fly his own helicopter and Brin to spend time building his own kite-powered sailboat. Will their attention wander from Google? Today, Google appears impregnable. But a decade ago so did AOL, and so did the combination of AOL Time Warner. “There is nothing about their model that makes them invulnerable,” Clayton Christensen, Harvard business historian and author of the seminal The Innovators Dilemma, told me. “Think IBM. They had a 70 percent market share of mainframe computers. Then the government decided to challenge them. Then the PC emerged.” Seemingly overnight, computing moved from mainframes to PCs. For a long while, Microsoft seemed unstoppable, he said, only to be diverted by government intervention and the emergence of Linux and open-source software.

No one can predict with certainty where Google and the digital wave is heading, when it will crest, or who it will flatten. If the public or its representatives come to believe Google plays favorites, aims to monopolize knowledge or its customers, invades their privacy, or arrogantly succumbs, in the words of Clayton Christensen, “to the falsehood that you can grow and grow because of network effects,” then it will be more vulnerable. If Google maintains its deposit of public trust—continuing to put users first—and if it stays humble and moves with the swiftness of a fox, it will be difficult to catch. Other companies have profoundly disrupted the business landscape.


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

“We were told from the top that the minifig wasn’t considered cool.” The Jack Stone “minifigure” (right) and a classic LEGO minifigure. Unlike the classic minifigure, the Jack Stone figure could not be disassembled. Practice disruptive innovation. In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen introduced his theory of disruptive innovation, which he defined as a less pricey product or service, initially designed for less-demanding customers, which catches on and captures its market, displacing the incumbents.10 Christensen saw how low-quality, low-cost technologies were ramping up faster than ever before.

To build new growth drivers, LEGO would once again seek out untapped, blue-ocean markets. (We will trace that effort in the next chapter.) And it would attempt to unleash a disruptive innovation—a low-end, low-quality product that improves over time and eventually upends the industry incumbents. In a New Yorker profile, Clayton Christensen cited the pint-size transistor radio as a prototypical example of a big, disruptive innovation. Launched by Sony in the late 1950s, the tinny, tiny radios, using the then-new technology of the transistor, had nowhere near the same sound quality as the big vacuum-tube RCA and Zenith consoles found in many middle-class homes.

As 3-D printing improves, LEGO might one day find that Minecraft (or something like it) has jumped the digital divide to become a more compelling, richer, and easier way to construct plastic buildings, characters, and vehicles. As many disrupted companies have learned, what was low-end yesterday can be mainstream tomorrow. One of Clayton Christensen’s most counterintuitive arguments is that managers sometimes fail because they are smart, not because they are stupid. They abide by the same management strategies that have worked so successfully in the past. As a result, the disruptive effort goes wrong. Such was the case with the LEGO Group’s handling of Universe.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

I have also had the privilege to receive help and advice from true luminaries, such as Richard Saul Wurman, Saul Kaplan, Kevin Kelly, Jared Spool, Peter Vander Auwera, Dan Roam, Thor Muller, Paul Pangaro, Lane Becker, Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld, Nilofer Merchant, John Hagel III, JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Stowe Boyd, Jay Cross, Marcia Conner, Ben Cerveny, Chris Brogan, Bob Logan, David Armano, Alex Osterwalder, and Don Norman. Although I don’t know them personally, for the ideas in this book, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the works of Gary Hamel, Clayton Christensen, Arie de Geus, Ricardo Semler, Eric Beinhocker, Daniel Pink, Richard Florida, Stewart Brand, Bill McKelvey, Stafford Beer, Herbert Simon, John Boyd, and perhaps most of all, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, many of whose groundbreaking ideas are only now being realized. For the access they provided to connected companies and their inner workings, I must thank Ray LaDriere, Kevin Kernan, Michael Bonamassa, Jerry Rudisin, Sunny Gupta, Adrian Cockcroft, Harry Max, Mary Walker, Mark Interrante, Ben Hart, Livia Labate, Sherri Maxson, and Sharif Renno.

While a company serves multiple purposes for different people, as an investment, a place of work, a paycheck, and so on, by far the most important purpose of a company is the job it does for customers. Companies that neglect or forget this fact have lost their way. Purpose Sets the Context for Organizations to Learn Cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer said, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” The purpose of a company is what it does for customers. Clayton Christensen calls this “the job to be done.” He points out that while technologies and methods change over time, the job doesn’t change that much. For example, the service provided by FedEx—get something from here to there, as quickly as possible, with perfect certainty—is something Julius Caesar could have used.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives By Steven Levy, Simon and Schuster, 2011. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy By Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Harvard Business Review Press, 1998. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail By Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Review Press, 1997. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations By Adam Smith, 1776. Jack: Straight from the Gut By Jack Welch and John A. Byrne, Business Plus, 2001. Just in Time for Today and Tomorrow By Taiichi Ohno and Setsuo Mito, Productivity Press, 1988.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

“I think that if there’s a need for something to be disrupted and it’s important to the future of the world, then sure, we should disrupt it. But I don’t think that we should just disrupt things, unless that disruption is going to result in something fundamentally better for society.” The business world had come to fear the word disruption because of The Innovator’s Dilemma, a 1997 book by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen that introduced the concept of “disruptive innovation.” The Innovator’s Dilemma, lauded by The Economist as one of the most important books about business ever written, lays out how market-leading companies can miss out on new waves of innovation by focusing on the needs of their existing customers to maximize profits while overlooking new and cheaper technologies or business models that customers didn’t realize they wanted.

But the industry’s fear that it might have been on the wrong side of history would not have dissipated completely. The same was true for at least one auto industry leader. The man who, until May 2017, was CEO of the Ford Motor Company is one person who does appear to be a fan of disruption. Mark Fields, a Harvard business grad and Clayton Christensen follower, was fifty-three when he was appointed to succeed outgoing CEO Alan Mulally. Fields had been the company’s chief operating officer since November 2012, and his ascent through the ranks had included leadership roles at Ford’s luxury autos group and Mazda when Ford owned the company in the early 2000s.

“In many cases, large car companies or truck companies are not focused on software, they’re not focused on sensors or batteries,” Straubel said in 2016. “And this gives an opportunity for innovation for new companies and new entrants to play on a bit more of a level playing field than there ever was in the past.” Tesla, however, is not a disrupter by Clayton Christensen’s original definition of the theory. In a December 2015 article published by the Harvard Business Review, Christensen and his coauthors, Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald, said Tesla didn’t fit the disruptive innovation model because its foothold was in the high-end segment of the auto market.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

These approaches still entail a “paint-can” on the roof with sixty-four lasers and photo-detectors in rows. Velodyne’s idea of how to improve performance is to double the number of lasers to 128 and add more software. It all strikes Russell as a kludge—a system too complex and cumbersome to work. Governing this challenge is Clayton Christensen’s model of “integration and modularity.” When a product fundamentally underperforms the market’s requirements, integration is essential. You can’t just go down to Fry’s and cobble together existing devices. Every interface must be optimized. Modularity—interconnecting standard components from a variety of suppliers—works only when the product easily fulfills the function, leaving tolerances for less than top performance.

Bundling reflects Coase’s Law: Companies expand until the costs of performing a transaction inside the firm exceed the costs of performing it outside. Don and Alex Tapscott point out that this law works both ways: Companies that find the costs of internal operations exceed the costs of outsourcing should cut back, shrink their reach, and spin out operations. In a word, unbundle.1 Adding a technological argument to Coase, Clayton Christensen shows that integration—essentially bundling components together in a seamless system—is desirable as long as a technology falls short of a market need. All interfaces between components must be optimized to the point that the market need is satisfied. Then, where suboptimal performance satisfies the market, modularity—using standardized interfaces and components—will reduce costs and expand market share.2 In the bitcoin blockchain, companies accept cumbersome solutions constantly distributing a 120-gigabyte ledger across the network when most of the functions could be performed ten thousand times more efficiently within a single company hierarchy.

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Harmony Books, 1980), foreword by Andrew Tobias. Chapter 23: The Great Unbundling 1. Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 92–93, 142. 2. Clayton Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2003), 126–143. 3. Binyamin Appelbaum, “Is Bitcoin a Waste of Electricity, or Something Worse?” New York Times, February 28, 2018. 4. The error of GDP accounting that renders invisible the most creative parts of the economy is rectified by economist Mark Skousen’s new concept of Gross Output (GO) or gross domestic expenditures.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

Only in retrospect can we look back and say, ‘That was it, that was the peak, that was when we should have started to think anew.’ Unfortunately, being wise after the event is too late to be useful. First-curve success can blind one to the possibilities of a new technology or a new market, allowing others to seize the initiative. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School termed it the problem of disruptive innovation, citing, among many others, the case of Kodak, who ignored the possibilities of digital photography until it was too late. They allowed outsiders to intrude and, in my words, create the new curve instead of them. New technology is offering the chance of those new curves every day.

I can see that requiring MPs to vote by walking through those doors inherited from St Stephen’s Chapel not only means that they have to be present and counted, in person, but also acts as a reminder of why they are there, even if they sometimes don’t know what they are voting on, just following their herd. Some rituals, however, are just nostalgia and eventually become dysfunctional. Manual voting is now one of them. If we want people, particularly the young, to take democracy seriously we have to work with the new ways of communicating. Otherwise we risk going down Clayton Christensen’s technological mudslide on the road to Davy’s Bar. The Scottish referendum in 2014, with an 84 per cent turnout, showed that when it matters to them the voters will come out, come rain, hail or sunshine, but not all elections are so emotive or so compelling – witness the turnout for European elections.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

MORE ADVANCE ACCLAIM FOR THE STARTUP WAY “My research has focused on what causes established companies to maintain success, and The Startup Way provides practical guidance on how to do just that.” —Clayton Christensen, author, entrepreneur, and Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School “To succeed in the Third Wave, an era where technology will disrupt everything from education to healthcare, companies will need new tools and approaches. Eric Ries provides a road map for companies on how to use entrepreneurial principles to achieve transformational growth.”

And the laws of corporate gravity still apply: The scarcity of resources most startups deal with argues for more, not less, financial discipline. Similarly, even the stodgiest product team will be doing some experimentation and some innovation, a point the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen, has been trying to make for years. In most cases, good business practices will cause missed opportunities, because in order to serve existing customers well, companies don’t want to do anything too radical. The team may be trapped by this dilemma and unable to produce something truly disruptive, but it is engaged in “sustaining innovations” that may still be quite radical in their own way.3 THE FLOW OF IDEAS IN THE MODERN COMPANY Thus, every organizational unit is more properly understood as a portfolio that contains some mix of experimentation and execution.

They often want control over the project (because they are afraid of negative consequences to the status quo), but they don’t want to provide funding for the project (because they would much rather invest in the short-term things that are working today). This combination gives rise to the problem outlined in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Innovation accounting suggests one possible way to solve that problem. Along with division- and function-level growth boards, which allocate funding and hold teams accountable within their existing structures, how about a corporate-level growth board that can fund and accelerate new startups that no existing division wants to fund.


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Time horizons can help us better allocate all of our resources—our time, energy, attention, and money—to achieve our goals. We have to beware of our natural tendency to over-allocate our resources to short-term activities that offer immediate rewards instead of to our long-term goals and priorities. Clayton Christensen offers the most compelling illustration of the consequences of overinvesting in the short term. In his Harvard Business Review article “How Will You Measure Your Life?” he describes how, more than 30 years after graduation, many of his classmates have ended up “unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children” even though none of them set out to do so.

The ability to quantify ourselves makes it easier than ever to track our daily time habits and identify the ones we want to change. Do You Allocate Enough Time to Larger, Longer-Term Rewards? Short-term wins are compelling because they offer instant gratification and a sense of accomplishment and progress. We discussed this tendency briefly in chapter 1 and used the Clayton Christensen “How Will You Measure Your Life?” article to illustrate it. In that article, Christensen’s classmates fell prey to this short-term bias by persistently overinvesting in immediate career “wins” and achievements at the expense of the longer-term reward of lasting and loving family relationships.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

“If you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity,” he said. By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers.

“We were both passionate and within five minutes we were both mad,” says Wilke, who later conceded that Bezos was right and the short-term pain had been worth it to build the Kindle franchise. Bezos won the argument, of course, but Wilke convinced him to at least make it clearer on the site that Amazon did not actually have any Kindles on hand. Just as Clayton Christensen had predicted in The Innovator’s Dilemma, technological innovation caused wrenching pain to the company and the broader industry. No one was feeling it more than the book publishers. Amazon had spent much of the last two years cajoling and threatening them to embrace its new digital format.

Chapter 8: Fiona 1 Calvin Reid, “Authors Guild Shoots Down Rocket eBook Contract,” Publishers Weekly, May 10, 1999. 2 Steve Silberman, “Ex Libris,” Wired, July 1998. 3 Steven Levy, “It’s Time to Turn the Last Page,” Newsweek, December 31, 1999. 4 Jane Spencer and Kara Scannell, “As Fraud Case Unravels, Executive Is at Large,” Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2007. 5 David Pogue, “Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete,” New York Times, October 12, 2006. 6 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998. 7 Walt Mossberg, “The Way We Read,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2008. 8 Mark Leibovich, “Child Prodigy, Online Pioneer,” Washington Post, September 3, 2000. 9 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997). 10 Jeff Bezos, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, PBS, February 26, 2009. 11 David D. Kirkpatrick, “Online Sales of Used Books Draw Protest,” New York Times, April 10, 2002. 12 Graeme Neill, “Sony and Amazon in e-Books Battle,” Bookseller, April 27, 2007. 13 Brad Stone, “Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books,” New York Times, September 6, 2007. 14 Jeff Bezos, The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC, October 24, 2008.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Early versions of this can be seen in the rise of “transformational festivals” like Burning Man, or fitness companies like CrossFit, where the experience is generally bad (you work out in old warehouses), but the transformation is great (the person you become after three months of working out in those warehouses). What all this tells us is that business as usual is becoming business unusual. And for existing companies, as Harvard’s Clayton Christensen explains, this is no longer optional: “Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.” And for those of us on the outside of these disruptive models, our experience will be better, cheaper, faster.

Converging Technology Moore’s Law: See: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html. as a human brain: Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind (Viking, 2012), pp. 179–198. “Law of Accelerating Returns”: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001. See: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns. we use the term “disruptive innovation”: Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (HarperBusiness, 2000), pp. 15–19. Enter distributed electric propulsion, or DEP for short: Mark Moore, “Distributed Electric Propulsion Aircraft,” Nasa Langley Research Center. See: https://aero.larc.nasa.gov/files/2012/11/Distributed-Electric-Propulsion-Aircraft.pdf.

the multimillion-dollar economy: Maria Korolov, “Second Life GDP Totals $500 Million,” Hypergrid Business, November 11, 2015. See: https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2015/11/second-life-gdp-totals-500-million/. The Experience Economy: Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 1998. Harvard’s Clayton Christensen: Mark Johnson, Reinvent Your Business Model (Harvard Business Press, 2018), back cover. Force #7: Longer Lives Ada Lovelace: Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (Simon & Schuster, 2014) pp. 7–33. the average caveperson hit puberty: For a great review of lifespan through history, see: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy.


pages: 204 words: 66,619

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking

Taking the smartphone market as an example, there was a time when the iPhone represented the high end of the market with other imitators satisfying the lower end of the market, selling cheaper but with a lower brand and performance offering. Currently the differentiation between various brands is becoming more difficult, and smartphones are almost becoming a commodity. Disruptive Innovation (Source: Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen) Clayton Christensen in his book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ presented an interesting theory of what he calls “disruptive innovation.” He explains how a new product, service, or company may drive existing prominent market players out of the market and conquer their market share. This happens by addressing market segments that are below the existing lower end of the market.


pages: 238 words: 68,914

Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care by Jonathan Bush, Stephen Baker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, informal economy, inventory management, job automation, knowledge economy, lifelogging, obamacare, personalized medicine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, web application, women in the workforce, working poor

His illustrations and metaphors help me envision the problems and their solutions clearly. And he is very, very funny. You will be able to hear Jonathan’s voice as you read this book. It is an easy, insightful, and entertaining read. Jonathan, thank you for writing this book—for what it says and how you say it. Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School JANUARY 2014 INTRODUCTION It’s a steamy summer night in New Orleans in 1990. I’m twenty-one years old and gunning an ambulance down Bienville Avenue, toward Charity Hospital. My uncle is president of the United States and my cousin will take over the same job in a decade.

But I’m convinced that in health care technology, primitive is where the opportunities lie, and that simple, affordable systems will give birth to the disruption we’re aching for. I didn’t speak too much in my rustic getup. Instead I introduced one of my favorite professors from Harvard Business School, Clayton Christensen, who drove home the point much more eloquently than I did with my pike and loincloth. Clay towered before the gathering, all six foot eight of him. A few years ago, he told us, he had suffered a stroke. It affected the part of his brain that governed speech. So he had to relearn English.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

At the same time, don’t lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us. Execute Like a Business The story has become lore in the world of business consulting. In the mid-1990s, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen received a call from Andy Grove, the CEO and chairman of Intel. Grove had encountered Christensen’s research on disruptive innovation and asked him to fly out to California to discuss the theory’s implications for Intel. On arrival, Christensen walked through the basics of disruption: entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by start-ups that begin with cheap offerings at the low end of the market, but then, over time, improve their cheap products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share.

A more detailed history can be found in Chapter 7 of Walter Isaacson’s 2014 book, The Innovators. New York: Simon and Schuster. Execute Like a Business “How do I do this?”: from pages xix–xx of McChesney, Chris, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling. The 4 Disciplines of Execution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Clayton Christensen also talks more about his experience with Andy Grove in a July–August 2010 Harvard Business Review article, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” that he later expanded into a book of the same name: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1. “The more you try to do”: from page 10 of McChesney, Covey, and Huling, The 4 Disciplines of Execution.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

Eventually the entire population that might possibly choose to adopt the gadget is reached. The growth slows down as it reaches this carrying capacity, obeying its logistic shape. These curves are also often referred to as S-curves, due to their stretched S-like shapes. This is the term that’s commonly used when discussing innovation adoption. Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that a series of tightly coupled and successive S-curves—each describing the progression and lifetime of a single technology—can be combined sequentially when looking at what each consecutive technology is actually doing (such as transforming information) and together yield a steady and smooth exponential curve, exactly as Magee and Koh found.

Technological Forecasting and Social Change 73, no. 9 (2006): 1061–83; Koh, Heebyung, and Christopher L. Magee. “A Functional Approach for Studying Technological Progress: Extension to Energy Technology.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 75, no. 6 (2008): 735–58. 45 They begin to run out of space: This growth pattern assumes a continuous food supply. 45 Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School: Christensen, Clayton M. “Exploring the Limits of the Technology S-Curve. Part I: Component Technologies.” Production and Operations Management 1, no. 4 (1992): 334–57. 46 they found mathematical regularities: More recent research has debated whether these are truly exponential or other fast-growing functions, such as power laws or double exponentials.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Here, I want to thank these people who have been instrumental in my education: I have been blessed with many extraordinary teachers and educators, including Peter Sinclair, Vernon Bogdanor, and Tony Courakis, who tutored me in economics and politics; Mary Stokes, John Davies, Hugh Collins, Peter Birks, and Bernard Rudden, who tutored me in law; and Diana Hughes, Charles Stewart, and others who taught me at the City of London Freemen’s School. Richard Nolan, Dick Poorvu, Rawi Abdelal, Clayton Christensen, Boris Groysberg, Len Schlesinger, Jan Hammond, David Joffe, Amar Bhide, Bill Sahlman, and Ray Goldberg are some, but not all, of the brilliant professors I had at Harvard Business School. In my professional life, I have also been tremendously fortunate to have had wonderful teachers and collaborators.

Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology by Ricard Solé and Brian Goodwin Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph LeDoux Self-help A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard A Simple Act of Gratitude: How Learning to Say Thank You Changed My Life by John Kralik Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell As a Man Thinketh by James Allen Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown Focusing by Eugene Gendlin Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples by Harville Hendrix Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide by Harville Hendrix Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want by Wayne Dyer Success: Advice for Achieving Your Goals from Remarkably Accomplished People by Jena Pincott Thanks!


pages: 1,136 words: 73,489

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

The security vulnerability had been disclosed with a CVE ID several months before, and a patch had been released, but Equifax’s developers failed to update the company’s software in time.227 Adapting to user needs Maintenance is often classified as reactive work: it’s the minimum required to keep things running smoothly. But users’ needs change over time, too. Software must also change to meet these needs, or else risk becoming irrelevant. Clayton Christensen famously identifies and analyzes this problem in The Innovator’s Dilemma, the 2003 book in which he tries to understand why successful companies can be overtaken by new ones, even if they are doing well. By focusing too much on iterating upon their incumbent product, companies risk missing major opportunities for so-called “disruptive innovation,” which eventually replaces existing products.228 Similarly, state-of-the-art software, even with regular maintenance, will eventually be replaced by something else that better addresses modern user preferences.

rsc, January 23, 2019, https://research.swtch.com/deps. 227 Dan Goodin, “Failure to Patch Two-Month-Old Bug Led to Massive Equifax Breach,” Ars Technica, September 13, 2017, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/massive-equifax-breach-caused-by-failure-to-patch-two-month-old-bug/. 228 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (New York, NY: Harper Business, 2003). 229 “PyPy Features,” PyPy, n.d., https://pypy.org/features.html. 230 “Call for Donations - PyPy to Support Python3!,” PyPy, December 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191209173423/https://www.pypy.org/py3donate.html. 231 Mikeal Rogers, “Request’s Past, Present and Future,” Request Issues, GitHub, March 30, 2019, https://github.com/request/request/issues/3142. 232 “Moving to Require Python 3,” Python 3 Statement, accessed March 30, 2020, https://python3statement.org/. 233 VPeric, “Differences between Distribute, Distutils, Setuptools and Distutils2?


pages: 283 words: 78,705

Principles of Web API Design: Delivering Value with APIs and Microservices by James Higginbotham

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business intelligence, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative editing, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, database schema, DevOps, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, index card, Internet of things, inventory management, Kubernetes, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, microservices, recommendation engine, semantic web, side project, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, SQL injection, web application, WebSocket

The ADDR Process recommends using job stories, which are rooted in the jobs to be done approach to design. Focusing on the Jobs to be Done Jobs to be done (JTBD) are the identified needs fulfilled by a product or service offering. This includes capturing how a customer problem, the task to be performed, and the desired outcome that should result. JTBD was formulated by Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, as a method of taking the viewpoint of the customer when designing a product or service. JTBD ensures that the product addresses a specific need and therefore has a better chance of gaining market adoption. It starts by identifying the needs of customers, the job, and then defining how a product or service will fill that need.

Job stories seek to identify the problems that customers have and the eventual outcome they wish to achieve. Jobs are identified that will solve these problems. APIs will offer digital capabilities that will power these jobs to be done to produce the desired outcome. Job stories were created by Alan Klement and are based on JTBD formulated by Clayton Christensen. They offer a simple framework to capture all of the aspects of the job to be done. Teams producing job stories will find that their API designs focus more on the desired outcomes of the audience. They will also have the details necessary to create acceptance criteria for automated tests. It is important to note that job stories shouldn’t contain implementation specifics.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Over time, it can be hard to separate strategy from the status quo. Are we operating in sixty countries because that’s critical to our success or because we happened to acquire a bunch of foreign offices? The longer we operate, the more organizational debt we likely carry with us, limiting our ability to innovate. Indeed, Professor Clayton Christensen coined the term “the innovator’s dilemma” to describe why incumbents are so often disrupted by upstarts and unexpected competitors. To resist this pattern, try launching a red team. Originating in the military and intelligence communities but now practiced in a variety of business contexts, a red team is charged with one mission: putting you out of business.

When a CMO at a Fortune 10 company reported to his peers that he was saving fourteen hours a week based on changes his team had made, you could see the jealousy on everyone’s face. There’s nothing that legacy cultures love more than a measurable productivity gain, so when things do move the needle, they spread fast. Wonder. Winning experiments reveal new possibilities. Working in new ways opens the mind to what could be. Clayton Christensen once told software entrepreneur Jason Fried, “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.”


pages: 299 words: 92,782

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

And when they do, you have a bunch of people on the other team doing things they don't have much experience doing.” By adding battlefields to the game, Leach diluted the advantage of the stronger teams.7 Colonel Blotto also has parallels to business. One illustration is the theory of disruptive innovation developed by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School. Christensen studies why great companies with smart managements and substantial resources consistently lose to companies with simpler, cheaper, and inferior products. He calls these upstarts “disruptors” and distinguishes between what he calls sustaining and disruptive innovation.8 Sustaining innovation involves steadily improving a product that already exists.

Take war as an example. Weaker combatants won a higher percentage of wars in the twentieth century than the nineteenth century because they learned not to go toe-to-toe with their stronger foe. Instead, they pursued alternative strategies and tactics, including those of guerrilla warfare. Professor Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation shows how companies that are initially weaker overcome their more formidable competitors. One of his insights is that the stronger companies initially concede part of the market to the weaker companies or ignore them altogether.18 The stronger companies allow the disruptors to win small battles, which allows to disruptors to improve their products and make money.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Again and again, automotive innovations quickly shift from competitive advantage to industry-standard equipment. This pattern repeats itself so regularly because almost every innovation in the automotive space is what is known as a “sustaining innovation” rather than a “disruptive innovation.” Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined these terms, defines sustaining innovations as “innovations that make a product or service perform better in ways that customers in the mainstream market already value,” which indeed describes the evolution of the auto industry. “Disruptive innovations,” on the other hand, “create an entirely new market through the introduction of a new kind of product or service,” which are out of step with the values of both established consumer markets and industry leaders.

The one area where Tesla has had undeniable success, namely creating electric cars with performance and styling that appeals to existing customers, proves that its innovations are sustaining rather than disruptive. One of the fundamental cornerstones of the Tesla mythology is the belief that established automakers either can’t or won’t build electric cars in meaningful volumes. This theory relies heavily on crude interpretations of what Clayton Christensen called “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which suggests that investments in existing technologies and business models make “incumbent” companies less able to establish new businesses in response to innovations. Christensen and his coauthors explain this dilemma in an article called “Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things”: Executives in established companies bemoan how expensive it is to build new brands and develop new sales and distribution channels—so they seek instead to leverage their existing brands and structures.


pages: 102 words: 27,769

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

call centre, Clayton Christensen, Dean Kamen, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, fixed-gear, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Y Combinator

He made it look easy, but it wasn’t easy work. Thank you, Matt. We also want to thank our families, our customers, and everyone at 37signals. And here’s a list of some of the people we know, and don’t know, who have inspired us in one way or another: Frank Lloyd Wright Seth Godin Warren Buffett Jamie Larson Clayton Christensen Ralph Nader Jim Coudal Benjamin Franklin Ernest Kim Jeff Bezos Scott Heiferman Antoni Gaudi Carlos Segura Larry David Steve Jobs Dean Kamen Bill Maher Thomas Jefferson Mies van der Rohe Ricardo Semler Christopher Alexander James Dyson Kent Beck Thomas Paine Gerald Weinberg Kathy Sierra Julia Child Marc Hedlund Nicholas Karavites Michael Jordan Richard Bird Jeffrey Zeldman Dieter Rams Judith Sheindlin Ron Paul Timothy Ferriss Copyright © 2010 by 37signals, LLC.


pages: 327 words: 102,322

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

He likened it to giving QNX “training wheels” before taking on the task of overhauling his beloved BlackBerry from the inside—as well as the entire software organization that provided its digital core—to build RIM’s smartphone of the future. “I was basically putting the company through the biggest transformation they had ever experienced,” he says. Lazaridis had a blueprint inspired by Clayton Christensen’s acclaimed 1997 management book, The Innovator’s Dilemma.3 The Harvard professor argued that for established companies to succeed against disruptive competitors, they had to empower small, cloistered teams. These autonomous groups, unsullied by the parent company’s set ways, would develop disruptive technologies of their own and could eventually subsume other parts of the organization.

brandID=21. 15 / FAULT LINES 1 Ben Worthen, “Businesses Add iPads to Their Briefcases,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2010. 2 Jobs claimed Adobe “screwed” him by refusing to make a Mac version of Adobe Premiere in 1999 and later attacked Flash, telling biographer Walter Isaacson that it was “a spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy performance and really bad security problems.” Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 514–5. 3 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Boston, Harvard Business Publishing, 1997. 4 BlackBerry turned down interview requests with Dan Dodge for this book. 5 Chloe Albanesius, “Adobe Ditching Mobile Browser Flash Player Development,” PC Magazine, November 9, 2011. 6 RIM’s share of AT&T, which was lower to begin with because of the carrier’s relationship with Apple, dipped to 15 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, down from 18 percent a year earlier. 7 Mikael Ricknäs, “Samsung Becomes Biggest Smartphone Vendor, as Android’s Market Share Grows,” PC World, November 15, 2011. 8 Paul Christoper Webster and Iain Marlow, “Where the BlackBerry Still Reigns Supreme,” Report on Business Magazine, November 29, 2012. 9 Susana Ferreira and Will Connors, “In These Countries, BlackBerry Is Still King—Of Pop Culture,” Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2012. 10 “BlackBerry Babes,” The Economist, December 8, 2012. 11 “BlackBerry Loses Top Spot to Apple at Home: Corporate Canada,” Bloomberg, March 22, 2012. 12 Zahraa al Khalisi, “BlackBerry ‘Pins’ Are the New Licence Plates,” The National (United Arab Emirates), September 19, 2009; author interview with Patrick Spence, 2014. 13 Sandeep Singh Grewal, “Comeback Vow by Journalist,” Gulf Daily News, September 23, 2010; Yousef, “Blackberries, Breaking News and Bans,” Flipcorp.com, September 25, 2011, www.flipcorp.com/en/read/blog/bahrain-blackberries.blog. 14 This information is based on a statement of defense and counterclaim filed in Canadian Federal Court by Kik Interactive against RIM in April 2011; it was not tested in court.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Likewise, AT&T and RCA were extremely innovative companies, but other companies ultimately developed their key technologies, such as the transistor. AT&T and RCA stuck to phones and radio, and became the antithesis of originality.55 There is a reason why big companies are so bad at implementing new ideas. Steve Jobs rarely recommended books, but he liked The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. His 1997 book was embraced by Silicon Valley and called one of the six best business books ever by The Economist.56 Christensen's theory was that because successful companies cannot disrupt themselves; they leave themselves vulnerable to competition from upstarts because they abandon the lower end of the market.

Audretsch, “Testing the Schumpeterian Hypothesis,” Eastern Economic Journal XIV, no. 2 (1988). 51. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-most-successful-companies-are-killing-the-economy-2017-05-24. 52. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-12/google-has-made-a-mess-of-robotics. 53. http://blog.luxresearchinc.com/blog/2016/03/the-downfall-of-google-robotics/. 54. Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperBusiness, 1999). 55. Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). 56. https://qz.com/801706/innovation-guru-clayton-christensens-new-theory-will-help-protect-you-from-disruption/. 57. Frederic M. Scherer, “Technological Innovation and Monopolization” (October 2007). KSG Working Paper No. RWP07-043. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1019023. 58. John J. McConnell, John J. Sibley, E. Steven, and Wei Xu, “The Stock Price Performance of Spin-Off Subsidiaries, Their Parents, and the Spin-Off ETF, 2001–2013,” Journal of Portfolio Management; New York 42, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 143–152. 59. http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagnation/. 60.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Imagine a future where college students can attend free online courses taught by Harvard or Stanford professors and subsequently receive a credential that would be acceptable to employers or graduate schools. Who, then, would be willing to go into debt in order to pay the tuition at a third- or fourth-tier institution? Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School and an expert in disruptive innovation within industries, has predicted that the answer to that question will result in a grim future for thousands of institutions. In a 2013 interview, Christensen said that “15 years from now, half of US universities may be in bankruptcy.”22 Even if most institutions remain solvent, it is easy to imagine dramatically declining enrollments and revenues coupled with massive layoffs of both administrators and faculty.

id=40. 18. Selingo, College Unbound, p. 27. 19. “Senior Administrators Now Officially Outnumber Faculty at the UC” (Reclaim UC blog), September 19, 2011, http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2011/09/senior-administrators-now-officially.html. 20. Selingo, College Unbound, p. 28. 21. Ibid. 22. Clayton Christensen interview with Mark Suster at Startup Grind 2013, available at YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYVdf5xyD8I. 23. William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Kelly A. Lack, and Thomas I. Nygren, “Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials,” Ithaka S+R Research Publication, May 22, 2012, http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/interactive-learning-online-public-universities-evidence-randomized-trials.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

And yet some business scholars wonder if even the approach of a W.L. Gore or a Google is really radical enough to cope with truly disruptive business ideas. 6 When companies become dinosaurs Guppies breed so quickly that John Endler was able to produce guppy evolution withn months. When Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School wanted to understand why some apparently capable companies find themselves wiped out by a sudden shift in the competitive landscape, he looked for the economic equivalent of a greenhouse full of guppies. The disk-drive industry was his first port of call: a market in which upstarts frequently seem to usurp the market leaders.

Conspiracy theorists may believe that this is because Shell has an evil plan to dominate and disrupt the threat from renewable technologies. I doubt this. If there really is a cost-effective renewable alternative to the eons of energy concentrated into crude oil, it would be very much in Shell’s interests to commercialise it. The explanation is simpler: following Clayton Christensen’s logic, there is simply no reason to expect an oil company to be particularly good at inventing, manufacturing or distributing photovoltaic solar panels. Oil companies are good at very different things: negotiating with African and Middle Eastern governments, complex drilling operations, building and operating refineries and chemical engineering plants, and selling liquid fuels in roadside forecourts.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

Like the old BCG matrix, its careless use can create more fog than clarity. With overuse, the term disruption has come to mean almost anything that upsets an existing business or state of affairs. The idea, however, had a more precise meaning when it was first deployed by Harvard professors Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower. Their focus was on the many leading companies failing to “stay on top” when competitors employed new technologies: “Goodyear and Firestone entered the radial-tire market quite late. Xerox let Canon create the small-copier market. Bucyrus-Erie allowed Caterpillar and Deere to take over the mechanical excavator market.

In the classic version of disruption, a maker of hard disk drives for desktop PCs had customers who wanted faster and faster drives with ever more capacity, so it would tend to ignore the new smaller two-and-a-half-inch hard drives. The existing customers weren’t interested in them. But as the smaller drives became more capable, they went into laptops and actually became more cost effective than your traditional larger desktop drives. In this story, the company is “disrupted from below.” Clayton Christensen’s vivid descriptions of disruption from below in the hard-disk industry, the excavator market, and steel mini mills terrified a generation of executives. Executives worried that they were too focused on their successful products and their best customers. Should they respond to every competitive product that was not as good as theirs?


pages: 133 words: 36,528

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

One possible application of this technology would be to taxis, if lower fares increased their attraction to passengers (in which case the innovation would be disruptive to taxi drivers). Driverless trains are already with us—for instance on London’s Docklands Light Railway—safe and practical because access to the system is controlled. Clayton Christensen, originator of the concept of disruptive innovation, argued that the electric car might be such a technology. Possibly the electric car will displace vehicles powered by conventional internal combustion engines. Car manufacturers who do not have access to this technology would lose market share, but the battery manufacturers who might make the technological breakthrough would be keen to supply all users.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”42 The shifts in power that we see all around us—which include and transcend the ascent and demise of business enterprises—are certainly consistent with Schumpeter’s expectations. They are also in line with the insights of Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who coined the term disruptive innovation, meaning a change—in technology, service, or product—that creates a new market by relying on a completely new approach. The effects of a disruptive innovation eventually spill over to other related or similar markets and undermine them.

On the other hand, the outsourced drug discovery market has grown faster than overall drug R&D since 2001; it expanded from $2 billion in 2003 to $5.4 billion in 2007 and is estimated to be currently growing at 16 percent per year.45 None of this bodes well for large companies. As the business scholar Clayton Christensen argued in a famous book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, even the very best large companies operate by a set of procedures that make them good at harnessing “sustaining technologies” (the new technologies that help make existing products better) but terrible at identifying and capitalizing on disruptive technologies (the new technologies that usually emerge at the margins of an existing market but eventually stand to remake it).


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

Disruption This afterword is mostly for business-theory or innovation-theory junkies who may have heard of, or even occasionally make use of, the term disruptive or the term (which causes me even more stomach pain) disruptive innovation. First, to get something out of the way quickly: the two types of loonshots described in chapter 3 are unrelated to what Louis Galambos in 1992 called “adaptive” vs. “formative” innovations, and Clayton Christensen in 1997 called “sustaining” vs. “disruptive” innovations. The two loonshots distinguish between a new strategy (S-type) and a new product or technology (P-type). Galambos and Christensen distinguish between improvements to existing products (sustaining) and technologies that eventually significantly alter some market (disruptive).

The reason to use the term will become clearer later. *    The word choice is borrowed from a phrase made famous by Sheryl Sandberg. *    For business theorists: The two types of loonshots are unrelated to what Louis Galambos in 1992 called “adaptive” vs. “formative” innovations, and Clayton Christensen in 1997 called “sustaining” vs. “disruptive” innovations. For the distinction, see the afterword. *    The data sample included over one hundred YouTube concert videos watched by the authors, from which they concluded mosh pits and circle pits “are robust, reproducible, and largely independent of factors such as the musical subgenre, timing of performance, crowd size, arena size, suggestions from the band, time of year, and socioeconomic status of the moshers” (Silverberg et al., “Collective Motion of Humans in Mosh and Circle Pits at Heavy Metal Concerts,” PRL 110 [2013]).


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

More broadly, pivoting can apply across all areas of life: your career path, a difficult relationship, how you’re approaching meeting your child’s educational needs, and so forth. When considering a pivot, you can use a few mental models to help you decide what to do. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen named and championed the model of jobs to be done, which asks you to figure out the real job that your product does, which can be different than what you might initially think. An oft-cited example by Christensen is a power drill: “Customers want to ‘hire’ a product to do a job, or, as legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, ‘People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill.

Would we all have had digital cameras years earlier? Could it have eventually pivoted into a role powering the cameras in most smartphones or pivoted even more drastically and created a product like Instagram? We’ll never know. Consumer Camera Sales Digital vs. Smartphone, 2002-2016 In Clayton Christensen’s seminal work The Innovator’s Dilemma, he lays out the framework for how such disruptive innovations ripple through industries, ushering new industry entrants into power while leaving dead incumbents in their wake. The incumbent’s dilemma is whether to embrace the disruptive technology, usually at the great cost of the existing business.


pages: 138 words: 40,787

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

(Source: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/authors/anthony-flint/.) 23 SARTRE, Partners Conclude After the SARTRE Project (2012). http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/about/news/Sidor/20120917_1.aspx. 24 Economist Intelligence Unit, Rise of the Machines: Moving from Hype to Reality in the Burgeoning Market for Machine-to-Machine Communication (2012). http://digitalresearch.eiu.com/m2m/report. Chapter 5 USE CASES The use cases capture the goals of the system. To understand a use case, we tell stories. ~ Ivar Jacobson In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma,25 Clayton Christensen uses a fascinating Harvard Business School case called “Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk.” The Kittyhawk was the product name of a revolutionary hard disk drive developed by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the early ’90s. The disk was tiny and had a capacity of 20MB to 40MB, which made the product unique at its time with potential to disrupt one or more industries.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

“The industry is simply too efficient,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive (who seems to have gone quite grey during his mixed performance at his previous job as boss of Novell, a software firm). The it industry also differs from other technology sectors in that its wares become less valuable as they get better, and go from “undershoot” to “overshoot,” to use the terms coined by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. A technology is in “undershoot” when it is not good enough for most customers, so they are willing to pay a lot for something that is a bit better although not perfect. Conversely, “overshoot” means that a technology is more than sufficient for most uses, and margins sink lower. pcs quickly became a commodity, mainly because ibm outsourced the components for its first venture into this market in the early 1980s, allowing others to clone the machines.

The bitter irony, says Mr Lane, is that Microsoft is one of the least likely companies to make breakthroughs in simplification. “It cannot cannibalise itself,” says Mr Lane. “It faces the dilemma.” The dilemma? These days, whenever anybody in the it industry mentions that word, it is instantly understood to refer to The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), a book by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, who has since followed it up with a sequel, The Innovator’s Solution (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). In a nutshell, the dilemma is this: firms that succeed in one generation of innovation almost inevitably become hamstrung by their own success and thus doomed to lose out in the next wave of innovation.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Hence, when financial services expand, business development tends to be pushed out. The BIS economists discovered this in one of their studies, and argued that “productivity tends to grow disproportionally slower in industries with lower asset tangibility.”58 Many others have suggested a similar type of problem. “The emphasis on earnings per share,” argue Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and colleagues, “diverts resources away from investments whose payoff lies beyond the immediate horizon.”59 Another way to put it, and to simplify to an extreme, is that an investor owning a stock for only a few months has little interest in supporting costly investments today that might pay off years in the future.

However, the risk is that ignoring nonquantifiable objectives pushes companies to make the wrong investment choices: that overlooking becomes too mechanical, and that is a particularly acute problem when dealing with investments in innovation. The use of standard quantitative valuation methods, argue Harvard’s “innovation guru” Clayton Christensen and colleagues, “causes managers to underestimate the real returns and benefits of proceeding with investments in innovation.”69 In other words, companies risk failing to accurately predict future cash flows by making incorrect assumptions about the future. But, to make it even more intriguing, myopic companies also become overoptimistic about the not-to-invest scenario when modeling current investments quantitatively.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Sull calls this “active inertia” and he believes it is the main reason good companies fail: “When the world changes, organizations trapped in active inertia do more of the same. A little faster perhaps or tweaked at the margin, but basically the same old same old. . . . Organizations trapped in active inertia resemble a car with its back wheels stuck in a rut. Managers step on the gas. Rather than escape the rut, they only dig themselves in deeper.” Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor whose book The Innovator’s Dilemma is the corporate bible on disruptive change, has found that established companies almost always fail when their industries are confronted with disruptive new technologies or markets. And that is not, he argues, because their managers are dumb or lazy.

“I made a mistake” Transcript of House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Hearing on the Role of Federal Regulators, October 23, 2008. “we always assume regime stability” McFaul e-mail to CF, February 22, 2011. “active inertia” Donald Sull, “Why Good Companies Go Bad,” Financial Times, October 3, 2005. “These failed firms” Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), p. xv. “vast, silent, connected” W. Brian Arthur, “The Second Economy,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2011. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Zuckerberg attended Ardsley High School for two years before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy.


pages: 160 words: 45,516

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future by Richard Susskind

business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, global supply chain, information retrieval, invention of the wheel, power law, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, supply-chain management, telepresence, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Instead, based on a user’s answers to specific questions about his or her particular circumstances, the document generated will be one output of countless (often millions of) possible permutations. The end result is a tailored solution, delivered by an advanced system rather than by a human craftsman. That is the future of legal service. 5 Disruptive Legal Technologies In management theory, drawing on Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, a distinction is commonly drawn between sustaining and disruptive technologies. In broad terms, sustaining technologies are those that support and enhance the way that a business or a market currently operates. In contrast, disruptive technologies fundamentally challenge and change the functioning of a firm or a sector.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Moore. (2006) “Understanding Moore’s Law.” Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation. 169 The Continuum of Kryder’s Law: Data from Clayton Christensen. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, p. 10. 170 need to “listen to the technology”: (2001) “An Interview with Carver Mead.” American Spectator, 34 (7). http://laputan.blogspot.com/2003_09_21_laputan_archive.html. 170 Compound S Curves: Data from Clayton Christensen. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, p. 40. 9.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

There are not uses in the home itself.’32 Jobs was himself ousted from Apple, before he returned in 1997 to save the faltering company. He managed to turn it into the world’s most valuable company, partly based on the success of a revolutionary smartphone in 2007, which was immediately met by the certain prediction ‘Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone’ by the innovation guru (and I mean that in a non-ironic sense) Clayton Christensen, ‘History speaks pretty loudly on that.’33 The simple truth is that no one can predict the future. Ironically, in the 1988 study that claimed the Soviet Union was at square one, the authors also added a few words about their own US: ‘It would be optimistic to predict a rapid transition of personal computing to a phase 5 [a part of daily life] technology.’

Goodman, ‘The Soviet Union and the personal computer “revolution”’, Report to National Council for Soviet and East European Research, June 1988. 30 ‘If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute’, as the ad had it. 31 S. Goodman, ‘Soviet computing and technology transfer: An overview’, World Politics, 31(4), July 1979, p. 544. 32 ‘Apple wizard says computer “fad” dying’, The Pantagraph, 20 January 1985. D. Sanger, ‘Computers for the home’, The Day, 5 May 1985. 33 J. McGregor, ‘Clayton Christensen’s innovation brain’, Bloomberg, 18 June 2007. 34 Stapleton and Goodman, 1988. 35 J. Edstrom and M. Eller, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1998, p. xii. 36 S. Johnson, ‘The internet? We built that’, New York Times, 21 September 2012. 37 In an email exchange documented here: http://www.nethistory.info/Archives/origins.html (accessed 9 March 2020). 38 Johnson, 2011, p. 221. 39 Ibid, p. 89. 40 G.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound,” keynote address, National Association of Business Economists’ Policy Conference, February 24, 2014, which focuses on the impotence of expansionary monetary policy when interest rates approach zero. 7.Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York, NY: Crown Business, 2014), 193. For my time-sensitive money, this is the most original and interesting book ever written on business strategy. (Its chief rival is the more technical Innovators’ Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.) 8.Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel, “The Great Bank Robbery,” Global Public Square, CNN, October 2011. 9.David Malpass, speech to the Needham Growth Conference, New York, January 15, 2015. As Malpass points out, zero interest rates mean free money, and “when anything is free it is allocated by queue and only the privileged folk at the front of the line get any.” 10.Charles Gave, “Poverty Matters for Capitalists,” GavekalDragonomics (Hong Kong: Gavekal Global Research, July 9, 2014), 1–6.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

When the Harvard Business School embraced Jensen, explains Duff McDonald, it transformed itself from an institution seeking to create a body of enlightened business people into a cheerleader for Wall Street. ‘They basically threw in the towel and said, “Fuck it, let’s go for the money.”’ Not coincidentally their fundraising improved spectacularly. Clayton Christensen, a dissenting professor at the school who specialises in business innovation, explains how destructive the new thinking has been. ‘The professors of finance in the main business schools, the professors of economics have over the last forty years created a church. I call it the New Church of Finance.

For a deeper investigation, see Lynn Stout, The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public, Berret-Koehler, 2012; and Karen Ho, Liquidated, 2009, Chapter 3 and particularly p.124 onwards. 7. From ‘The New Church of Finance: Deeply held belief systems and complex codes must be changed’, Deseret News, 9 December 2012, and from my phone interview with Clayton Christensen, 24 May 2012. 8. As Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt put it in Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street, Russel Sage Foundation, 2014, pp.7–8, ‘with the portfolio companies of most private equity firms located in many different industries, private equity’s expertise is typically financial, not operational’. 9.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

In The Role of Demographics in Occupational Stress and Well Being (Research in Occupational Stress and Well-being, Volume 12), 235–283, edited by Pamela Perrewé, Christopher Rosen, and Jonathon Halbesleben. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Thomas, Frank, and Ollie Johnston. 1981. The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. Abbeville Press. Thompson, Ben. 2013. “What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong.” Stratechery blog, September 22. http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/. Torelli, Carlos, and Andrew Kaikati. 2009. “Values as Predictors of Judgments and Behaviors: The Role of Abstract and Concrete Mindsets.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96(1): 231–247. Tormala, Zakary, Jayson Jia, and Michael Norton. 2012.


pages: 550 words: 154,725

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

They would prefer to invest in incremental improvements, and to have wonderful picnics, and make this quarter’s earnings without strain.” In part, Mayo connects this to the “immense stress” associated with funding research on ideas that may destroy your business if the results make your current product obsolete. Those who study innovation know this as the innovator’s dilemma, a term coined by the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. “This is a very strong force,” Mayo points out. “It’s in me. And in everybody.” Strangely enough, however, it may not have been in Mervin Kelly or in some of his disciples—perhaps because the monopoly, at least for a time, guaranteed that the phone company’s business would remain sturdy even in the face of drastic technological upheaval.

With so many uncertainties in the picture no accurate estimate of research and development cost can be had but comparison with other large system developments would suggest a minimum cost of $20,000,000 and a possibility of a considerably higher figure.” The memo also predicted, incorrectly, that the “propaganda value” (i.e., the public relations boost) from a communications satellite would be minimal. 14 The term was coined years after Kelly’s reign, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. 15 J. R. Pierce and R. Kompfner, letter to M. J. Kelly, 8 October 1958. In Kompfner’s handwriting at the top it reads: “Copy given to J.R.P. who showed it to W.O.B. Not Sent.” J.R.P. is Pierce; W.O.B. is William (Bill) Baker. AT&T archives. 16 J. R. Pierce and R. Kompfner, “Proposal for Research Toward Satellite Communication,” January 6, 1959.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Many of our most admired companies won’t stand a chance when the most valuable digital networks take on their markets. Nigel Fenwick of Forrester Research said that by 2020, every organization will be either digital predator or digital prey.1 Your Strategy Needs a Business Model Face-Lift To return to the quote by Clayton Christensen at the start of this chapter, the problem is that most organizations don’t know where they are starting, much less where they are headed and how to get there. We wrote this book to help the leaders of traditional firms—those focused internally on using their own assets and employees to make, market, and sell—enter the world of digital network business models and leverage an external network to contribute its assets, ideas, skills, and relationships and share in the value created.


pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Think Two Steps Ahead Planning and adapting means thinking carefully about your future. Lunging at the first well-paid and/or high-status job you come upon may offer immediate gratification, but it won’t get you any closer to building a meaningful career. A goal that can be achieved in a single step is probably not very meaningful—or ambitious. The business professor Clayton Christensen once told graduating students at Harvard Business School, “If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find [a] predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.” At the same time, though, don’t do the opposite and think ahead too far in the future.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Workers can then use these funds at different stages in their career for training purposes, in response to replacement or to advance their careers more generally. Before scaling up such efforts, however, they need to be carefully evaluated. Major reforms to transform education and training might also be required more broadly. As Harvard University’s Clayton Christensen has forcefully argued, there is no particular reason why people with different learning requirements should have to conform to rigid academic programs that run for a specified period of time. The factory-based education model, which emerged in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, gradually expanded across many dimensions with more hours spent in school, more subjects covered, and more years of schooling.

It draws upon a vast body of research to which numerous scholars have contributed. I guess my own journey to writing it began in my school years, when my father, Christopher, got back from a business trip with two new books for me. The first was Joel Mokyr’s The Lever of Riches. The second was Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Their work showed me that long-term prosperity derives from technological innovation. But it also made abundantly clear that progress often comes with economic and societal disruption. My lifelong interest in the subject is thanks to my father. Over the past four years of writing, I have accumulated many debts.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

As former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has put it, “Lack of demand creates lack of supply.” Instead of making investments that could create new jobs, firms are now using their cash to buy back stock, which only increases economic inequality. 5. The Harvard Business School guru Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail) argues, “Financial markets—and companies themselves—use assessment metrics that make innovations that eliminate jobs more attractive than those that create jobs.” Whereas the return on “efficiency innovations” is relatively quick, the more important “market-creating innovations,” which create entirely new industries that produce jobs, have a long time in which to return the investment.


pages: 272 words: 66,985

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

Later I bought a dumb feature phone and then an even more distracting smartphone. Next came an iPad and a fitness tracker. I’m sure there will be more devices in my future. This speaks to a trap we increasingly face: bringing new devices into our lives without first questioning their value. Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, developed a useful way of assessing the devices in your life: question what “jobs” you “hire” devices to do for you. Every product we buy should do a job for us—we hire Kleenex to blow our nose; Uber to get from one place to another; OpenTable to book a table at a restaurant; Match.com to find a partner.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

If you sell dresses, for instance, supporting each design requires loads of execution work: pricing, sourcing, inventory management, sales, marketing, shipping, and returns. Additional support work props up these processes, including basic tasks in human resources, contracts, and accounting. The burden of execution work has made it nearly impossible for companies with one core business to develop and support another (Clayton Christensen calls this the “innovator’s dilemma”). Those who’ve tried have almost always pulled back, or found it impossible to sustain multiple businesses at once. “GM historically made many things other than cars,” Professor Ned Hill, an economist at Ohio State University, told me, citing refrigerators and locomotives.


pages: 296 words: 66,815

The AI-First Company by Ash Fontana

23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, blockchain, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Charles Babbage, chief data officer, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, independent contractor, industrial robot, inventory management, John Conway, knowledge economy, Kubernetes, Lean Startup, machine readable, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, single source of truth, software as a service, source of truth, speech recognition, the scientific method, transaction costs, vertical integration, yield management

* “API.DATA.GOV,” Data.gov, accessed September 11, 2020, https://api.data.gov. *Convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks are explained on p. 151. *See the glossary for definitions of these terms. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle. * Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016). * Ben Thompson, “Defining Aggregators,” Stratechery, accessed September 26, 2017, https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/.


pages: 227 words: 63,186

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

Ben Horowitz, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, data science, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, functional programming, Google Earth, hive mind, Innovator's Dilemma, iterative process, Kanban, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, pull request, Richard Thaler, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, statistical model, systems thinking, the long tail, web application

keywords=INSPIRED%3A+How+to+Create+Tech+Products+Customers+Love+by+Marty+Cagan&qid=1551586391&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull 12. https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/1633691780/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=The+Innovator’s+Dilemma%3A+When+New+Technologies+Cause+Great+Firms+to+Fail+by+Clayton+Christensen&qid=1551586451&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull 13. https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About-ebook/dp/B000RO9VJK/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=The+E-Myth+Revisited%3A+Why+Most+Small+Businesses+Don’t+Work+and+What+to+Do+About+It+by+Michael+Gerber&qid=1551586507&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull 14. https://www.amazon.com/Fierce-Conversations-Achieving-Success-Conversation/dp/B06XGNMDBY/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?


pages: 733 words: 184,118

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Schumpeter was fascinated by the role that innovation played in the modern economy, and he emphasized in his writings that there were two kinds of innovative activity. On the one hand, there are the creative responses of entrepreneurs and inventors who introduce radically new products, processes, and services and in so doing wreak the creative destruction that Schumpeter regarded as a central characteristic of capitalism. More recently, Clayton Christensen has characterized Schumpeter’s creative responses as “disruptive innovations” in the sense that selected firms sometimes pursue technologies that disrupt the pattern of established industries and alter the everyday life of consumers.50 On the other hand, there are the adaptive responses of managers and engineers who undertake the steady and incremental work of establishing the corporate structures, manufacturing procedures, and marketing plans that allow products and services to be produced and consumed.51 Clearly the success of any economy—especially the United States in Tesla’s time, from 1870 to 1920—has depended on getting the right mix of creative and adaptive innovations.

To respond to this challenge, we need to recall Schumpeter’s idea that economies grow as a result of two kinds of innovation (see Chapter 2). On one hand, there are the creative responses of entrepreneurs and inventors who introduce new products, processes, and services and in so doing dramatically change everyday life and reorder the industrial world; as Clayton Christensen has suggested, these can be called disruptive innovations.15 On the other hand, there are the adaptive responses of managers and engineers who undertake the steady and incremental work of establishing the corporate structures, manufacturing procedures, and marketing plans that allow products and services to be produced and consumed.


pages: 612 words: 187,431

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

The lesson for the future is that over-committing to any one technology or business model would be a mistake — and maintaining the adaptive flexibility of our software and the design tradition that goes with it is correspondingly imperative. Another lesson is this: Never bet against the cheap plastic solution. Or, equivalently, the low-end/high-volume hardware technology almost always ends up climbing the power curve and winning. The economist Clayton Christensen calls this disruptive technology and showed in The Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen] how this happened with disk drives, steam shovels, and motorcycles. We saw it happen as minicomputers displaced mainframes, workstations and servers replaced minis, and commodity Intel machines replaced workstations and servers.

Whittington, Henry Spencer, David Keppel, and Mark Brader. Recommended C Style and Coding Standards. 1990. An updated version of the Indian Hill C Style and Coding Standards paper, with modifications by the last three authors. It describes a recommended coding standard for C programs. Available on the Web. [Christensen] Clayton Christensen. The Innovator's Dilemma. HarperBusiness. 2000. ISBN 0-066-62069-4. The book that introduced the term “disruptive technology”. A fascinating and lucid examination of how and why technology companies doing everything right get mugged by upstarts. A business book technical people should read.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

FENG ZHU, Professor, Harvard Business School “A forefront researcher into how businesses can better use metadata and current technology.” — 4BC 1116 NEWS TALK, Australian Radio, at the G20 World Summit 2014 “Sangeet is one of the deepest thinkers I know. He has helped countless startups understand and unlock their core value as platform businesses. His work sits next to Clayton Christensen and Geoffrey Moore.” — MENG WONG, Co-founder, JFDI “One of the best innovation strategists in the world and an expert on building platforms. His work is a must-read for entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators worldwide.” — KEVIN DEWALT, Former EIR at NSF and Founder, SoHelpful.Me “Sangeet’s work provides amazing insight into the success and failure of todays business models, a resource that entrepreneurs and innovators cannot afford to ignore


pages: 229 words: 72,431

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The product will probably not be as good as what a professional would produce, but it is good enough for many customers, and far less expensive. The shadow-working consumer simply customizes the template for her needs and goes ahead with it—planting the garden or going live with the new website. Such templates are examples of “disruptive innovation,” a term Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined in his landmark 1992 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Disruptive innovation happens when a new company introduces a product that is cheaper, simpler, and/or faster than those on the market. Toyota and Honda, for example, disrupted Detroit’s Big Three automakers by bringing out cheaper, smaller, no-frills cars like the Corolla and Civic.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

In fact, as implied earlier, because people will have longer health spans, there will likely be an increase in the amount of time they spend in training at the beginning of their lives as well as throughout their lives. This begs the question of whether educational delivery will change as our lives lengthen and we become more technologically sophisticated. Education likely will expand to offer more personalized instruction. In a recent book titled Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen and his coauthors make a persuasive case that the future of education will become more tailored to individuals’ learning styles and levels. Whereas one student might learn best from rote memorization, another might be better off learning through an interactive game format or virtual reality system.


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Kelly says, with a twinge of genuine pain in his voice. “In the old days there was tons of stuff around for them. It might not always have been exciting work, but at least it was available. Now guys like us can do a lot of that work just by using the right algorithm.” Divorce by Algorithm Business-management guru Clayton Christensen identifies two types of new technology: “sustaining” and “disruptive” innovations.19 A sustaining technology is something that supports or enhances the way a business or market already operates. A disruptive technology, on the other hand, fundamentally alters the way in which a particular sector functions.


Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, deal flow, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, diversification, drop ship, Elon Musk, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, high net worth, intangible asset, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, Peter Thiel, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, Y Combinator

He was able to identify an enormous opportunity to offer hospitals art consulting and design services, along with the custom framing manufacturing he already did. This expanded his current offering to fill an additional customer need, expanding the company into “blue ocean” territory. UNDERSTANDING INNOVATION Often, entrepreneurship is often associated with disrupting existing industries with innovation. In Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma, the Harvard professor beautifully illustrates the relationship between existing and disruptive technologies through mapping the quality level of the product over time. Mature markets often operate at a quality level above what is required by customers, eliminating quality issues between competitors, while emerging technologies are usually ignored by industry incumbents because the quality level is too low for offering to existing customers.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Rather ironically, Didi, in turn, already owns stakes in several of Uber’s key competitors, including Lyft in the United States and Ola in India: Leslie Hook, ‘Uber makes a U-turn in China as subsidy war ends in Didi deal’, Financial Times (1 August 2016), http://www.ft.com/content/ 7f6e251a-5801-11e6-9f70-badea1b336d4, archived at https://perma.cc/2MYF- JJ3X; Ma Fangjing and Charles Clover, ‘Uber shares soar after Didi deal’, Financial Times (2 August 2016), http://www.ft.com/content/54217d94-5892- 11e6-8d05-4eaa66292c32, archived at https://perma.cc/E4LJ-86NX 29. Clayton Christensen, Michael Raynor, and Rory McDonald, ‘What is dis- ruptive innovation?’, Harvard Business Review (December 2015), https://hbr. * * * 154 Notes org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation, archived at https://perma.cc/ YUW5-UY2P 30. Ibid. 31. Paul Bradley Carr, ‘Travis shrugged: the creepy, dangerous ideology behind Silicon Valley’s cult of disruption’, Pando (24 October 2012), https://pando.


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

Bell instead used these patents, which are often called the most valuable patents in history, to set up his own phone company: a company that was grossing a million dollars per annum well before the Dow Jones started. Yet at the time, Western Union management were making the right decision on the basis of the information available to them. As Clayton Christensen points out, it is very difficult for an incumbent to justify investment in new technology when it creates a different business model because it will always earn more in the short term from investing in its core business; competitors have asymmetric motivation (Christensen et al. 2005). And naturally, if the incumbent asks its customers what they want, they will direct the investment in the same direction.


pages: 307 words: 17,123

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry by Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, business continuity plan, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, digital divide, iterative process, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, Nicholas Carr, platform as a service, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business

Leveraging the power of trainers has allowed us to have thousands of developers creating new functionality, sharing it in our online marketplace, and enabling us to offer a more comprehensive service to our customers. 253 BEHIND THE CLOUD Think about the partners that might recommend your service and the vendors that might build complementary products; then, do everything you can to strengthen the entire ecosystem that surrounds your company. In doing so, you can turn a handful of disjointed partners into a thriving community of supporters, innovators, and evangelists that will further your success. 254 The Final Play Play #111: Make Everyone Successful A little over a decade ago, Clayton Christensen wrote a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma. It illustrated how a start-up company—by employing innovation that disrupts existing business models—will always beat the established big companies. He cited examples like Intel’s success with the microprocessor and the steel mill Nucor’s hit with its revolutionary way to reuse scrap.


pages: 255 words: 76,495

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

Nor should you expect that the kings of today’s era will reign in tomorrow’s era. More likely, the kings don’t see it coming, don’t want to see it coming, or see it coming but can’t get organizationally aligned around doing anything about it. This is a classic example of the innovator’s dilemma, a concept introduced by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen to describe the inability of most large companies to embrace radically new technologies because they are disruptive to the existing business. Look at what happened to Eastman Kodak, the dominant player in photography for many decades. As the digital photography revolution was unfolding in the late nineties and into this century, Kodak was still seeing the vast majority of its profits come from its slowly declining but still extremely compelling print film business.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Later came Michael Porter, a Harvard business professor who claimed to have developed a methodology that would enable companies to create sustainable advantages using his Five Forces Framework. Porter launched a consulting company, Monitor Group, which raked in enormous fees from corporate clients—until, somehow, in 2013 the bottom fell out and Monitor Group went bankrupt. After Drucker and Porter came Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor who achieved business guru status with a 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Gary Hamel wrote The Future of Management and talked about Management 2.0. Jim Collins explained how to go from Good to Great. Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim wrote Blue Ocean Strategy. If you work in the corporate world you’ve undoubtedly heard of these books.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It is the reason Northeastern University has a “venture accelerator” it calls IDEA; that Harvard has the famous Innovation Center; that Boston University’s business school has a Department of Strategy and Innovation; that its College of Engineering has a Product Innovation Center; and that one of its colleges offers a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. At Harvard, where I met innovation guru Clayton Christensen ambling across a parking lot, the dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates is almost palpable. As well as the usual incubators and accelerators, the school boasts a $100 million venture capital fund that is focused on commercializing the ideas of former students.19 One of this fund’s press releases quotes a Harvard professor on how this heap of money advances the school’s “mission,” which today (apparently) includes “marshaling significant resources to help create thrilling companies.”


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

So, in a sense, the Uber and TaskRabbit business models are ideal for employers. The beauty of it is that the free market sets the value of the work done by the non-core employees. Since the company takes a cut of what the contractors make, its fixed costs are very low. WHEN SUCCESS MEANS SMALLER In 1997, Clayton Christensen published one of the most influential business books of all time, The Innovator’s Dilemma. He describes how the very processes that enable market leaders to succeed also set them up for failure when disruptive new products and technologies appear. A common reason is that the market for a new service is too small to meet its needs for growth, so the large company doesn’t pay much attention to it—until that market explodes, led by a suddenly powerful new competitor.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Brown, “Nearly a Third of Millennials Have Used Venmo to Pay for Drugs.” 13. Newman, “Who’s Buying Drugs, Sex, and Booze on Venmo? This Site Will Tell You.” III Working Together 10 On the Startup Bus Technochauvinists love disruptive innovation. Popularized by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive innovation is allegedly the technological tidal wave that sweeps away the competition and results in huge profits. Innovation—and disruption, come to think of it—is usually connected to young people. Ask an executive who he imagines as the ultimate innovator, and odds are he’ll paint a picture of a twenty-something computer genius in a hoodie who’s writing code to make the next billion-dollar startup.


pages: 330 words: 88,445

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

Page felt otherwise: “We both went to Montessori schools, and I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently.” they too found a Montessori connection: Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen, “The Innovator’s DNA,” Harvard Business Review, December 2009. 179 “Go back to Roger Bannister’s time”: Mike Gervais, AI, April 2013. 180 “The idea was to develop”: Leslie Sherlin, AI, February 2013. “quantified Self” devices: Lila Battis, “Fitness Trackers Compared!” Men’s Health.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Other priorities—higher rankings, growing enrollment, winning teams, bigger and better facilities, more revenue from sideline businesses, more research grants—have replaced learning as the primary touchstone for decision making.4 Meanwhile, the college “market” is being profoundly disrupted by the availability of free or low-cost online courses and alternate pathways for acquiring job skills, as we’ll see in chapter 7. Business guru Clayton Christensen believes that, because the value proposition for college has declined so radically and the finances of many colleges are so shaky, “15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy.”5 (We’re a little more optimistic than our friend Clayton. We believe that many will become assisted living homes!)


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Further underlying the nature of modern innovation, in 2015 Ashley Madison, an online site for people seeking extramarital affairs, announced plans to raise US$200 million to expand the market for adultery. Industrial revolution 3 emphasizes disruptive technologies, a term associated with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen and his influential 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. It differentiated between sustainable innovations, which improve products and make valuable changes for a firm's current customers, and disruptive innovations—cheaper, poorer-quality products that initially target less profitable customers so as to undercut existing businesses, with the object of eventually dominating the industry.


The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

All respondents to the annual “Business R&D and Innovation Survey,” conducted by the National Science Foundation with the Census Bureau—essentially all US companies conducting R&D—routinely report this classification, along with other important details related to R&D. But you won’t find this important information in financial reports. 9. In 2013, almost 6,500 patent infringement lawsuits were filed in the United States (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2014 Patent Litigation Study, at www.pwc .com). 10. The classic on disruption: Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). 11. See Internal Control—Integrated Framework, Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission, December 2011, at www.ic.coso.org (“Risk assessment also requires management to consider the impact of possible changes in the external environment . . . ” p. 51). 12.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

The innovation that triumphs at the end of this sequence is often inferior in many ways to its rivals: remember that cinema, for all its advantages, lacked color for its first fifty years, and even in the age of 3-D IMAX, movies lack the 360-degree vista of the Panorama. But cinema was not a classic Clayton Christensen–style disruption where an inferior but cheap new product wipes out a more fully featured but expensive rival. As alluring as the mechanical dancers were at Merlin’s, no one mistook them for genuine human beings. Once you could project images of actual people onto the screen—dancing and gesticulating and emoting, even without color or sound—the appeal of magic-lantern specters dissolved into thin air.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

As we become more comfortable with our ability to achieve our potential at these levels, we will begin to see more and more opportunities to amplify our potential even further by reshaping broader and broader arenas. We will also have more insight into, and experience with, the pull techniques required to pursue shaping strategies. How Shaping Strategies Are Different from Other Strategies Shaping strategies differ significantly from other well-known strategies. Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor have painted a very compelling picture of the potential to pursue disruptive innovation strategies.9 These strategies can generate enormous wealth for the innovator but, in general, they are different from the strategies we are discussing on two important dimensions. First, they often involve a single company making significant commitments to a disruptive innovation in technology or business design, rather than an individual or group bringing together very large numbers of companies to make complementary investments.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

There, Jimmy Boggs saw disruption decades ago, when a brew of robots, racism, and imports from Asia shut down the city’s factories, and when what remained of the auto industry fled to the whiter suburbs—consigning that capital of black America into decline and collapse. The jargon of disruption derives from a more precise academic concept. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen began honing what he came to call “disruptive innovation” in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, referring to how a simple development, often from an oblique end of a market, can refashion the rules of the market in which it operates.5 In this way, the cheaper, less-mighty cars from Japan took on Detroit’s Cadillacs.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

A decade or so ago these Indian pioneers would have been nothing more than an interesting sideshow to health-care reformers in the West. Today their ideas are gaining traction as governments everywhere look to save money. Reform, a British think tank dedicated to reforming the basic building blocks of the welfare state and with close ties to Downing Street, has championed Shetty and Aravind. Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School, perhaps the world’s most respected writer on innovation, thinks the public sector will be upset by what he calls “mutants”—new organisms spinning out of it. The point about the mutants is that they come from anywhere. Christensen’s mutants can dethrone powerful producer groups.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Value in society is increasingly built on ideas, and the firms that do best in this society are those that can manipulate ideas most effectively. The information-processing role of the firm can help us to understand the phenomenon of ‘disruption’, in which older businesses struggle to adapt to powerful new technologies or market opportunities. The notion of a ‘disruptive’ technology was first described in detail by Clayton Christensen, a scholar at Harvard Business School.4 Disruption is one of the most important ideas in business and management to emerge over the last generation. A disruptive innovation, in Christensen’s sense, is one that is initially not very good, in the sense that it does badly on the performance metrics that industry leaders care about, but which then catches on rapidly, wrong-footing older firms and upending the industry.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

In order to support those destined to live long lives, the agenda faced by educational institutions is fourfold: how to incorporate new learning technologies and experiential learning; how to break down boundaries between age groups; how to think more deeply about ways to teach creativity, innovation, humanity and empathy; and how to rapidly expand practical specialisms in order to ensure that education wins in its race against technology. It is no surprise therefore that Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen argues that technology makes education ripe for ‘disruptive innovation’, and that this will have a positive impact on lifelong learning. Investments in digital innovations will transform the classroom, with online teaching, MOOCs, digital degrees and certifications with new providers and new entrants.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

The increasingly obvious shortcomings of the H1 system spur growing innovation, although much of this may be captured by the existing system, for example through mergers and acquisitions. This creates a second horizon, H2. Eventually, the new, innovative approaches become more effective than the original system, creating an inflection point, a point of disruption. Clayton Christensen flagged this as the onset of the “innovator’s dilemma”: Should you protect your core business that is at risk, or instead invest in the innovations that look as if they might replace it? Often, breakthrough innovations—including exponential Green Swan solutions—emerge at the edges of the current system.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

The new competitors came in with much more convenient alternatives for low-value payments. They took business from banks to be sure, but in all three cases they also unlocked new markets: transactions that weren’t happening before because there was no convenient way to make them. It is often pointed out that this dynamic looks just like that famously described by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma: competitors with new technology come in at the low end, work their way up and ultimately disrupt and dislodge the incumbents. The analogy isn’t perfect, however: while new entrants have ‘worked their way up’ to larger payments, some important factors have shielded the incumbents, in this case, the banks.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Nor would he allow other online stores to sell songs for use on iPods. A variety of experts said this would eventually cause Apple to lose market share, as it did in the computer wars of the 1980s. “If Apple continues to rely on a proprietary architecture,” the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen told Wired, “the iPod will likely become a niche product.” (Other than in this case, Christensen was one of the world’s most insightful business analysts, and Jobs was deeply influenced by his book The Innovator’s Dilemma.) Bill Gates made the same argument. “There’s nothing unique about music,” he said.

But over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud. So it’s the same digital hub strategy, but the hub’s in a different place. It means you will always have access to your content and you won’t have to sync. It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be left behind. I’m going to take MobileMe and make it free, and we’re going to make syncing content simple. We are building a server farm in North Carolina.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

The NASA team sought help answering the latter two questions by recruiting Alan Marty, who had worked at several tech companies and then led a team of venture capitalists at J. P. Morgan. Marty’s job was to help NASA’s executives get into an entrepreneurial mind-set. He brought dozens of copies of Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma—an iconic Silicon Valley tome about how stagnant companies are disrupted by start-ups armed with outside-the-box thinking—to hand out at every NASA meeting he participated in. With Marty guiding the financial evaluation and Lindenmoyer on the technical side, NASA began considering its options.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Many platforms claim to be part of a new ‘sharing economy’ that is boosting efficiency and incomes through increased utilisation of underused assets. However, they are in fact expanding the scope of commodified labour and the amount of unpaid work-for-labour, as we will see. All bypass the firm as traditionally understood. They are creating ‘platform capitalism’. In a seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen argued that innovation was ‘disruptive’ if it had the potential to generate new products or services or to deliver them in radically new ways.3 He and colleagues later claimed that the provision of services through digital platforms did not meet two criteria for disruptive innovation – that the innovation must target the low end of an existing market and mainly draw in non-consumers of existing options.4 But digital platforms surely qualify as disruptive on both counts.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Mike Batty and Alice Kroll, “Automated Life Underwriting: A Survey of Life Insurance Utilization of Automated Underwriting Systems,” prepared for the Society of Actuaries, 2009, file:///C:/Users/jkirby/Downloads/research-life-auto-underwriting.pdf. 14. Thomas Arnett, “How Technology Displaces Teachers’ Jobs,” Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, November 19, 2014, http://www.christenseninstitute.org/how-technology-displaces-teachers-jobs/#sthash.PyjrVrNk.dpuf. 15. David Port, “Reckoning with Robo-Advisors,” LifeHealthPRO, December 31, 2014, http://www.lifehealthpro.com/2014/12/31/reckoning-with-robo-advisors.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

In his 2016 landmark sociological study of urban housing in the United States, Evicted, sociologist Matthew Desmond suggests that landlords in poor neighborhoods often buy up enough housing to have substantial power to drive up rents by holding units vacant and artificially depressing supply.55 Yet as far as we know, no antitrust case has ever been brought against such local but potentially devastating attempts at monopolization. Another growing area where antitrust goes underenforced is the digital economy. Competition there often happens through the sort of “disruption” highlighted by business scholar Clayton Christensen in his 1997 classic The Innovator’s Dilemma, where entry by a new firm or product changes the nature of the market rather than produces a better or cheaper version of an existing product.56 For example, Facebook is currently probably the most important competitor of Google (for user attention and advertiser dollars), but began in a completely unrelated business (of social networking as opposed to search functions).


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear. Like any good religion, the cult-like startup world has a holy scripture: The Innovator’s Dilemma, a 1997 book by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote the book before “disruptive innovation” was a punchline on the HBO comedy Silicon Valley, and it has managed to maintain its revered status for two decades. We can see the core concept of The Innovator’s Dilemma at work in Snapchat’s story: a new entrant makes a product that is so far beneath what an incumbent does that it seems silly—why would we waste our time down there?


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

In this view—and it is not insignificant—the idea of hacking comes from a position of arrogance.”99 Likewise, Silicon Valley’s favorite phrase, “let’s break shit,” is part of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” a theory of economic progress in which new business rises like a phoenix from the ashes of old business.100 Creative destruction has also been described as an early version of Clayton Christensen’s hypothesis of “disruptive innovation,” in which economies flourish when start-ups replace established firms.101 And of course, to disrupt the status quo of established industries is part of the goal of the sharing economy. When the term sharing economy first entered the public lexicon, the sharing economy itself looked like a step forward.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

A mere fraction of their capital could be spent to create new hydroponics kits or design more efficient ships, and their economies of scale—not to mention their established relationships with suppliers, regulators, and customers—would surely demolish any upstart companies. There were two problems though. The first stemmed from Clayton Christensen’s classic problem identified in The Innovator’s Dilemma, in which successful incumbent companies become fixated on increasing their sales and short-term share price rather than developing risky but innovative new products. The second was the fact that economies of scale were beginning to vanish.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

What sort of disruption to employment and wealth will come over the next 20 to 30 years as we emerge into a new age? ____________ 1 The term “disruption” is often overused today. When we refer to “disruption”, we generally refer to disruptive innovations that fill unmet or future needs or created entirely new markets, and in doing so displace incumbents who fail to adapt (see Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma). 2 In this case, until 25 per cent adoption in the US economy 3 “This is the best iPhone yet!” All Apple® and iPhone® trademarks are the property of Apple Inc. 4 “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits” by Gordon E. Moore was published in Electronics on 19 April 1965. 5 Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders 6 The equivalent of US$2.5 million in 2010 7 Gerald Sussman.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

“the cathode-ray tube had out-and-out scooped the newspapers”: Will Fowler, Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman (Malibu, CA: Roundtable, 1991), 160–61. “the television convention”: “Television Convention,” Newsweek, July 14, 1952. “informality, feeling, and emotion”: Karla Gower, Public Relations and the Press: The Troubled Embrace (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 29. an upstart company will topple: Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (New York: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997). My sentence here is an impressionistic reframing of Christensen’s thesis. It is, without question, informed by The Innovator’s Dilemma, but it’s not really an attempt to summarize the book. newspapers sold per person plummeted: Ken Goldstein, “Sixty Years of Daily Newspaper Circulation Trends,” Canadian Journalism Project, 2011.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

If Ethereum takes off as a decentralized world computer, will that have any effect on companies with cloud computing offerings, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google? If companies can get paid more quickly and with lower transaction fees using the latest cryptocurrency, will that have an impact on credit card providers like Visa and American Express? EXPONENTIAL DISRUPTION Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the seminal text on how large companies, often referred to as incumbents, struggle with maneuvering around exponential change. In The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Christensen makes no qualms about how even the most well managed of firms can fail when confronted with a technology that threatens to disrupt their market.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Rosengren, “Unnatural Selection: Perverse Incentives and the Misallocation of Credit in Japan,” American Economic Review 95, no. 4 (September 2005): 1144–66; Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap, Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 11 See “A Fork in the Road,” Financial Times, December 11, 2009. 12 See, for example, Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2003). 13 National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators, chapter 5, Appendix Table 5–43, National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10/c5/ c5s4.htm, accessed March 10, 2010. 14 Alesina and Glaeser, Fighting Poverty, 19. 15 Talkin’ ’bout My Generation: The Economic Impact of Aging U.S.


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

“If I can speak without fear of being misunderstood,” the president explained, “I would like to say that Nintendo is not producing next-generation game consoles.” The Wii used extremely simple games and technology from a previous console, but motion-based controls were a literal game changer. Given its basic hardware, the Wii was criticized as not innovative. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen argued that it was actually the most important kind of innovation, an “empowering innovation”—one that creates both new customers and new jobs, like the rise of personal computers before it—because it brought video games to an entirely new (often older) audience. Nintendo “simply innovated in a different way,” Christensen and a colleague wrote.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The company had just become fully employee owned, complete with an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that forged a real path to truly significant wealth for consultants like Jim. At the same time, he had already worked alongside a quartet of future luminaries: a young Mitt Romney; a thirtysomething Benjamin Netanyahu; the soon-to-be-legendary business school professor and author Clayton Christensen, whose seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, helped shape twenty-first-century entrepreneurship; and future hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, who would make his fortune virtually overnight betting against the subprime lending market with credit default swaps some twenty-five years later.


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

Merton, ‘The Matthew Effect in Science’, Science, vol. 159, no. 3810, 1968, pp. 56–63. 60And social theory shifts, or drifts, from institutionalism to rational choice, to the extent that it desires to be affirmative, or to biological behaviourism. 61Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions, New York: Harcourt, Brace 1953. 62The term was invented by Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press 1997) and subsequently became vastly popular among business school academics and managers. For a critical assessment see Jill Lepore, ‘The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong’, New Yorker, 23 June 2014.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

was typical of the notes from Katie I’d find in the margin); how landing a single great quote or fresh insight from an hour-long interview represents a stunning success. For this book and so much more, I owe her everything. Notes Preface xi that long-awaited “disruptive innovation” This concept was described by Clayton Christensen in C. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997). For its relevance to healthcare, see C. M. Christensen, J. H. Grossman, and J. Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009). xii I even blog and tweet My blog is Wachter’s World, and it can be found at www.wachtersworld.org.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

Cox told Zuckerberg he needed to let the products build independently and not become too similar. “They’ll compete a bit with each other, but if we have more unique brands, we’ll be able to reach different kinds of users.” He and Systrom had spoken extensively about using Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” theory of product development, which states that consumers “hire” a product to do a certain task, and that its builders should be thinking about that clear purpose when they build. Facebook was for text, news, and links, for example, and Instagram was for posting visual moments and following interests.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Hugo Duncan, “Robots to Steal 15 Million of Your Jobs, Says Bank Chief: Doom-Laden Carney Warns Middle Classes Will Be ‘Hollowed Out’ by New Technology,” Daily Mail, December 5, 2008, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4003756/Robots-steal-15m-jobs-says-bank-chief-Doom-laden-Carney-warns-middle-classes-hollowed-new-technology.html#ixzz4SDCt2Pql. 78. See, for example, Clayton M. Christensen, Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn, Disrupting Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008) and Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), which examines disruptive innovations in health care. 79.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

In less than four weeks—a record time for designing a mission—they put together a mission concept using Pathfinder’s landing system. The proposal eventually became reality. NASA selected Adler’s design largely because it had the highest probability of getting the spacecraft safely to Mars. “Every answer,” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says, “has a question that retrieves it.”11 The answer is often embedded within the question itself, so the framing of the question becomes crucial to the solution. Charles Darwin would agree. “Looking back,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them.”12 Think of questions as different camera lenses.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

The capabilities of a typical smartphone – high-definition colour video, high-fidelity sound, fast-action video games, scanners that transcribe text – were not available to anyone, not even the richest countries, just a couple of decades ago. When technologies develop exponentially, they lead to continually cheaper products which are able to do genuinely new things. To see this process in action, it’s worth examining the work of Horace Dediu. A business analyst, Dediu trained with Clayton Christensen, the world-renowned Harvard academic who wrote the bible of many a Silicon Valley tech firm, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Dediu carries a well-deserved reputation in his own right, thanks to his research into patterns of innovation. Over the last two decades, he has analysed more than 200 years of historical data, to examine how quickly technologies have spread through the American economy.9 He casts a wide net, meticulously tracking a broad range of innovations – flush toilets, the electrification of printing, the spread of roads, the vacuum cleaner, diesel locomotives, power steering in cars, electric arc furnaces, artificial fibres, ATM machines, digital cameras, social media and computer tablets, among many others.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

., p. 207 15 Gould (2007), p. 3 16 Rather than a straight porting of the concept he was willing to explore ‘homologies’, but only in a limited set of circumstances. Ibid., p. 266 17 Mokyr (1999) 18 Christensen (2013); Perez (2002). On a more local level we might look to what Louis Galambos called ‘formative’ innovations and Clayton Christensen ‘disruptive’ innovations. 19 Bahcall (2019) 20 Thiel (2014) 21 Kelly et al (2020) 22 For an alternative methodology with technology see for example Packalen and Bhattacharya (2012) or Funk and Owens-Smith (2017). 23 See for example a paper like Bhattacharya and Packalen (2020) for means of categorising science. 24 See Jockers (2013) or Moretti (2013) 25 Henrich (2009) 26 Epstein (2019) 27 See Hargadon (2003) for the concept of ‘technology brokering’ more widely, or Ridley (2020) for more on recombinant innovation.


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

This enables the business to continually improve the quality of its veterinary diagnostics and to continually widen its competitive advantage. In fact, IDEXX controls more than 65 percent of its market, and it’s now the largest global player in the reference lab market.9 Are R&D Efforts Successful? Just because a business spends a large percentage of revenue on R&D does not mean that it will create successful products. Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard who has studied innovation extensively, reminds us of two rather subtle things about R&D spending. First, most innovation starts out in the wrong direction: Therefore, spending more money upfront can mean more wasted money. Second, breakthroughs tend to happen when resources are most scarce.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Like many of the “Singularitarians,” he points to a portfolio of social engineering options for softening the impact. Brynjolfsson and McAfee in The Second Machine Age sketch out a broad set of policy options that have the flavor of a new New Deal, with examples like “teach the children well,” “support our scientists,” “upgrade infrastructure.” Others like Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen have argued for focusing on technologies that create rather than destroy jobs (a very clear IA versus AI position). At the same time, while many who believe in accelerating change agonize about its potential impact, others have a more optimistic perspective. In a series of reports issued beginning in 2013, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), established in 1987 with headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany, self-servingly argued that manufacturing robots actually increased economic activity and therefore, instead of causing unemployment, both directly and indirectly increased the total number of human jobs.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

This adjustment clearly correlates with top brass making more money (at this writing, Gabe Newell has a reported net worth of $5.5 billion), but its success at spawning innovation is less clear. “Flat hierarchies are supposed to result in disruptive innovation,” Ellsworth said. “But what happened at Valve wasn’t innovative. It was just disruptive.” The concept of “disruptive innovation,” popularized by Harvard Business School economist Clayton Christensen in his 1997 best seller The Innovator’s Dilemma, is all but de rigeur in business circles, particularly in the tech industry. Yet while it’s common for employers to encourage staff to be “disruptive,” what they actually mean by this is uncertain, even, one suspects, to the employers themselves.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

You told customers, “Don’t reply to this email because we won’t answer it,” or, when they did email, you just ignored them. This still goes on today. I’m not going to embark on a lengthy discussion around customer service, culture and how you need to build that. There is a plethora of reference works on that subject, including the work of Ron Kaufman (Up Your Service), Micah Solomon, Clayton Christensen, Ken Blanchard, and Gary Vaynerchuk, which are amongst my favourites. However, I will attempt to describe the problem and an organisational fix to the silos that frustrate service and sales within the retail financial services space. “I genuinely believe that any business can create a competitive advantage through giving outstanding customer care.”


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

This innovative distance explains why so many of those who turn an industry upside down are outsiders, even outcasts. To understand this point we need grasp the difference between two types of innovation: “sustaining” and “disruptive,” the distinction best described by innovation theorist Clayton Christensen. Sustaining innovations are improvements that make the product better, but do not threaten its market. The disruptive innovation, conversely, threatens to displace a product altogether. It is the difference between the electric typewriter, which improved on the typewriter, and the word processor, which supplanted it.5 Another advantage of the outside inventor is less a matter of the imagination than of his being a disinterested party.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

—DEBORAH DISANZO, FORMER CEO OF PHILIPS HEALTHCARE2,3 “In a typical hospital, overheads account for 85 to 90 percent of total costs because of the complexity of offering a ‘one size fits none’ offering. It turns out there are three different business models inside a hospital, and those three business models are incompatible.” —CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN When I was training to be a cardiologist in the 1980s at Johns Hopkins, it took three hospital days for a patient to undergo a cardiac catheterization. Each patient was admitted the day before the procedure to have a full evaluation, which consisted of a history and physical, chest X-ray, an electrocardiogram, and the routine laboratories.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

San Francisco emerged as the world’s epicenter of such deals. But then the balance of power began to shift. As startups upended global infrastructure at an unprecedented pace, entrepreneurs found that old power centers had eroded and been replaced in some cases by the upstarts that sprung up around them. Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” articulated the perils that awaited any company that grew so large that it no longer saw threats coming from more nimble competitors. The venture-backed startups became the new establishment. Something else happened: Founders realized they liked being in control.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

So when we started, Torry and I realized we had to take the team elsewhere. So we literally went to another floor. Separating digital from traditional by one floor was hardly a bold move. Nor was the separation of new and old businesses particularly novel. Just a few years earlier Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen had advocated that approach to innovation in his bestselling book, The Innovator’s Dilemma . What was novel was what transpired next at VG —a result of instinct, experience, and accident. During the next year and a half, two events occurred that were entirely outside the managers’ control but would change their entire approach and philosophy.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Once you reach the top of the hierarchy, you acquire status and benefits that can soon be lost—the nice cars, the home in Brentwood, the private schools…. It doesn’t make sense to jeopardize any of that by adopting a reckless attitude towards new technologies, new markets. Moving slow, and making clear, safe progress is the mantra.23 The puzzle of why big firms exhibit such innovative inertia was placed into a theoretical framework by Clayton Christensen in his pioneering book The Innovator’s Dilemma.24 Christensen found the hard disk drive industry representative. In it, market leaders tended to be very good at quickly and successfully adopting some technological advancements, yet were entirely left behind by upstarts. To explain the discrepancy, he created a taxonomy of “sustaining” and “disruptive” innovations.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

This has long been a practice of law firms who historically would bill work at rates reflective of more specialized staff, but would staff that work with lower-cost (but internally provided) junior lawyers and paralegals. 15. A provocative discussion of the potential impact of LPOs is provided by Bruce MacEwen, drawing on Clayton Christensen’s idea of the innovator’s dilemma (Christensen 2006). See Bruce MacEwen, “Innovators at the Barricades,” Adam Smith, Esq. (blog), July 10, 2010 (available at http://www.adamsmithesq.com/2010/07/innovators_at_the_barricades/, accessed February 18, 2013). 16. This three-level market breakdown appears on a number of law blog analyses of the changing legal market.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

And thank you to the following publications and writers who generously allowed me to quote from their work: Sol Waksman and Barclay Managed Futures Report, Futures Magazine, Managed Account Reports, Michael Rulle of Graham Capital Management, and Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities Magazine. I am also indebted to the following authors whose works continue to be treasure troves of information and insight: Morton Baratz, Peter Bernstein, Clayton Christensen, Jim Collins, Jay Forrester, Tom Friedman, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Jay Gould, Alan Greenberg, Larry Harris, Robert Koppel, Edwin Lefevere, Michael Lewis, Jesse Livermore, Roger Lowenstein, Acknowledgments Ludwig von Mises, Lois Peltz, Ayn Rand, Jack Schwager, Denise Shekerjian, Robert Shiller, Van Tharp, Edward Thorp, Peter Todd, Brenda Ueland, and Dickson Watts.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Antitrust authorities approved those deals quickly—decisions that would later be regarded skeptically in light of Amazon’s growing dominance. It turned out that there was more depth than anyone had suspected to the increasingly fit CEO with the now clean-shaven head. He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Recognizing that the market had shifted, Cue’s services team was at work creating their own streaming offering that would allow people to blend their iTunes purchases with a full catalog of songs. But the early designs of the service were discouraging. It looked more like an iTunes list than the colorful modern apps of its rivals. Influenced by Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Jobs preferred to be a disruptor rather than be disrupted. He had famously killed the iPod Mini, Apple’s best-selling product, and replaced it with the iPod Nano, a lighter, slimmer device that had gone on to even greater sales.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

It’s as though popular and widely adopted products become ossified, hardened by the inherent incentive to build on their own successes. The result is that entrenched industry players are generally not motivated to develop or deploy disruptive technologies, as Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has pointed out. So success breeds complacency. R&D departments are discouraged from investigating alternative technologies and so channel their resources into refining components, adding new features, or tweaking their existing product architectures. This strategy of marching down a well-defined product road map may pay dividends for some time.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Intel had already tried selling digital watches built around its chips, and National had done the same with calculators; both efforts had been expensive failures. “The technology is going to move faster than we can be sensible in applying it,” one National executive admitted when asked about moving into consumer markets.24 Large computer companies such as Hewlett-Packard and DEC, meanwhile, were caught in what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has called the “innovator’s dilemma”: they had committed resources to an existing market (minicomputers) and could not see, or did not want to see, an emerging market for smaller, cheaper, less powerful machines that could one day destroy the established market. Xerox, where Bob Taylor’s group and the systems science lab had designed the accessible, user-friendly Alto, was similarly stymied.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Chan Kim, Youngme Moon, and Bruce Greenwald educated me on competitive strategy. Peter Bernstein, Howard Marks, and Seth Klarman gave me the wisdom to appreciate the role of risk and risk management. Peter Thiel taught me the significance of monopolies, power laws, and highly innovative companies. Clayton Christensen made me aware of the constant threats posed by disruptive innovation. Peter Bevelin gave me some of the finest pieces of work on multidisciplinary thinking and inversion. Thornton Oglove, Howard Schilit, and Charles Mulford educated me on how to assess the quality of reported earnings. Stephen Penman and Baruch Lev taught me the finer nuances of interpreting accounting information from the vantage point of a business analyst and a value investor.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Too many people see the cognitive elite as exemplars of incompetence and self-dealing rather than expertise and problem-solving. Financiers rig the financial system for their own benefit. Technologists are building ‘surveillance capitalism’. Politicians earn millions cashing in on their public service. Many members of the elite themselves suffer from the demoralized view of success. Towards the end of his career, Clayton Christensen, a leading professor at Harvard Business School became so worried about the number of his pupils who had ended up divorced, miserable or in prison that he co-authored (with James Allworth and Karen Dillon) a book on How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012), urging business types to put more emphasis on basic morality.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Social skills are rarely emphasized in traditional education. “Machines are automating a whole bunch of these things, so having the softer skills, knowing the human touch and how to complement technology, is critical, and our education system is not set up for that,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, where he studies education. Miller consulted David Deming, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University and author of a new study on this subject. As Miller explained, Deming’s research shows that in the tech industry “it’s the jobs that combine technical and interpersonal skills that are booming, like being a computer scientist working on a group project.”


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In Europe, wireless carriers began giving them away for free to lure new customers. Without meaning to, netbooks had paved the way for the PC’s extinction. ASUSTeK didn’t take it upon itself to invent just a new product; they invented a new category. It’s a classic example of the disruptive innovations Clayton Christensen describes in The Innovator’s Dilemma—a cheap, seemingly inferior imitator appears to gut the incumbents’ business models. In this case, their only response was to hire the insurgents to slap their names on the same models. Suddenly, the Taiwanese firms and their mainland factories were dictating terms to the rest of the industry.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Forethought is a virtue; remember that one day, that distant future will be now, and the choices you make today will have shaped the choices you are able to make then. This obviously has wide applications to social and environmental issues (ahem, climate change or income inequality) as well. What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? “Disrupt!” When Clayton Christensen introduced the term “disruptive technology” in his 1997 business classic, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, he was asking a very different question than “How can I get funded by convincing VCs that there’s a huge market I can blow up?” He wanted to know why existing companies fail to take advantage of new opportunities.


pages: 704 words: 182,312

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, different worldview, Eyjafjallajökull, fail fast, glass ceiling, Internet of things, iterative process, Kanban, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, RFID, scientific management, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, stealth mode startup, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, urban planning, work culture

Expected output: Several key insights Generating jobs-to-be-done insights Summarizing the bigger picture of what customers want to achieve when they use certain services or physical/digital products. Jobs to be done (JTBD) is a specific way to formulate insights based on a framework by Clayton Christensen. 49 JTBD describes what a product helps the customer to achieve. It can be formulated for an entire physical/digital product or service (the main aim behind a journey map). Alternatively, formulate it for certain steps within a journey map by asking yourself what a customer or user wants to get done and adding your discoveries as an additional lane on a journey map.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Building on Smith’s ideas, many free-market advocates have remained skeptical of large corporations, and some of them raise alarms when mergers and acquisitions increase the power of big players. Thwarting the workings of the market is not the only reason for being suspicious of big businesses. A well-known proposition in economics is the Arrow replacement effect, named after the Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow and later popularized by the business scholar Clayton Christensen as the “innovator’s dilemma.” It states that large corporations are timid innovators because they are afraid of eroding their own profits from existing offerings. If a new product will eat into the revenues a corporation enjoys from what it is already doing, why go there? In contrast, a new entrant could be very keen on doing something quite different because it cares only about those new profits.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Paul Baran interview, in James Pelkey, “Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation,” http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/2/2.4-Paul%20Baran-59-65.html#_ftn9. 57. Paul Baran oral history, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008; interview with Paul Baran, by Stewart Brand, Wired, Mar. 2001; Paul Baran oral history, conducted by David Hochfelder, Oct. 24, 1999, IEEE History Center; Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harper, 1997). 58. Donald Davies, “A Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching,” Computer Journal, British Computer Society, 2001; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 558; author’s interview with Larry Roberts; Trevor Harris, “Who Is the Father of the Internet?


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, had recognized the PC as “an idea whose time has arrived” and had produced a prototype complete with mouse and graphical interface. Intel and National Semiconductor had considered making a PC, and Steve Wozniak had twice offered the Apple I design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard.[1] But all four companies had decided not to build a PC, inhibited by what the business thinker Clayton Christensen termed the “innovator’s dilemma.” Xerox worried that a computerized paperless office would harm its core photocopying business. Intel and National Semiconductor feared that making a computer would put them in conflict with existing computer makers, which were among their top customers. HP fretted that building a cheap home computer would undercut its premium machines, which sold for around $150,000.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

The lunch lasted three hours as Musk tried to persuade and cajole Hoffman. “I took all of my money and put it in this company,” he said. “I have the right to run it.” He also argued against the strategy of focusing just on electronic payments. “That should be only an opening act for creating a real digital bank.” He had read Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma, and tried to convince Hoffman that the staid banking industry could be disrupted. Hoffman disagreed. “I told him that I believed his vision of a superbank was toxic, because we needed to focus on our payment service on eBay,” he says. Musk then switched tacks: he tried to persuade Hoffman to become the CEO.