Disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship and organizational transformation
Disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship and organizational transformation
There’s a well-established theory in strategy called first-mover advantage. It states that the first company to enter a new market is able to erect a barrier to entry that secures a position that is difficult for subsequent entrants to challenge. While this theory may seem obvious, it is often contradicted by the facts. A good example is video conferencing.
(more…)Many of those dismayed by the events on the French or US campuses lately reassure themselves that the activists are only a minority, that they are not representative of the student body, and that their actions can therefore be overlooked. This is a profound mistake. Social change is always the work of a determined minority. We ignore this reality at our own peril.
(more…)Organizations are weakened by the uncertainty of a profoundly changing world. Yet many of them have a strong identity, an inner flame inherited from their history that should provide them with an anchor. The reason is that while this flame is often widely felt, it is rarely explicitly articulated, let alone embraced. It is therefore not nurtured. Doing so is of strategic importance.
(more…)Optimization is one of the essential goals of management. It means doing more with less. It is one of the factors behind the incredible performance of the global economy over the last two hundred years. It explains, for example, why the price of a refrigerator has fallen by 98% in constant euros over the last century. But it is sometimes done in a naive way, i.e. without taking uncertainty into account, and this naivete is a source of great fragility.
(more…)Almost thirty years after the pioneering work of Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation remains a major challenge for organizations. How do you avoid missing the breakthrough? Or, on the contrary, how do you capitalize on them? At the heart of these questions is the question of impact and scale, because while everyone is experimenting with breakthroughs here and there, very few are able to go beyond them. To avoid the pitfalls, we must first understand their nature.
(more…)When things go wrong for us and uncertainty is everywhere, we become defensive. The temptation is to protect ourselves. We do this by keeping a low profile, minimizing our singularity, and conforming to the dominant models that appear to be successful. A little-known episode from Apple’s 1997 turnaround suggests that, on the contrary, the key to recovery in the face of adversity is to assert our singularity.
(more…)We are capable of mobilising unsuspected resources to survive extreme situations. In these situations we are fully ourselves. And what if we didn’t wait for these situations to arise before we mobilized these resources on a daily basis?
(more…)Uncertainty needs an anchor. Can that anchor be inner certainty? It seems logical, but it’s an illusion. Strange as it may seem, the solution to uncertainty is not to seek certainty, but to take advantage of it.
(more…)The more uncertain the world, the more anxious we are, and the more we intensify our efforts to predict. It’s a paradox with no way out. The key to uncertainty is not prediction – which is dangerous – but control. This general attitude implies seven very concrete ideas for taking action and giving ourselves the opportunity to create something new that is our own.
(more…)The more the world changes, the more uncertain it becomes, the more we need to know who we are to avoid being swept away by the storm. But knowing our deepest nature provides much more than an anchor. For Montaigne, knowing it and, above all, accepting its limits by renouncing an ideal, enables us to be available without prejudice in the face of uncertainty. We no longer judge what is, but imagine what could be. And what if, in this way, he gave us an essential key to today’s world?
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