Management

The Innovator’ s Dilemma

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This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries when they confront certain types of market and technological change. It’s not about the failure of simply any company, but of good companies—the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate, the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute. Companies stumble for many reasons, of course, among them bureaucracy, arrogance, tired executive blood, poor planning, short-term investment horizons, inadequate skills and resources, and just plain bad luck. But this book is not about companies with such weaknesses: It is about well-managed companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance.
Such seemingly unaccountable failures happen in industries that move fast and in those that move
slow; in those built on electronics technology and those built on chemical and mechanical technology;
in manufacturing and in service industries. Sears Roebuck, for example, was regarded for decades as
one of the most astutely managed retailers in the world. At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2
percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of
today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue
retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears’ management was held shows in this 1964
excerpt from Fortune: “How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that
there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as
though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their
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Yet no one speaks about Sears that way today. Somehow, it completely missed the advent of discount
retailing and home centers. In the midst of today’s catalogue retailing boom, Sears has been driven
from that business. Indeed, the very viability of its retailing operations has been questioned. One
commentator has noted that “Sears’ Merchandise Group lost $1.3 billion (in 1992) even before a $1.7
billion restructuring charge. Sears let arrogance blind it to basic changes taking place in the American
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marketplace.” Anotherwriterhascomplained,
Sears has been a disappointment for investors who have watched its stock sink dismally in the face of unkept promises of a turnaround. Sears’ old merchandising approach—a vast, middle-of-the-road array of mid-priced goods and services—is no longer competitive. No question, the constant disappointments, the repeated predictions of a turnaround that never seems to come, have reduced the
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It is striking to note that Sears received its accolades at exactly the time—in the mid-1960s—when it was ignoring the rise of discount retailing and home centers, the lower-cost formats for marketing name-brand hard goods that ultimately stripped Sears of its core franchise. Sears was praised as one of the best-managed companies in the world at the very time it let Visa and MasterCard usurp the enormous lead it had established in the use of credit cards in retailing.
In some industries this pattern of leadership failure has been repeated more than once. Consider the computer industry. IBM dominated the mainframe market but missed by years the emergence of minicomputers, which were technologically much simpler than mainframes. In fact, no other major manufacturer of mainframe computers became a significant player in the minicomputer business.
cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company

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Detail Information

Series Title

The Innovator’ s Dilemma

Call Number

-

Publisher

Boston, Massachusetts : Harvard Business School Press., 1997

Collation

1-179

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0-87584-585-1

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Management

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

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