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The Essentials
The Essentials If you read nothing else on management, read these definitive articles from Harvard Business Review.
www.hbr.org
www.hbr.org
HBR’s 10 Must Reads: The Essentials Included with this collection:
2
Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf
16
Competing on Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport
28
Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker
41
What Makes a Leader? by Daniel Goleman
53
Putting the Balanced Scorecard to Work by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton
71
Innovation: The Classic Traps by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
85 Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John P. Kotter
96 Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt
113 What Is Strategy? by Michael E. Porter
135 The Core Competence of the Corporation by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel
www.hbr.org
It’s no wonder that innovation is so difficult for established firms. They employ highly capable people—and then set them to work within processes and business models that doom them to failure. But there are ways out of this dilemma.
Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf
Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: 3 Article Summary The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 4 Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change 14 Further Reading A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications
Reprint R00202
Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change
The Idea in Brief
The Idea in Practice
Why do so few established companies innovate successfully? Of hundreds of department stores, for instance, only Dayton Hudson became a discount-retailing leader. And not one minicomputer company succeeded in the personal-computer business.
SELECTING THE RIGHT STRUCTURE FOR YOUR INNOVATION
What’s going on? After all, most established firms boast deep pockets and talented people. But when a new venture captures their imagination, they get their people working on it within organizational structures (such as functional teams) designed to surmount old challenges—not ones that the new venture is facing. To avoid this mistake, ask:
COPYRIGHT © 2005 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
• “Does my organization have the right resources to support this innovation?” Resources supporting business-asusual—people, technologies, product designs, brands, customer and supplier relationships—rarely match those required for new ventures. • “Does my organization have the right processes to innovate?” Processes supporting your established business—decisionmaking protocols, coordination patterns— may hamstring your new venture.
If your innovation . . . Select this type of team . . . To operate . . . Fits well with your existing values and processes
Within your existFunctional teams who work sequentially on issues, ing organization or lightweight teams— ad hoc cross-functional teams who work simultaneously on multiple issues
Because . . . Owing to the good fit with existing processes and values, no new capabilities or organizational structures are called for.
Fits well with existing Heavyweight team values but poorly with dedicated exclusively to the innovation project, existing processes with complete responsibility for its success
Within your existing organization
The poor fit with existing processes requires new types of coordination among groups and individuals.
Fits poorly with exist- Heavyweight team dedicated exclusively to ing values but well with existing processes the innovation project, with complete responsibility for its success
Within your existing organization for development, followed by a spin-off for commercialization
In-house development capitalizes on existing processes. A spin-off for the commercialization phase facilitates new values— such as a different cost structure with lower profit margins.
Heavyweight team Fits poorly with your existing processes and dedicated exclusively to the innovation project, values with complete responsibility for its success
In a separate spin- A spin-off enables the project to be governed by off or acquired different values and enorganization sures that new processes emerge.
• “Does my organization have the right values to innovate?” Consider how you decide whether to commit to a new venture. For example, can you tolerate lower profit margins than your established enterprise demands? • “What team and structure will best support our innovation effort?” Should you use a team dedicated to the project within your company? Create a separate spin-off organization? By selecting the right team and organizational structure for your innovation—and infusing it with the right resources, processes, and values—you heighten your chances of innovating successfully. page 3
It’s no wonder that innovation is so difficult for established firms. They employ highly capable people—and then set them to work within processes and business models that doom them to failure. But there are ways out of this dilemma.
Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change
COPYRIGHT © 2000 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf
These are scary times for managers in big companies. Even before the Internet and globalization, their track record for dealing with major, disruptive change was not good. Out of hundreds of department stores, for example, only one—Dayton Hudson—became a leader in discount retailing. Not one of the minicomputer companies succeeded in the personal computer business. Medical and business schools are struggling—and failing—to change their curricula fast enough to train the types of doctors and managers their markets need. The list could go on. It’s not that managers in big companies can’t see disruptive changes coming. Usually they can. Nor do they lack resources to confront them. Most big companies have talented managers and specialists, strong product portfolios, first-rate technological know-how, and deep pockets. What managers lack is a habit of thinking about their organization’s capabilities as carefully as they think about individual people’s capabilities. One of the hallmarks of a great manager is
harvard business review • march–april 2000
the ability to identify the right person for the right job and to train employees to succeed at the jobs they’re given. But unfortunately, most managers assume that if each person working on a project is well matched to the job, then the organization in which they work will be, too. Often that is not the case. One could put two sets of identically capable people to work in different organizations, and what they accomplished would be significantly different. That’s because organizations themselves—independent of the people and other resources in them—have capabilities. To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in assessing people but also in assessing the abilities and disabilities of their organization as a whole. This article offers managers a framework to help them understand what their organizations are capable of accomplishing. It will show them how their company’s disabilities become more sharply defined even as its core capabilities grow. It will give them a way to recognize different kinds of change and make appropri-
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Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change
ate organizational responses to the opportunities that arise from each. And it will offer some bottom-line advice that runs counter to much that’s assumed in our can-do business culture: if an organization faces major change—a disruptive innovation, perhaps—the worst possible approach may be to make drastic adjustments to the existing organization. In trying to transform an enterprise, managers can destroy the very capabilities that sustain it. Before rushing into the breach, managers must understand precisely what types of change the existing organization is capable and incapable of handling. To help them do that, we’ll first take a systematic look at how to recognize a company’s core capabilities on an organizational level and then examine how those capabilities migrate as companies grow and mature.
Where Capabilities Reside
Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School in Boston and the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Harvard Business School Press, 1997). Michael Overdorf is a Dean’s Research Fellow at Harvard Business School.
Our research suggests that three factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values. When thinking about what sorts of innovations their organization will be able to embrace, managers need to assess how each of these factors might affect their organization’s capacity to change. Resources. When they ask the question, “What can this company do?” the place most managers look for the answer is in its resources—both the tangible ones like people, equipment, technologies, and cash, and the less tangible ones like product designs, information, brands, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Without doubt, access to abundant, high-quality resources increases an organization’s chances of coping with change. But resource analysis doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. Processes. The second factor that affects what a company can and cannot do is its processes. By processes, we mean the patterns of interaction, coordination, communication, and decision making employees use to transform resources into products and services of greater worth. Such examples as the processes that govern product development, manufacturing, and budgeting come immediately to mind. Some processes are formal, in the sense that they are explicitly defined and documented. Others are informal: they are routines or ways of working that evolve over time.
harvard business review • march–april 2000
The former tend to be more visible, the latter less visible. One of the dilemmas of management is that processes, by their very nature, are set up so that employees perform tasks in a consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change or, if they must change, to change through tightly controlled procedures. When people use a process to do the task it was designed for, it is likely to perform efficiently. But when the same process is used to tackle a very different task, it is likely to perform sluggishly. Companies focused on developing and winning FDA approval for new drug compounds, for example, often prove inept at developing and winning approval for medical devices because the second task entails very different ways of working. In fact, a process that creates the capability to execute one task concurrently defines disabilities in executing other tasks.1 The most important capabilities and concurrent disabilities aren’t necessarily embodied in the most visible processes, like logistics, development, manufacturing, or customer service. In fact, they are more likely to be in the less visible, background processes that support decisions about where to invest resources—those that define how market research is habitually done, how such analysis is translated into financial projections, how plans and budgets are negotiated internally, and so on. It is in those processes that many organizations’ most serious disabilities in coping with change reside. Values. The third factor that affects what an organization can and cannot do is its values. Sometimes the phrase “corporate values” carries an ethical connotation: one thinks of the principles that ensure patient well-being for Johnson & Johnson or that guide decisions about employee safety at Alcoa. But within our framework, “values” has a broader meaning. We define an organization’s values as the standards by which employees set priorities that enable them to judge whether an order is attractive or unattractive, whether a customer is more important or less important, whether an idea for a new product is attractive or marginal, and so on. Prioritization decisions are made by employees at every level. Among salespeople, they consist of on-the-spot, dayto-day decisions about which products to push with customers and which to de-emphasize. At the executive tiers, they often take the form
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When you’re telling someone they’re fired:- Don’t say, “I understan...d how you feel.” You don’t.- Don’t say, “I know that this hurts right now but later on you’ll realize that this is the best thing that could have happened.” It isn’t. It is a very bad thing.- Avoid justifications (“You should have known”).See More