He is the leader of a division that recently had been chartered to bring his company into the twenty-first century by building a new suite of products designed to take advantage of the Internet. When he came to talk to me afterward, I started to give him the standard advice about how to create innovation teams inside big companies, and he stopped me in midstream: “Yeah, I’ve read The Innovator’s Dilemma.1 I’ve got that all taken care of.” He was a long-term employee of the company and a successful manager to boot, so managing internal politics was the least of his problems. I should have
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