Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

Why is success so hard to sustain? That question nagged at me for years. In the early years of my career, I had the opportunity to work closely with many companies that were in trouble, first as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group and then as the CEO of my own company, CPS Technologies, a company I founded with several MIT professors to make products out of a set of advanced materials they had developed. And I witnessed firsthand how a lot of smart people were unable to fix the problems of once-great companies. At that same time, I watched the rise of a local Boston company, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), as it became one of the most admired in the world. Whenever you read explanations about why it was so successful, inevitably its success was attributed to the brilliance of the company’s management team. Then about 1988 Digital Equipment fell off the cliff and began to unravel very quickly. When you then read explanations about why it had stumbled so badly, it was always attributed to the ineptitude of the management team, the same folks running the company who had earned unfettered praise for so long.