Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

“I think you might be underestimating the degree to which established brick-and-mortar business, or any company that might be used to doing things a certain way, will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel,” he told the class at Harvard. “I guess we’ll see.”29 Bezos, it turned out, had judged Len Riggio’s perspective perfectly. Barnes & Noble was making good money in its bookstores and didn’t want to spoil the corporate balance sheet by running a loss-making website; its distribution systems were large and well-established and designed to send large shipments to large stores, rather than one book at a time to individual customers. And Riggio didn’t want his best people to be distracted by a website, so Barnes & Noble’s e-commerce operation received too little management attention for too long. Barnes & Noble had developed excellent systems for running retail bookstores. But it hesitated to engage with the chaos of the new world of e-commerce. Amazon thrived on it. To use John Boyd’s jargon, Amazon was inside Barnes & Noble’s OODA loop, and Barnes & Noble’s response was schwerfällig—ponderous.30

This is very much like Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma