Book Review: The Innovator's Dilemma
Posted by Tim Freund Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:41:00 GMT
Is it possible to stay on top once you get there? That is the central question in The Innovator's Dilemma. Although I'm far from the top of anything, I read it anyway because so many other people have said it is an amazing book. Oh, and it can be had for a song on Amazon.com.
I read The Innovator's Dilemma primarily because it is mentioned by so many other entrepreneurial people as a great book. The fact that it can be had used for a fraction of the cover price didn't hurt, either.
I was able to storm through the book in a single day, not because it was captivating, but because it was a pretty good read and I was enduring a full day's worth of air travel. The first part of the book was more interesting than Sky Mall, but less interesting than much of the reading material around my house. There were some great nuggets of wisdom in the middle and back of the book that I may have never read if it weren't for my situation.
Christensen uses the hard drive industry as his primary example throughout the book. The industry has a large body of empirical evidence available for research, and, as a bonus for those of us who code, it is an industry that most software developers are already familiar.
Despite the evidence available in the hard drive industry, I was actually more interested in the other examples used in the book, especially the story of the mini steel mill industry.
The example of mini mill steel plants eating away at big steel's market from the bottom up is a great example of why it is OK to focus on small problems. Small problems solved well create opportunities for us to turn our attention to ever larger problems. If businesses can boom and blossom with that approach in a high capital high risk business like steel, then we software developers have no excuse not to consider small problems.
The Innovator's Dilemma isn't a book that I will keep on my shelf to read again and again, but it is one that I am very glad to have read through once.
