How Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma

hype7 writes "With yesterday's release of the Steve Jobs biography, a raft of interesting information has come to light — including Jobs' favorite books. There's one book there listed as 'profoundly moving' to Jobs — The Innovator's Dilemma by innovation professor Clayton Christensen. The book explains how in the pursuit of profit, good managers leave their companies open to disruption. There's an interesting article over at the Harvard Business Review that explains how disruption works, and how Jobs managed to solve the dilemma by focusing Apple on products rather than profit."

Comments

Re:Nice if you can do it

[Spy Handler]

not to mention, Jobs was only able to take total control because Apple was very close to death.

If Scully and the other bean counters didn't screw up as much as they did - and Apple was still a somewhat decent and profitable company - there's no way Job's would've been invited back, let alone go nuts the way he did.

Ye Gawds!

[DontBlameCanada]

I think all of us in the tech industry know of or have experienced decisions which make sense only when viewed from the light of "near term profit is the most important."

You know:
- Downsizing skilled engineering teams to cut costs in order to hit profit numbers
- Terminating new products before they've been completed, because some number cruncher couldn't foresee profitability
- Failure to endorse refactoring of software modules engineering states are fragile/non-maintainable because it requires dedication of resources to something that doesn't drive current revenues
- The list goes on

Here we have evidence, finally, that profit at all costs isn't how you run a company.

Sad commentary on the state of US companies

[antifoidulus]

I think this speaks more to how pathetic the leadership of a lot of US companies have become more than it does on Jobs. Love Jobs or hate him, one thing that you cannot deny is that he was one of the few US CEOs that actually gave a shit about what his company makes and sells. Compare Jobs to people like Fiorna or Bob Nardelli whose sole purpose was to get inside a company, didn't' even matter which industry it was, and play games with numbers while gutting the company and enriching themselves in the process. Fiorna didn't give 2 shits about servers, or calculators, or Unix etc. To her they were all just "product", an annoyance that she had to tolerate on her way to stealing from the HP shareholders, employees, and customers.

Now compare that to Jobs, people talk about the reality distortion field, but the only way Jobs could actually create that field was if he actually cared about what he was talking about. He gave such good presentations because in a lot of ways he was like a kid who had just been given a neat toy and was showing it off at show and tell, there was genuine passion there. If companies want to emulate Apple's success the first thing they have to do is hire executives that actually are genuinely interested in what they make and sell.

Re:MBAs Prevent Disruption

[Divebus]

It's the most misunderstood thing in business - do good work, make the customers happy, create good value and profit becomes a side effect.

Re:How long...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Uh, no, RMFP, it's actually the "you're part of the problem you're whining about" argument. Slashdot attracts readers to the comments section where they serve ads. If you post about how you hate Apple, you're making money for Slashdot and encouraging them to keep running Apple stories.

But, hey, according to somebody with a mod-point, I shouldn't be pointing this out. Well, if I'm some crazy person, fine. You're welcome to go to apple.slashdot.org and peek at all the recent stories and how many comments they've gotten. After three or for stores with 500+ comments it really is hard to say that people who post on Slashdot don't want Apple stories posted.

Re:Nice if you can do it

[binarylarry]

Sculley traded Apple's good reputation for short term profits.

I wouldn't exactly call that saving Apple, it's typical MBA idiocy.

Ridiculous fanboyism

[FyberOptic]

I like how he still thought he was an innovator, when he admitted in his own book that another guy came up with the idea for products like the iPhone. That same guy received an award for it. That guy still works for Apple.

Steve Jobs was just the business man who could sell it. This has not only been blatantly obvious from the beginning, but now his own words back it up. So why are we still describing him as an innovator and visionary?

I can however credit him for being a good business man. And that's how he should be remembered. You know, the honest way.