10 lessons from a history of disruptions

There are many common reasons how and why business disruptions happen, and are resisted.

- Vikram Khanna

Disruption has felled many once-great companies, including Digital Equipment, Nokia, Sears, Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders as well as several newspapers and brick-and-mortar retailers across the world.

In his new book, Epic Disruptions, Professor Scott D. Anthony, a professor of strategy at Dartmouth College in the US, chronicles how a variety of disruptions down the centuries have reshaped industries and societies.

Having worked as a consultant with Professor Clayton Christensen, the pioneer of the study of business disruption, and ranked among the top 10 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, he brings both academic and practical experience to trace the history of disruptions, from the printing press to generative artificial intelligence. Here are 10 lessons from that history, based on both the book and my conversation with Prof Anthony:

MARKET LEADERS USUALLY SEE A DISRUPTION COMING, BUT DON'T ACT

There are both rational and irrational reasons for this. The rational reason is that it makes more sense to run their existing business better, instead of disrupting it when a new challenge emerges. The irrational reason is fear, worry and struggles, often rationalised as "maybe this time it will be different, maybe I will be immune to this".

Nokia was a case in point. When Apple's iPhone was launched in 2007, Nokia, which was the market leader in mobile phones with around one billion customers, thought it was unassailable. It saw the iPhone as a niche, expensive product that lacked key features such as a removable battery and a physical keypad and did not have a variety of models. What it missed was that the iPhone was not just a product but an ecosystem, which made it a software platform and a computing device.

'GHOSTS' HAUNT EVERY 2 ORGANISATION