Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator’s Dilemma
Charles A. O’Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman
Stanford Business Books/An Imprint of Stanford University Press (2016)

“Why do successful firms find it so difficult to adapt in the face of change – to innovate?”

It was Clayton Christensen who posed the “innovator’s dilemma”: the same practices that lead a business to be successful in the first place can — and often do — result in their eventual demise. Whereas in one of his recent books, Marshall Goldsmith suggests that “what got you here won’t get you there,” worse yet, Christensen suggests, “what got you here will probably doom you to failure.”

“Why do successful firms find it so difficult to adapt in the face of change – to innovate?” Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman respond to the question they pose in Lead and Disrupt: “The book was written to help organizations tackle the challenge of innovating in a way that is consistent and repeatable, using Jobs to Be Done as the cornerstone of a rigorous framework. Our view is that to create innovation, it’s necessary to focus as much on the approach taken as on the ideas themselves. In fact we argue that getting the ‘how’ of innovation right will in large part determine the quality of the ‘what’ — the solutions that organizations ultimately produce. Through a detailed but straightforward approach, which we call the Jobs Roadmap, companies can navigate the various requirements of innovation and consistently come up with winning solutions.”

This is what Christensen and his colleagues have in mind — in Competing Against Luck — when suggesting that “good theory helps us understand ‘how’ and ‘why.’ It helps us make sense of how the world works and predict the consequences of our decisions and actions. Jobs Theory [a term interchangeable with Theory of Jobs to Be Done], we believe, can move companies [and more specifically, their leaders] beyond hoping that correlation is enough to the causal mechanism of successful innovation.”

In Lead and Disrupt, O’Reilly and Tushman offer their concept of ambidexterity, an ability that leaders in some companies have (e.g. IBM, R.R. Donnelley, 3M, Toyota, and Ikea) and in others don’t (e.g. Kodak Westinghouse, Polaroid, and Sears). More specifically, leaders who able and willing “to exploit existing assets and capabilities in mature businesses, and, when needed, reconfigure these to develop new strengths.”

These are among the several dozen passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of O’Reilly and Tushman’s coverage:

o Organizational Evolution (Pages 7-13)
o Amazon (9-10, 39-49, and 49-52)
o Disruptive Innovation (13-15)
o Innovation streams (15-19)
o Strategy and execution (49-52)
o Requirements of ambidexterity (73-74)
o Achieving balanced with innovation streams (75-91)
o Linking strategic insights and execution (91-97)
o Flextronics (113-119)
o Case study of federation of entrepreneurs (129-136)
o Defining traits of leaders who exhibit ambidexterity (137-139)
o Examples of successful ambidexterity (144-162)
o Lifecycles of emerging business opportunities (150-151
o Successful ingredients for ambidexterity (174-192)
o Leading exploration and exploitation: Examples (198-205)
o Leadership principles associated with ambidexterity (202-212)
o Effective strategic renewal: Examples (234-240)

Long ago, Charles Darwin observed, “It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” More recently, Alvin Toffler observed in Future Shock, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

In their brilliant book, O’Reilly and Tushman’s recommendations can be of incalculable value to all business leaders – whatever the size and nature of their organization may be – who now struggle to adapt to a global marketplace that seems more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall. Those unable to cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn cannot thrive in that world. Indeed, they cannot survive.

These are among Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman’s final thoughts: “In the innovation game, it is easy to feel as though you are on a treadmill, especially when your organization faces the threat of extinction. But remember that exploration is the path to changing the game in your industry; it is what allows you to discover the future before your competitors do. Fifer leaders — and, really, everyone involved with winning organizations — this is an electric possibility. But this possibility of leading ambidextrously requires emotional and strategic clarity and the ability embrace contradiction.”

I commend them on a brilliant achievement. Bravo!