How Clayton M. Christensen might approach Business & Strategy

For decades, the field of "Business & Strategy" has grappled with a persistent and puzzling anomaly: why do so many well-managed, seemingly successful companies struggle to maintain growth, or worse, get disrupted entirely? It's not a question of incompetence, nor typically a lack of resources or intelligent people. The answer, I've found, lies deeper, in the very theories we use—or fail to use—to understand how industries change and how growth truly happens.

The prevailing view often suggests strategy is about outmaneuvering competitors within existing markets, focusing on financial metrics or incremental improvements. But this misses a fundamental causal mechanism at play. What often happens is that successful companies become exquisitely good at *sustaining innovation*, improving products and services for their most profitable customers within their existing *value network*. Their *resources, processes, and values* become perfectly tuned for this task.

This very success, however, creates the *innovator's dilemma*. It blinds them to the *disruptive innovations* emerging at the low end of the market, or serving an entirely different set of customers with simpler, cheaper, or more convenient solutions. These new entrants aren't competing for the same "job to be done" initially; they're creating a new one, or serving an overlooked segment. The established firm's processes, built like cement that hardens over time, cannot easily embrace these different business models.

Therefore, effective strategy isn't just about efficiency or market share. It begins with understanding "What job are you hiring that product to do?" for the customer. By identifying these underlying "jobs to be done," managers can move beyond competing solely on features or price. They can instead…

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Clayton M. Christensen’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.