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1/ Two possible reasons why sustaining innovation fails to compete with true (external) disruption: finance, sociology
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2/ Finance reason is well known: sustaining innovation looks for measurable, quick top-line impact that disruptive does not show early on
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3/ Sociological reason: due to cooperative nature of work (individual contributions buried), the default internal tribe is the slacker tribe
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4/ Finance reason does not truly explain why "self-disruption" fails (a strong leader *could* get the time constants and $ right)
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7/ Only way to resist that is to create a "full stack" internal tribe with independent soup-to-nuts capability, not just P/L.
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8/ This is impossible in a sufficiently old company because years of cost-discipline ==> shared services. You can't pwn an entire function.
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10/ If marketing, say, hasn't been consolidated and centralized, one marketing node could be pwned exclusively by disruptor tribe
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12/ i.e., keep the company structure a set of vertical, redundant flows, 1 per product. Build pay-for-redundancy into business model.
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13/ There is a CS metaphor here: run every product inside its own VM. Only bare-metal functions are corp. governance ones (legal, cap table)
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