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The Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton Christensen's 1997 landmark — the book that introduced disruptive innovation and demonstrated, through disk drive industry case studies, that successful companies fail not despite good management but because of it.
The Innovator's Dilemma, published in 1997 by Harvard Business School Press, is the book that made Clayton Christensen the world's most-cited management theorist. Built on his doctoral dissertation research into the disk drive industry, the book demonstrated a counterintuitive empirical finding: successful companies, practicing what textbooks called good management — listening to customers, investing in sustaining improvements, pursuing profitable opportunities — were systematically displaced by inferior competitors serving overlooked markets. The dilemma of the title is not that managers make mistakes; it is that the behaviors that would respond to disruption are the behaviors that good management is designed to prevent. The book reshaped corporate strategy across industries and remains, nearly three decades after publication, among the most cited works in business scholarship.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's analytical power derives from its case methodology. Christensen did not begin with a theory and search for supporting examples; he began with an empirical puzzle — why had