“The list of leading companies that failed. . .”

“The list of leading companies that failed when confronted with disruptive changes in technology and market structure is a long one. . .

One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.

There is something about the way decisions get made in successful organizations that sows the seeds of eventual failure.

Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership. . .

Rarely have even the most radically difficult sustaining technologies precipitated the failure of leading firms. Occasionally, however, disruptive technologies emerge: innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near-term. Ironically, in each of the instances studied in this book, it was disruptive technology that precipitated the leading firms’ failure.”