Clay Christensen on the news industry: “We didn’t quite understand…how quickly things fall off the cliff” » Nieman Journalism Lab
Two ideas in Clay’s work have always stood out for me. First, focus on the jobs that your customers are hiring you to do — and on new ones that you might be in a good position to do. Successful companies often value elements of their products that audiences don’t particularly care about; getting too much distance between those two perceptions leads to business failure. And second, create a separate business focused on taking advantage of the disruption — and give it permission to outcompete and outperform its parent, even to run it out of business. Disrupt yourself before someone else disrupts you.
