Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Christensen: Marginal cost thinking traps established companies facing disruption

Clayton Christensen · a16z Podcast | Competing Against Luck · Jan 2, 2019 · at 17:22

Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator's Dilemma, discusses corporate decision-making frameworks on the a16z Podcast.

0:00 / 0:27exact quote · 27.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In accounting, we teach people that you should ignore fixed and sunk costs and only look at the marginal cost and marginal revenue Associated with the proposal that you're making a decision about. And that idea that you should ignore sunk costs, and just look at the marginal cost, creates real problems for the management team.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Clayton Christensen

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Christensen: Online learning is rapidly disrupting Harvard Business School
“And, ah, online learning is improving at such a rapid rate that Harvard Business School is getting disrupted.”
Clayton Christensen Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:41 a16z Podcast | Disruption in Business... and Life
Opinion
Christensen: Offering products for free is the wrong strategy for market disruption
“And so giving anything away free is absolutely the wrong way to think about the problem.”
Clayton Christensen Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:43 a16z Podcast | Disruption in Business... and Life
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Christensen: Tech progress does not always outstrip customer ability to use it
“And I can't tell you how many millions of slides I projected that shows that trajectory of technological progress almost always outstrips the ability of customers to use it actually isn't true.”
Clayton Christensen Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:08 a16z Podcast | Competing Against Luck
Insight
Christensen: Incumbents survive disruption only by creating independent business units
“There have been a few examples, but in every case, The leader who caught this next wave had to set up a completely different business unit and manage it independently with different processes, a different architecture or economic structure, and those have been…”
Clayton Christensen Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:56 a16z Podcast | Competing Against Luck
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Christensen: 80% of corporate-funded product innovations fail in the market
“About 80% of the innovations that get that Funding from the corporation. You then deploy it into the market, and they fail. And why is it that you can't be correct more than 20% of the time?”
Clayton Christensen Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:33 a16z Podcast | Competing Against Luck
Insight
Christensen: Building superior products fails if startups ignore customer motivation
“If you understand what causes us to buy it, we can develop products that nail the job better and better and better, and that is really hard for a disruptive company to go after, because they enter the market thinking that if they make better products than the …”
Clayton Christensen Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:18 a16z Podcast | Competing Against Luck
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.