Gillette is perhaps one of the most innovative companies in the world, constantly reinventing its own model, often upending past products in favor of the new in a fit of what most people call creative destruction. And no surprise, Gillette is at it again, with the first new shaver developed since Procter & Gamble bought them in 2005.
A lot has been written about creative destruction (including by yours truly) but very few people actually understand it. Most people think that it is a process where innovative new products cripple lumbering dinosaurs. But the irony of creative destruction is that it is often the less innovative, more mundane changes that are the most disruptive. Clayton Christensen wrote about this in The Innovator’s Dilemma where he says, “occasionally disruptive technologies emerge — innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near term…..generally disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features….they are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use.”
This is equally, if not more true in nature: Evolution is a process of creative destruction, wherein things evolve over time; not for better or worse in the long run, but for short term survival. Sometimes this leads to long term survival (cockroaches); sometimes it leads to demise (dinosaurs). Any study of evolution will show how nature can overshoot itself — witness the lumbering dinosaurs, so heavily plated with armor, versus the weaker but soon dominant mammals. What better metaphor for a big company than a beast that can’t see around its own girth to the upstarts, nibbling away at the grass below. This is the big idea behind creative destruction — that the march of “progress” is not a smooth upward curve.
Gillette is perhaps one of the most innovative companies in the world, constantly reinventing its own model, often upending past products in favor of the new in a fit of what most people call creative destruction. And no surprise, Gillette is at it again, with the first new shaver developed since Procter & Gamble bought them in 2005.
A lot has been written about creative destruction (including by yours truly) but very few people actually understand it. Most people think that it is a process where innovative new products cripple lumbering dinosaurs. But the irony of creative destruction is that it is often the less innovative, more mundane changes that are the most disruptive. Clayton Christensen wrote about this in The Innovator’s Dilemma where he says, “occasionally disruptive technologies emerge — innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near term…..generally disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features….they are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use.”
This is equally, if not more true in nature: Evolution is a process of creative destruction, wherein things evolve over time; not for better or worse in the long run, but for short term survival. Sometimes this leads to long term survival (cockroaches); sometimes it leads to demise (dinosaurs). Any study of evolution will show how nature can overshoot itself — witness the lumbering dinosaurs, so heavily plated with armor, versus the weaker but soon dominant mammals. What better metaphor for a big company than a beast that can’t see around its own girth to the upstarts, nibbling away at the grass below. This is the big idea behind creative destruction — that the march of “progress” is not a smooth upward curve.
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