Xvii) Need To Develop A Process Called Disruptive Growth Engine

Critical to success is the senior executive's involvement. His/her role is to understand a circumstance-based approach, ie

"...discern the circumstances in which their direct involvement actually is critical to success and the circumstances in which they should delegate..."

Clayton Christensen et al, 2003

Need to be careful of middle management filtering information needed for senior management decision-making, ie there is an asymmetry of information. The best way to handle this is to drive decisions down to the lowest organisational level possible.

Remember

"...potentially disruptive businesses are small. But with ill-defined strategies and demanding profitability targets, make-or-break decisions arise with alarming frequency, and such businesses have no processes for making the decisions correctly. In contrast, large businesses in successful organisations typically have established customers with clearly articulated needs, and have finely honed resource allocation and production processes to serve their needs. The decision-making requirements of these organisations......are......made by the orderly functioning of established processes......because the plans of disruptive businesses by definition need to be shaped by different criteria, the values of the mainstream business have evolved to weed out the very sort of ideas that have disruptive potential..."

Clayton Christensen et al, 2003
"... There are countless examples from our own lifetime - Kodak, Xerox, all of those traditional companies that failed to recognise that their world was fundamentally changing......one of the impediments they faced was that they had made so much money and they had been so successful that so long that they denied and denied the reality of the future would not be like the past......the best time to drive change is before the crisis hits. Rather be too soon, than too late, that you cannot predict the timing of when you are going to reach that strategic inflection point in a business. By the time it is staring you in the face, it's too late. So you're got to be willing to drive the change rather than let the change drive you..."

Mark Scott as quoted by Dominic White, 2015

Furthermore, in most circumstances, sustaining innovation encourages delegation of decision-making. In contrast, the disruptive innovation model requires senior management's focussed because the most apt processes are not yet in place to create and manage the disruptive innovation.