My FT Magazine cover story tomorrow is “Why Big Companies Squander Good Ideas“, and I wanted to give some pointers to further reading, because I learned a lot and had a lot of fun writing this piece. (I’ll post the feature article on this website in due course.)
About innovation
The classic here is Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (UK) (US) – a book I loved and found compelling, but also has some tantalising gaps. Well worth your attention, though.
Then there is Joshua Gans’s The Disruption Dilemma (UK) (US) – this book places Christensen’s work in a broader academic context, in particular comparing and contrasting with the work of Rebecca Henderson. Lots of interesting case studies and the distinction between demand-side and supply-side disruption is instructive.
The seminal 1990 Rebecca Henderson article, with Kim Clark, is here.
Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker essay on Xerox is a classic, and the New York Times published a lovely biographical essay about Steven Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera at Kodak.
Chris Goodall’s book about solar power, The Switch, is a must-read.
If you’re intrigued about what my colleagues and I were thinking about back in Shell around the year 2000, here are the long-term energy scenarios created around that time, out to 2050.
About tanks
The original spark for this piece came from reading The Psychology Of Military Incompetence (UK) (US). Not much of that book made it into the final piece, partly because I don’t really buy Norman Dixon’s curious thesis. But there are some amazing and tragic stories of error in this book.
Brian Holden Reid has a thorough biography of JFC Fuller (UK) (US), and Mark Urban’s Generals (UK) (US) has a chapter on him with some telling details.
And there’s also this more academic essay on military innovation in peacetime, by Murray and Watts.