Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

Steve Jobs and Apple taught us that profit is not the ultimate goal, but rather a consequence of something greater.

Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you’ve been passed by.

It is a company's customers who effectively control what it can and cannot do.

Because of the disruption phenomenon - technological progress outstripping the ability of customers to utilize it - the general tendency is for the money to migrate toward the subsystems.

There's usually some process by which a potentially great idea gets prostituted into something lacklustre, or by which the wrong idea gets put forward.