Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.

History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.

Lets take the best of our ideas from Global Drucker Forum, and the best of our language, and then focus and clarify.

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

One reason there are so many short-lived management fads is that their prescriptions were derived and advocated in precisely this way. So managers read about a fad and try it, find that it doesn't work, abandon the effort, and move on to the next thing. In reality, it is usually the case that the faddish prescription was indeed sound advice in certain circumstances, but actually was poor advice in other circumstances.

By the time it becomes obvious that a technology will have truly disruptive impact, it is often too late to take action. This is one reason why we are such advocates of using theory to try to analyze industry change. Conclusive evidence that proves that a company needs to take action almost never exists. In fact, the data can fool management, lulling them into a false sense of security.

The best strategy is a balance between having a deliberate one, and a flexible, or emergent strategy.