More from the Author

• Book | 2012

  How Will You Measure Your Life?

  Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon

  Citation:

  Christensen, Clayton M., James Allworth, and Karen Dillon. How Will You Measure Your Life? HarperBusiness, 2012.

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• Book | 2011

  The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

  Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen

  Some people are just natural innovators, right? With no apparent effort, they discover ideas for new products, services, and entire businesses. It may look like innovators are born, not made. But according to Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clay Christensen anyone can become more innovative. How? Master the discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers. In The Innovator's DNA, the authors identify five capabilities demonstrated by the best innovators: (1) Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields; (2) Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom; (3) Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things; (4) Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge; and (5) Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives. The authors explain how to generate ideas with these skills, collaborate with "delivery-driven" colleagues to implement ideas, and build innovation skills throughout your organization to sharpen its competitive edge. They also provide a self-assessment for rating your own innovator's DNA. Practical and provocative, this book is an essential resource for all teams seeking to strengthen their innovative prowess.

  Keywords: Competency and Skills; Disruptive Innovation; Competitive Advantage;

  Citation:

  Dyer, Jeffrey H., Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen. The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2011.

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• Article | Harvard Business Review | March 2011

  The New M&A Playbook

  Clayton M. Christensen, Richard Alton, Curtis Rising and Andrew Waldeck

  Companies spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions every year, yet the M&A failure rate is between 70% and 90%. Executives can dramatically increase their odds of success, the authors argue, if they understand how to select targets, how much to pay for them, and whether and how to integrate them. The most common reasons for making an acquisition include holding on to a premium position or cutting costs. But to realize those benefits, the acquirer needs to achieve economies of scale by absorbing the target's resources into its operations. CEOs, who are often unrealistic about the performance boost from such acquisitions, must be sure not to pay too much for them. A less-familiar reason for making an acquisition is to fundamentally change a company's growth trajectory. In those deals, the acquirer uses the target's business model as a platform for growth. Because the business models with the most transformative potential are often disruptive, they can be difficult to evaluate, and CEOs often believe that such acquisitions are overpriced. In fact, however, those are the ones that can pay off spectacularly.

  Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Model; Disruptive Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Integration;

  Citation:

  Christensen, Clayton M., Richard Alton, Curtis Rising, and Andrew Waldeck. "The New M&A Playbook." Harvard Business Review 89, no. 3 (March 2011).

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