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New York Times Business Best Seller Harvard Business Review - Top 10 Book of 2001 Amazon.com Editor's Choice, 2001 See excerpt in the McKinsey Quarterly. Chapter-by-chapter summary. Chapter 1 available here.
Now in
US,
Italian,
German,
Japanese,
Portuguese,
Polish,
Chinese,
Dutch,
Russian and
UK editions.
From the publisher:
In a striking challenge to such bibles of business literature as
In Search of Excellence
and
Built to Last,
Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan draw on thirteen years of research to show
that, over time, long-established companies, instead of maintaining
excellence, almost always under-perform the market. Ironically, the very
culture and meticulously maintained bureaucracy that fuel the good times
cause companies to stall out after a period of ten to fifteen years.
Foster and Kaplan's long-term studies of corporate birth, survival, and
death in America show that the corporate equivalent of El Dorado, the
golden company that continually outperforms the market, has never existed.
It is a myth.
Corporations operate with management philosophies based on the assumption
of continuity; as a result, in the long term, they cannot change or create
value at the pace and scale of the markets. Their control processes, the
very processes that enable them to survive over the long haul, deaden them
to the vital and constant need for change. Proposing a radical new
business paradigm, Foster and Kaplan argue that redesigning the
corporation to change at the pace and scale of the capital markets rather
than merely operate well will require more than simple adjustments. They
explain how companies like Johnson and Johnson, Corning, and GE are
overcoming cultural "lock-in" by transforming rather than incrementally
improving their companies. They are doing this by creating new businesses,
selling off or closing down businesses or divisions whose growth is
slowing down, as well as abandoning outdated, ingrown structures and rules
and adopting new decision-making processes, control systems, and mental
models. Corporations, they argue, must learn to be as dynamic and
responsive as the market itself if they are to sustain superior returns
and thrive over the long term.
Creative Destruction has appeared on the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, Businessweek, and Canadian management book best seller lists.
Advance reviews: "Creative Destruction is a phenomenal book. It reveals what it takes for an enterprise to thrive in the age of discontinuities yet meet the pressures of continuous performance. Wise, sweeping, balanced, grounded in facts and yet highly imaginative, it is unquestionably the best business book I have ever read…Countless numbers of CEO's will wish they could have read it sooner -- and so will their shareholders."
--John Seely Brown, President, Xerox PARC "[Offers] invaluable insight into business building and dealing with the challenge of dynamic growth. Foster and Kaplan get right to the heart of one of today's central themes...An instructive and insightful guide for managers to navigate...the twenty-first century."
--Jorma Ollila, Chairman and CEO, Nokia Corporation "A thoroughly researched, masterfully written, and somewhat frightening explanation of how competitive advantage is built and inevitably erodes. Anyone who is interested in staying ahead of the competition should read this book. It's good."
--Clayton Christensen, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School
(author of
The Innovator's Dilemma) "I spend a good deal of every week listening to business leaders and economists from around the world discuss their writings and experiences. This is the single most informative account of the eternal battle between managers and markets, and it explains with intellectual force and hard research why managers must prune their corporations in order to survive the remorselessness of the market."
--Leslie H. Gelb, President, Council on Foreign Relations "As this book with its long-term analysis makes clear: a successful past is but an opportunity to build the future. The only true winners are those that relentlessly drive innovation and change and continually challenge organizational practices and culture."
--Linda Robinson, Vice Chairman, Young and Rubicam Selected reviews:
This book is published by Doubleday. |
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About
Creative Destruction |
