Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition

Foreword

A hundred years ago, no smart businessperson would have produced bath products—only one in five houses had bathtubs, and women washed their hair once a month. No shrewd financier would have invested in the telephone, which cost more for a three-minute call than the average person made in a week. No prudent distributor would have considered the California market because of its physical remoteness and tiny population. A manufacturer was more likely to release version 3.0 of the horse carriage than to retool for the new automobile or aero-plane, both new and dangerously unsafe.

In retrospect, the foolish short-sightedness of such mindsets is obvious. We don’t stop to think of how many companies of that era did go out of business because ...