In his best-selling book, Christensen explains why successful companies that seem to be doing everything right nevertheless lose their market leadership position. According to the author, if managers don’t know when and how to move away from traditional business approaches, even the most successful firm will inevitably go under. Bold, compelling, and provocative, this book contains valuable business advice that all managers, entrepreneurs, and project managers simply must know.

Clayton Christensen’s absolutely titanic work. In an era of business literature that is often based on nothing but the opinion of the author and yet suffers from a lack of systematicity, a book like this is a real revelation. Most of the conclusions and ideas are based on huge studies of multiple companies and markets. In general, quite a few of the thoughts in this book are unsupported by any numbers. Clayton Christensen essentially introduced the concepts of disruptive innovation and Jobs To Be Done, which already deserves quite a lot of attention. I would recommend reading this book in English, because the Russian translation gives the impression that the translators are not excited about the topic or about Clayton, or about the thoughts in the book.

The book unfolds gradually. Each successive insight becomes more and more interesting and gripping. Toward the end, Clayton talks on his fingers about why the electric car market is going to take off and how it will roughly do so. That would be OK, but it was written in 2000, when there was not even a whiff of Tesla. I had the impression that Elon Musk, top Yandex executives, and a number of successful managers had been studying this book very closely.