Don't Let Your Competitors Cannibalize Your Business ...

… cannibalize it yourself.

Clay Christensen on Steve Jobs & the trouble with venture capital:

How much wisdom can one glean from a 20-minute chat withProfessor Clay Christensen? I would say — if one keeps his mouth shut and asks the right questions — a lot. Here are notable highlights from my chat with the famousHarvard Business School professor, founder of the Innosight Institute and author of such best selling books asThe Innovator’s DilemmaandDisrupting Class.

Jobs at hand

Steve Jobs and the company he co-founded just might be one of the few companies to look the innovator’s dilemma right in the eye and stare it into submission. Jobs’Apple decided that it was better to cannibalizeitself rather than have others do it. And so, the briskly selling iPod was replaced by the iPhone, and the iPad became the new low-end computer. When I asked Professor Christensen what made Jobs special, he said, “Jobs never said he understood the customer, but instead he tried to learn what they are trying to do, and that was his genius.”