I love Clayton Christiansen. I believe his real contribution was to identify the properties of bureaucracies that make it difficult for them to deal with chang

I love Clayton Christiansen. I believe his real contribution was to identify the properties of bureaucracies that make it difficult for them to deal with changing business conditions. Everybody who has worked in a big company has seen the behaviors he describes like feature overshoot and chasing high margins to the detriment of emerging markets. What's amazing is how well he put the pieces together into a cohesive model. Given that he's talking about institutions in general it's not surprising there are many cases where the model does not work. Start-ups are an obvious example because they can shift strategy quickly. However even large companies like Microsoft in the 1990s that have "Napoleonic" leadership can react very quickly to changing business conditions.