So remember that last post? Just kidding. There'll be one or two more

Good news!

I found out I can write a few more of these to increase my grade for my MCOMM class. So we'll have one or two more in the next two days.

Today I wanted to talk about another recent blog I read from the Harvard Business School titled: "Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma."

Before you roll your eyes on another article about Steve Jobs, consider this question that we talked about a few posts ago, "What is the purpose of business?"

As a little reminder I heard this exact question posed to an auditorium of Marriott School students recently. It caused me to pause and think and I anxiously anticipated a thoughtful response. But no sooner had those thoughts started to form in my mind than the whole auditorium promptly responded, "To make money."

"Exactly," replied the instructor who then moved on with her presentation.

I wrote earlier about how ridiculous I thought that was. And I still do. What I want to talk about today is an example that illustrates the point.

In the article on Steve Jobs, the author James Allworth, (a Fellow of the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School) points out how he believes jobs solved the famous "Innovator's Dilemma." For those unfamiliar with it, the innovator's dilemma basically states that managers can follow all best practices in listening to customers and delivering what they want which is the logically accepted course for increasing profits but that they eventually kill their companies this way. The dilemma is that over and over again through business history it is shown that as companies do this they start making products that over serve their customers and miss opportunities for new technologies that eventually reshape the industry and thus disappear or downsize drastically. (Think Blockbuster and Redbox.) Implementing disruptive innovations as a major corporation has been seen as extremely difficult to manage and there are very few who have managed it, the main reason being that the new innovation eventually cannibalizes the sales of your other most popular products. For those reasons it truly the innovator's dilemma.

That's a lot of nitty gritty detail to get through but the author's point is this: Apple has bent the rules of disruptive innovation by focusing on great products rather than by profit maximizing. Over an over again they have reshaped and created new industries and markets by their innovations and have seemed to do so with ease.

My take on this is that a new era of innovation and entrepreneurship is going to come forward. There are going to be a lot more people a lot less concerned about only profits. And it should be understood that obviously profits are important and a business can't be run on good intentions. However when they take second place to the quality of a product or service I believe that profits will fall into place naturally. So hats off to Steve Jobs and Apple for being an example of what business could be like if everyone didn't focus so much on just "making money" but rather the quality and novelty and usefulness of their product.