Good management is why great companies fail

Christensen's opening move rejects the easy explanation for corporate failure — that leaders got lazy, arrogant, or blind. His research into the disk drive industry showed the opposite: the companies that lost to disruptive newcomers were often doing exactly what business schools teach as good management — listening closely to their most profitable customers and directing investment toward the highest-margin opportunities.

Those two habits, individually rational, combine into a trap. Your best customers don't want the disruptive technology yet, because it's worse on the metrics they currently care about. And the disruptive technology's early market is small and low-margin, so it loses every internal resource-allocation fight against sustaining projects serving existing profitable customers.

The unsettling implication: you cannot simply tell a well-run company to "listen to customers and chase the best margins" and expect it to catch disruption — those are precisely the instincts steering it away.

One-line takeaway: the discipline that makes a company excellent at serving today's market is the same discipline that blinds it to tomorrow's.