Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma played out at Digital Marketer when AI automated the skills they taught. The company hesitated to pivot, fearing it would cannibalize existing revenue. Core sales fell 75% in twelve months, and they realized they were 18 months behind the market. The lesson: self-disrupt while you still have resources, before competitors force your hand.
If you haven't had time to read The Innovator's Dilemma, here's everything I learned from implementing it in my 8-figure business. Christensen's point is that great companies don't fail because they do the wrong thing. They tend to fail because they do the right thing for way too long. They're going to ignore the smaller, crappier competitors at the bottom of the market so that they can stay focused on their goals and their mission. Problem is, sometimes those smaller, crappier competitors get bigger and less crappy, and that's when they should actually start to take notice. I lived The Innovator's Dilemma One of my companies, Digital Marketer, innovated initially by being one of the first to offer professional certifications in digital marketing when the field was still very new and up and coming. When AI showed up, we knew that it was going to do a lot of what we were teaching people to do, but we didn't pivot because the current business was still working. People were still buying certifications and disrupting it meant cutting into our own sales. In 12 months, core sales dropped by 75%. And I'll tell you, we're making changes now. But if I'm honest, we're at least 18 months behind. And it's not like the signal wasn't there. It was. Our customers were telling us what they wanted. We just weren't listening because things were easy and we wanted them to stay easy. But I'll tell you, when things feel the easiest, that is exactly when it's time to disrupt yourself. The key is make sure it's the customer driving it, not some trend, not FOMO. Ask what are our customers going to need from us in the next 3 years? And if the honest answer is something else than what we're doing now, start building the thing that replaces you now while you can still afford to do it.
