Rhonda Sunnarborg

In Alan Murray’s 8/21 Wall Street Journal article (http://tinyurl.com/2gxxy3g), he mentions that when the Journal’s CEO Council was asked to name the most influential business book, many members cited Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. What does Christensen say about innovation that is so compelling? Murray summarizes:

“That book documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of ‘bad’ management, but because they followed the dictates of ‘good’ management.

They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process, they missed disruptive...

In an attempt to fill the gaps in my pop culture knowledge, I recently watched the last season of the acclaimed series, The Sopranos. My favorite scene? Sitting in his psychiatrist’s office reflecting on his close brush with death, his wonder at being alive, and his unrelenting problems, Tony Soprano confesses: “I realize now that each day is a gift … just, does it always have to be a pair of socks?”

We all have days when we feel like Tony—a customer’s legitimate complaint, a technical failure, an untrained employee passing along bad information, an error that you catch only as your presentation hits the giant screen in front of hundreds. Another pair of socks? Perhaps. But it’s also an opportunity to begin to connect the dots and better understand the problem.

Is it an isolated issue or part of a larger pattern? (As my first manager was fond of saying, “How many cars have to go by before it’s a train?”) And so the digging begins. What’s the cause...