Creative Destruction Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market--And How to Successfully Transform Them

Creative Destruction

Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market--And How to Successfully Transform Them

By: Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan

323 pp.

Doubleday 2001

Review by: Lydia Morris Brown

Over the past century, highly revered and much-touted "built-to-last" corporations tended to underperform the market by a significant amount. This was because they were operated according to an assumption of continuity. Blindly adhering to rigid mental models and mired down by controls and procedures that impede innovation and creativity, they became paralyzed by "cultural lock-in."

Creative Destruction teaches corporations how to succeed, not just survive, by redesigning themselves from top to bottom and by "[changing] at the pace and scale of the market," without losing control of operations. McKinsey consultants, Foster and Kaplan, rely on their own experience, and their employer's vast database, to explain that markets built on the assumption of discontinuity "enable, manage, and control the processes ofCreative Destruction" by encouraging new entrants that produce value and by "remorselessly" replacing weak performers that consume it.