I found an old classic when browsing the web this morning – “The Five Deadly Business Sins” by Peter Drucker (http://www.bmacewen.com/blog/pdf/WSJ.2005.11.29.DruckerFiveDeadlySins.pdf). These sins (in order of prevalance) are:
Worship of high profit margins and premium pricing (e.g. Xerox's focus on feature-rich copiers and American car companies' focus on big cars provided opportunities for their Japanese competitiors to capture the rest of the market)
Mispricing new products by charging what the market will bear (e.g. American firms' pricing of fax machines)
Cost-driven pricing (rather than price-led costing)
Slaughtering tomorrow's opportunity at the altar of yesterday (e.g. IBM forbade its PC division from approaching its Mainframe customers)
Feeding problems and starving opportunities (i.e. assigning stars to fix problems)
Sins 1 and 4 are very similar to the issue Clayton Christensen addresses in his famous book “The Innovator's Dilemma”.
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