THE DAILY DRUCKER : Calculated Obsolescence

Being the one who makes your product, process, or service obsolete is the only way to prevent your competitor from doing so.

Innovating organisations spend neither time nor resources on defending yesterday. Systematic abandonment of yesterday alone can free the resources, and especially the scarcest resource of them all, capable people for work on the new.
Your being the one who makes your product, process, or service obsolete is the only way to prevent your competitor from doing so. One major American company that has long understood and accepted this is DuPont. When nylon came out in 1938, DuPont immediately put chemists to work to invent new synthetic fibres to compete with nylon. It also began to cut nylon’s price – thus making it less attractive for would-be competitors to find way around DuPont’s patents. This explains why DuPont is still the world’s leading synthetic-fibre maker, and why DuPont’s nylon is still in the market, and profitably so.

Action point: Cannibalise your own products before your competitor does.

Managing for the Future

Extracted from
Peter Drucker’s book
The Daily Drucker.

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